06.12.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Nine out of ten (87 percent) of hiring managers in Europe have “hiring Linux talent” on their list of priorities and almost half (48 percent) say they are looking to hire people with Linux skills within the next six months.
But while they either need or want to hire more people with Linux skills, the data from the Linux Foundation suggests that this is easier said than done. Almost all — 93 percent — of the managers surveyed said they were having difficulty finding IT professionals with the Linux skills required and a quarter (25 percent) said they have “delayed projects as a result”.
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Desktop
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With Father’s Day right around the corner, some dads out there might be requesting a new Chromebook. Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, have quietly become quite popular among notebook buyers. As of this writing, Chromebooks are among the top 20 most popular computers available on Amazon, and sales continue to grow steadily. Although the devices got off to a slow start, Google has found a way to attract customers. With that in mind it might be a good time to revisit Chromebooks’ operating system, Chrome OS, and talk about key features that make the Chromebook so attractive. While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively. This eWEEK slide show will cover the factors that made this platform appealing to notebook PC users.
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Server
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Cloud computing has really become the buzz term for any online service. Your web browser is a client connecting to a server or clusters of servers hosted anywhere in the world. The point is that you don’t care. You don’t need to know.
Generally speaking I have barely touched the surface. We all use the cloud everyday and most of us don’t even think about it.
How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user? It turns out quite a bit.
Is the cloud a good or bad thing? Neither. Each service has to be judged on it’s own merits.
The term “The Cloud” is just something marketing people and the technical press get excited about. Anyone remember when they kept using the term “Web 2.0″?
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Thanks to the advent of multicore processors, the average data center these days has access to a massive amount of compute capacity. Tapping into it efficiently, though, is another thing altogether.
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Kernel Space
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The official release announcement from Linus Torvalds has yet to come down the pipe, but today’s 3.15 final release was expected. For those not up to date on our Linux 3.15 kernel coverage, there’s been dozens of articles in recent weeks about this latest major kernel update. A summary of this new kernel’s top features can be found via the aptly named The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel article. There’s a lot of great stuff in this new kernel release for everyone!
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Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).
The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support in existence already, but you can never know.
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The suspend and resume code impacts users who run Linux on laptop computers where there is a need to suspend disk and operating system operations when a device is closed and then start up again when the device is opened. Williams noted that his code contribution was inspired by an analysis and proposal from Intel developer Todd Brandt. Brandt’s proposal specifically dealt with a suspend/resume speed improvement, enabling a rapid wakeup from a device’s suspend state
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The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.
First up, with the MIPS changes comes initial support for the Octeon 3. The Octeon 3 is Cavium’s new multi-core processor line-up announced at the end of 2013. The OCTEON III is MIPS64-based and optimized for Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The Octeon III claims up to 120GHz of 64-bit processing and is aimed for high-performance computing environments.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92. As usual, each contains fixes all over the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.
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Samsung has sent in their F2FS pull request for the Linux 3.16 to provide a number of enhancements for the Flash Friendly File-System.
Improvements for the F2FS file-system with the Linux 3.16 kernel include enhanced wait_on_page_writeback, support for SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, readahead flow enhancements, enhanced I/O flushes, support for fiemap, support for trace-maps, support for large volumes over two Terabytes, and a number of bug-fixes and clean-ups.
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Rackspace has lately been in the news for its stock market gains and a potential acquisition. But over the past 16 years the company has become well known, first as a web hosting provider built on Linux and open source, and later as a pioneer of the open source cloud and founder of the OpenStack cloud platform.
In May, Rackspace became a Xen Project member and was one of three companies to join the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with CoreOS and Cumulus Networks.
“Many of the applications and infrastructure that we need to run for internal use or for customers run best on Linux,” said Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace, via email. “This includes all the popular language frameworks and open virtualization platforms such as Xen, LXC, KVM, Docker, etc.”
In this Q&A, Voccio discusses the role of Rackspace in the cloud, how the company uses Linux, why they joined the Linux Foundation, as well as current trends and future technologies in the data center.
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Graphics Stack
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According to the changelog, various improvements and corrections have been made to the information reported to GL applications via the KHR_debug and ARB_debug_output extensions, a bug that caused the GLX applications that simultaneously created drawables on multiple X servers to crash when swapping buffers has been fixed, and the nvidia-settings option has been updated to report all valid names for each target when querying target types, e.g. “nvidia-settings -q gpus.”
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Applications
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What makes this important, even vital, news to the larger world of system administrators, datacenter managers, and cloud architects, is that Google, Red Hat, and Parallels are now helping build the program. Indeed, they will work with Docker as core maintainers of the code. Canonical’s Ubuntu container engineers will also be working on it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The CD Projekt Red studio has announced that the upcoming The Witcher 3 action RPG is also arriving on SteamOS, which means that it will feature Linux support.
The interesting fact about this announcement is that the studio has yet to make a formal statement, and they chose a more indirect way to tell Linux users that they will be able to play the game. If you happened to open Steam today, you might have noticed that The Witcher 3 game also said that is coming to SteamOS.
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The Steam developers usually release quite few intermediary Steam versions, between major stable updates. This is one of the most interesting Beta updates so far in this cycle and the VR support that was just introduced will certainly make it into the next version.
It looks like virtual reality is the next-gen feature that will be pursued by all the major gaming companies. Oculus is already having an impact on the industry, Sony is working on their own version, and Valve will most likely present their own solution soon enough. With all these advancements made with VR, it’s good to see that Linux is on the forefront.
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Interstellar Marines, a tactical FPS developed and published by Zero Point Software, has just received Linux support with the latest patch.
Interstellar Marines is a very promising first-person shooter and its developers said that they took inspiration from Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game has been built mainly as a multiplayer experience, but a limited single-player is also available.
The latest update for the Interstellar Marines also brought support for the Linux platform and it looks like this title aims to be one of the best-looking on the open source platform…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The third beta is out today ahead of the final release expected in July. This third beta brings many bug-fixes and other minor enhancements to ease in porting of software to this next-generation KDE stack.
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The latest monthly point release update to KDE 4.13 is now available.
KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.
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Hello, This is my second report for my GSoC. This week i was working on the Wallpapers and the Activities Configuration. While there was the support for changing the wallpapers the UI was more focused on a desktop rather than a touch device, which wasn’t exactly what we needed for Plasma Active. So the new UI looks like the old one (Plasma Active 1), and the only small change is that we don’t show the wallpaper name.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The player bar now uses all horizontal space available, which I based on new mockups for playback buffer by Jakub Steiner (except that it still has the repeat/shuffle menu). With this, the song title and album song has more space, and it will no longer just show an ellipsis when the window is small.
Updating of views is further refined, so it will not interfere when in selection mode. Tooltips were added to the buttons. Right-clicking songs inside albums in Albums view now starts selection mode. Albums list in Artists view are now insensitive when in selection mode.
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The Trevilla theme pack is made for people who like to have a flat desktop and it comes with clean headers and buttons that are very good for a minimalistic experience.
The Trevilla designers are not the only ones using this flat look for themes. In fact, more and more distros come with flat desktops and it looks like these types of decorations are not going anywhere…
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The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:
Sriram Ramkrishna
Ekaterina Gerasimova
Karen Sandler
Tobias Mueller
Andrea Veri
Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Jeff Fortin
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Ubuntu GNOME is a popular spin of Ubuntu that uses the GNOME desktop instead of Unity. Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 has been updated to include GNOME 3.10, and GNOME Classic. This release also includes some gorgeous new backgrounds that will spruce up you Ubuntu GNOME desktop. And since it’s a long term support release you will be able to run it for the next few years with the maximum amount of stability and polish.
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The GParted Life project undergoes dormant periods and hardly are any updates released, but now it looks like two versions have arrived inside a week.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2014/Jun/09),” reads the official announcement.
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New Releases
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The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).
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The Linux platform is home to quite a few operating systems dedicated to sound, video, and graphics editing. Some are better than others, but they all try to do the same thing and get some free tools in the hand of the people who need them the most.
The advantage of Tango Studio is that you don’t need to configure almost anything in the operating system and most of the tools just work, without any extra input from the user. It’s a very helpful OS, especially for the people who just want to work and not tinker with a Linux distribution…
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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“We prepared mhwd to support newer proprietary drivers. MHWD 0.3.901 reflect these changes. Blueman got updatedto support the latest bluez 5.19. We kept Wayland 1.4.0, as any higher version breaks bluetooth support. We have to deal with that later. Beside some libreoffice language acks,python updates, a newer Cinnamon we pushed also regular upstream updates to this update-pack,” said the developers in the official announcement.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the business opportunity of a generation in what he calls a computing paradigm shift from client server to cloud architectures. “In those paradigm shifts, generally new winners emerge,” says Whitehurst and he intends to make sure Red Hat is one of those winners. His logic is sound and simple: disruptive technologies like the cloud that arise every couple decades level the playing field between large, established firms and smaller, innovative challengers since everyone, from corporate behemoth to a couple guys in a garage, starts from the same spot and must play by the same unfamiliar and changeable rules. With the cloud “there’s less of an installed based and an opportunity for new winners to be chosen,” Whitehurst adds. His mission is “to see that open source is the default choice for next generation architecture” and that Red Hat is the preferred choice, particularly for enterprise IT, of open source providers.
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Red Hat was just sending out press invites this afternoon for a virtual event tomorrow regarding “an exciting product” that will be announced.
Registration for the online event happening tomorrow (10 June) at 11AM EST can be found at RedHat.com. The site says it’s about, “redefining the enterprise OS.”
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Fedora
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If you’re a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the ‘Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®’ department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you…
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Debian Family
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has advanced to version 2.2.6 Beta and is available for download.
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Technologic is sampling a fast-booting “TS-4740″ COM that runs Debian on a 1GHz, ARM9 PXA168 SoC and offers a 25K-LUTs Spartan-5 FPGA and gigabit Ethernet.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A session happened this morning about the Unity8 Desktop Preview Image as a way for early adopters and developers to try out the Unity 8 and Mir stack ported to the desktop on the Ubuntu 14.10 base, while the official Ubuntu 14.10 release image will still be using Unity 7 with the X.Org Server. Those interested in learning more about this image and the plans can find the details via summit.ubuntu.com with the Google Hangout Video plus notes.
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The Core i7 4790K has an 88 Watt TDP over 84 Watts on the Core i7 4770K but aside from the higher clock frequencies and thermal/power improvements, the i7-4790K shares much in common with the i7-4770K when it comes to being a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, 22nm manufacturing, DDR3-1600MHz memory support, and sports HD Graphics 4600. Like the i7-4770K, the HD Graphics 4600 top out at 1.25GHz. Pricing on the Intel Core i7 4790K is currently about $340 USD from major Internet retailers.
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Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done.
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Flavours and Variants
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At Bodhi we work firmly on a “its ready when its ready schedule” as opposed to sticking to our set release goals and churning out something we are not happy with. Better late than never as the saying goes! Just ten days after the targeted release date I am happy to share our first Release Candidate for Bodhi Linux’s third major release…
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This was originally supposed to be a comparison test against Antergos, which is another distribution that ships GNOME 3/Shell and aims for new users to Linux. Unfortunately, Antergos refused to boot. Therefore, what is left is a typical review of Pinguy OS, albeit with some more critical remarks than usual about how well it really caters to newbies (left over from when this article was a comparison test). Follow the jump to see what it is like…
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This current version of Linux Mint 17 KDE “Qiana” comes with KDE 4.13.0, which is the latest version available right now. The rest of the packages are in place and, if you ever opened a KDE-powered distro, then you won’t be surprised by anything.
Just like the other flavors that have been released so far, this one is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will benefit from an extended support period, after it becomes stable, of course. The Linux mint developers announced a while ago that they intended to only base their distros on LTS versions of Ubuntu…
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If the end of XP demonstrated anything, it’s that disruption ensues when an OS reaches end of life. Linux users have long had LTS releases to stave off some of that, but the new Linux Mint 17 offers even more stability. Not only will it be supported until 2019, but it’s also built on a base that was made to last.
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WeIO is sampling a tiny open source board, running OpenWRT Linux on an Atheros/MIPS module, that enables IoT applications controlled entirely via HTML5 code.
Billed as “The Web of Things for Creators,” the fully open source, GPL3-licensed WeIO module is notable for its HTML5 programming interface and Python-based Tornado web server. Together, these let you connect and control objects from any device using only a web browser, says Paris-based WeIO. Designed for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, WeIO lets developers easily connect objects so they communicate with each other, or hook up to Internet services like social networks, says the company.
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Musaic is prepping an OpenWRT Linux and AllJoyn AllPlay-enabled wireless speaker and Internet radio that doubles as a home automation hub.
U.K.-based Musaic ended its Kickstarter round in April, surpassing its goal of raising 60,000 U.K. Pounds, and promising products by September starting at 160 Pounds (about $269). Recently, the Musaic system was selected along with four other finalists by the John Lewis JLAB technology incubator program, which starts today. Commercial sales will open in the fall.
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Phones
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Android
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OnePlus has managed to create a bit of a buzz around their latest smartphone. Called ‘One’ (but I’ll go with the OnePlus One for most of this review to avoid the confusion with HTC) this is a handset that goes out of its way to be attractive. The styling is simple but functional, the specs are close to the top of the range in the world of Android, and the price is stunning. It’s not a typo, it actually starts at £229 in the UK ($299 in the US) for the 16 GB model.
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When a buyer goes to purchase a new smartphone, he or she is often confronted with a tough choice. With so many flagship smartphones in the market today, which ones to choose from? There’s the Galaxy S5, which is a widely popular phone from Samsung and then there’s the iPhone 5s, which comes from the world’s most valuable tech company. And, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, Google offers its own flagship device known as Nexus 5.
While the three smartphones mentioned above are wildly popular, users have a tough time investing their hard-earned cash into. That’s why, we’ve written this article to help you buy the best phone amongst the big 3. So, without further ado, here’s a quick comparison between the Galaxy S5, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s.
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Q: Where and why is SlimPort being implemented?
A: SlimPort was first implemented in the Google Nexus 4 back in 2012 and has continued to be used in a number of high-end tablets and smartphones from Fujitsu, Asustek, LG, and ZTE, as well as finding its way into Chromebooks from brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), among others. The key is that the technology enables more features and can reduce costs. For example, users want to have the ability to take mobile audio and video and get it up on a big screen. Previously, the ability to get the video off of a tablet/smartphone was typically done by running it through a micro-HDMI port. Using SlimPort allowed the OEMs to drop the micro-HDMI port and simply run everything through the five-pin micro-USB port that is needed for charging. SlimPort simply takes control of the connector when a SlimPort dongle is plugged in, and while the devices are connected, SlimPort enables the display to also charge the mobile device. In 2013, support for Full HD was added but we really expect the technology to take off this year with SlimPort Pro.
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Release day is here again, with CM 11.0 M7 hitting the download servers. Last week’s post included the highlights from the changelog, but we’ll it again for those of you who prefer tl;dr.
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Most everyone, at least the tech-savvy who read this, are familiar with VLC Player — the Video LAN Client. It’s a jack-of-all trades media player, that is capable of handling pretty much any format you can throw at it, no matter how obscure it may be.
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Luis Gomez is Principal Software Test Engineer at Brocade and currently coordinates the Integration Group at OpenDaylight. Prior to this, Luis worked many years at Ericsson in end-to-end solution integration and verification for radio, fixed, core and transport functions…
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One problem is that the GitHub generation does not seem to care as much about code vetting as did coders in earlier years. In the time span from 2007 to 2010, open source became very popular. Enterprises tried to manage it, according to MongoDB’s Assay.
“My sense is that developers do not really look at licenses any more. They are not even looking at which license is applied and does it comply. I think these are issues that attorneys look at, though. I do not think the developers are thinking a lot about the licenses anymore,” he said.
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Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.
It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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ADI technology analyst Tyler White speculated that two underlying market forces are boosting Google’s numbers. “First, device defaults matter,” White said. “Internet Explorer leverages its Windows OS dominance to gain share as the default Web browser for the majority of people online. Today mobile OS is more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS.”
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Mozilla
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The Firefox 30 release announcement is imminent with the source and binaries for the upcoming browser update now being available.
For those interested, Mozilla Firefox 30.0 can be obtained from the Mozilla FTP server while we’re still waiting for the official release announcement, which is likely coming in the day ahead.
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Education
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Ellis, who co-coordinated POSSE with Drexel professor Greg Hislop, told a crowd of nearly 20 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country that embedding their computer science students in open source communities could facilitate a kind of engagement traditional classroom experiences just can’t offer. But, she said, students and professors alike should be prepared for a bit of culture shock if they aren’t prepared to embrace the open source way.
So Ellis derived 16 maxims from free and open source culture—what she calls “FOSSisms”—to explain how open source values might transform computer science education.
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BSD
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DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.
DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.
“DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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RMS argues that “open source” misses the point, but a counter argument is that the name “Free Software” can sound like “free as in beer” – like malware-ridden Windows freeware. So we want to hear from you: which term do you use? Is it really important to you? Do you think RMS should have chosen a better word than “Free” originally, such as “Libre”?
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As anticipated, 3.15 was released upstream earlier today, and the scripts I updated yesterday have now done their job: 3.15-gnu sources are now available at http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ and shortly on mirrors too.
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Public Services/Government
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Tender documents issued this morning have confirmed that the Australian government will push ahead with seeking to build a whole-of-government content management system based on the open source Drupal platform.
The Department of Finance has made an approach to market seeking request for proposals for ‘GovCMS’, which the RFP states will be based on Drupal and delivered via a public cloud service.
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Although it’s good to see open standards in there, it’s disappointing that the Policy Exchange did not go further and call for open source, which is the most effective way of implementing those open standards. Simply mandating open standards allows lock-in through inertia – the argument being that the re-training costs etc. etc. make moving to new implementations of open standards too expensive. That’s a ridiculous way of looking at things, because it pretty much ensures that the status quo is maintained. What the Manifesto should have called for was a default use of open source software throughout government, unless there are compelling and clearly-articulable reasons not to take that route.
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Licensing
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For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I’ve written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA’s aren’t necessary, and on Conservancy’s typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.
In the most general sense, a CLA is a formal legal contract between a contributor to a FLOSS project and the “project” itself0. Ostensibly, this agreement seeks to assure the project, and/or its governing legal entity, has the appropriate permissions to incorporate contributed patches, changes, and/or improvements to the software and then distribute the resulting larger work.
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Health/Nutrition
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An immense scandal involving pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been unfolding in China over the last year. It centers on a massive bribery operation uncovered by Chinese police that included nearly every aspect of GSK’s business in China. Billions of yuan in bribes were channeled through an immense network to buy off doctors, hospitals, healthcare organizations, and even government officials to boost sales of GSK drugs.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Two drone strikes launched by the US military killed at least 16 suspected militants in Pakistan’s northwest tribal area bordering Afghanistan, local media reported on Thursday.
According to media reports, a US drone fired eight missiles in Dande Darpakhel area near North Waziristan tribal area which killed at least ten suspected militants and wounded four others in early hours of Thursday. The drones targeted four different compounds and a pick-up truck. At least five to ten drones were flying in the area near Miranshah tribal area when the strike took place, said the reports.
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People may wonder why we are protesting drones. The answer is simple: More than 2,400 men, women and children, more than 270 of them civilians, have died in drone attacks, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Investigate Journalism.
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KT MCFARLAND: We’ve seen in the past when Gitmo grads have been released, they have gone back to join the fight. If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to start releasing Gitmo prisoners, here’s what we ought to do. We have a lot of drones. I think we ought to put a drone 24/7, for the rest of their natural lives, hovering over each one of these Gitmo/Taliban grads. And the minute they join the fight, the minute they step out of line, waste ‘em.
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In Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices, the former secretary of state defends the administration’s use of drone strikes in the face of knotty ethical and legal questions.
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The White House has assumed all power over life and death — at home and abroad — and has created a brand-new category of individual — one who can be indiscriminately deprived of all rights altogether.
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The Government of Pakistan condemns the two incidents of US drone strikes that took place near Miranshah in North Waziristan on 11 and 12 June, the Foreign Office stated.
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Two hours after her official briefing, Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam confirmed and condemned two pre-dawn US drone strikes that struck militant hideouts in North Waziristan in the past 24 hours.
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Islamabad (AFP) – Pakistan on Thursday condemned the first US drone strikes on its soil this year despite suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
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Though the Pakistani government is back to the old strategy of labeling everyone slain “suspects,” none of the victims in either attack were actually named, and there was no indication the US even suspected they had a high-profile target in sight.
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Finance
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Privacy
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Deutsche Telekom, operating in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published data for Germany
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Edward Snowden has secured his highest endorsement yet in the US when former vice-president Al Gore described the leaking of top secret intelligence documents as “an important service”.
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Former vice president and global warming activist Al Gore forayed into the world of government surveillance on Tuesday, claiming that the National Security Agency’s constitutional violations are “way more serious” than any crime Edward Snowden committed in leaking secret documents.
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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has defended its failure to comply with a request for evidence in a lawsuit by saying that its systems are “too complicated” to prevent data from being deleted.
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The National Security Agency is using a new argument for not retaining the data it gathers about users’ online activity: The NSA is just too complex.
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Making any adjustments to the way the National Security Agency collects intelligence —even court orders to ensure that evidence isn’t deleted by the NSA’s spying infrastructure — would bring great harm to the United States, officials say.
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The American fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has claimed that the US National Security Agency (NSA), which works with the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), can eavesdrop through the mic inside an iPhone even when the device is switched off. The claim has been confirmed by several experts, reports Sina’s tech news web portal.
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Inspired by the NSA’s ANT Catalog of spyware and surveillance tools, The NSA Playset project invites hackers to reproduce easy, at-home versions of the NSA’s spy-tools arsenal — and NSA-style silly names are required.
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The NSA is particularly pleased with the security features in Apple’s iPhone which allows it to spy on people when they think it is switched off.
Edward Snowden said that the NSA can get into an iPhone, turn it on remotely if it’s off and can they turn on apps?
The Tame Apple Press dismissed the claim as “magical” – after all the iPhone was designed by Steve Jobs and is totally unhackable and completely secure. The fact that it usually takes experts less than a minute to break into one is neither here nor there.
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Observing corruption, waste and fraud drove NSA whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney to reveal government wrongdoing – June 11, 14
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The Silicon Valley tech giants want to reform government surveillance on the Internet? That’s what they say, anyway. In an open letter to U.S. Senators, technology titans such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer joined forces to urge Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act to “help restore the confidence of Internet users here and around the world, while keeping citizens safe.”
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According to some researchers, metadata could actually reveal a lot about you and your activities.
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Fuel to the fire of financial privacy with fiat currency has been added this week: details of transactions shared between banks and the NSA being made public.
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Thanks to hacker Michael Ossmann, you can now build gadgets like the National Security Agency uses to intercept communications from the comfort of your own home.
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International law firm Hogan Lovells has been tapped to represent the government of the Bahamas after a May report by The Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed that the NSA had been recording all cell phone conversations made into, out of, and within the island country.
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The NSA surveillance was being carried out, unbeknownst to Bahamian officials, using an advanced system known as SOMALGET, which enables the NSA to record and replay all cell phone calls for about a month, according to The Intercept report.
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A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.
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Civil Rights
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The Obama administration covers for Bush-era secrets.
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The new president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, welcomed a delegation of secret services from Atlanticist countries, headed by the CIA Director of the National Service of Covert Operations, Frank Archibald.
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The extreme right-wing organisation boasts it is ‘more radical than the BNP’ and is targeting students and universities in the UK to spread its message of hate
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The so-called “transparency journalism site” that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, decided to launch legal action because, it says, the CIA frustrates its work.
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MuckRock, a transparency journalism site that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, today revealed it is suing the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.
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British intelligence played a vital role in smuggling copies of Boris Pasternak’s banned novel Doctor Zhivago to Soviet readers, with MI6 secretly passing the Russian manuscript to the CIA, a new book reveals.
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As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn’t allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder
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Radical transparency website Wikileaks has been a thorn in the side of the American intelligence community for long. And as the CIA joined Twitter this month, the Wikileaks account, which many believe to be controlled by founder Julian Assange, welcomed it in their own inimitable way.
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August and technophobic literary journal released a barrage of reminders of agency’s controversial interrogation techniques
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Afshin Rattansi goes underground on a story making big headlines across the Atlantic – net neutrality. But our own government seems suspiciously quiet on the subject, and leader of the Pirate Party UK Loz Kaye says it’s because politicians want to retain the power to control the internet. Amidst D-Day commemorations across the continent, historian and author of War Horse Michael Morpugo warns against glorifying war. Plus, the Chilcot inquiry is set to review some heavily-redacted evidence: we review who’s on the panel. A new report claims 4,000 of us are at risk of losing our homes per week – and the figure will only go up. Plus, what’s she done now? The Duchess of Cambridge gets it royally wrong as she attends a wedding at the Dorchester hotel.
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Send this to a friend
06.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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ZBOSS Linux 6.5 was released on Friday as a RHEL-based “enterprise” Linux distribution that ships with the ZFS file-system by default.
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In 1991, 22-year old Finnish computer programmer Linus Torvalds released his own operating system. Opening with the message “Hello everybody out there,” (a now-iconic phrase among Linux fans), he posted the source code online. People alternately contributed their abilities to improve it where they could or went off to build their own things with it.
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The latest Linux 3.16 kernel pull request worth covering on Phoronix are the latest LLVMLinux patches for being able to compile the kernel with Clang rather than GCC.
With Linux 3.15 came the patch-set to come close to being able to compile under Clang and now with Linux 3.16 it’s a bit closer. A set of five LLVMLinux patches are called for merging that affect ARM and Shash Crypto code.
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The Linux 3.15 kernel isn’t even expected for release until later today, but thanks to the Linux 3.16 merge window opening a week early to adjust to Linus Torvalds’ upcoming schedule, we already have a good idea for a portion of the changes for the next kernel cycle.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 10.1.5 was just released this Friday evening while we’re still waiting for the imminent release of the major Mesa 10.2 release unless it was delayed again.
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AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is a bit closer to supporting OpenGL 4.0 via the GLSL 4.00 specification requirements thanks to a new patch set published on Friday by Marek Olšák.
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The Linux graphics developers within Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center have already prepared a fresh batch of changes that will land with the Linux 3.17 kernel — even though the Linux 3.15 kernel hasn’t been released yet and the Linux 3.16 kernel merge window opened early.
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ARM has already submitted their results of their graphics driver for several Mali graphics processors for OpenGL ES 3.1 certification by the Khronos Group.
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Benchmarks
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The tested graphics processors for this article included the:
1: Intel HD 4600
2: NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT
3: NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT
4: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT
5: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
6: NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
7: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
8: NVIDIA GeForce GT 520
9: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
10: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
11: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
12: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
13: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
14: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
15: AMD Radeon X1800XT
16: AMD Radeon HD 4550
17: AMD Radeon HD 4670
18: AMD Radeon HD 4770
19: AMD Radeon HD 4830
20: AMD Radeon HD 4850
21: AMD Radeon HD 4870
22: AMD Radeon HD 4890
23: AMD Radeon HD 5770
24: AMD Radeon HD 5830
25: AMD Radeon HD 6450
26: AMD Radeon HD 6570
27: AMD Radeon HD 6770
28: AMD Radeon HD 6870
29: AMD Radeon HD 6950
30: AMD Radeon HD 7850
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Applications
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The original traceroute application must be about a thousand years old by now. I can remember messing with something like it ~20 years ago on a Windows machine, and promptly tossing it aside for a graphical version that showed where the IP addresses were located on the globe. Far more interesting.
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XBMC 13.0 “Gotham” was probably the best release made by its developers and incorporated numerous features and some very cool options. The devs started working on an update for XBMC almost right away after the launch and, a Release Candidate later, the 13.1 version arrived.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The developers behind 7 Days To Die do like to tease us and then repeatedly go silent now don’t they? Here’s the latest on what’s going on and it’s not good as usual.
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Valve has funded work by LunarG on a project codenamed “Glassy Mesa” to deliver potential performance improvements on the open-source Mesa graphics driver stack.
Glassy Mesa is an experimental project using LunarGLASS for plugging LLVM into Mesa for shader compilation and run-time improvements. LunarGLASS originated back in 2010 as using LLVM IR as the base intermediate representation for the shader and kernel compiler stack. LunarGLASS has performance potential via taking advantage of LLVM’s many optimization passes.
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Besides Mesa 10.1.5 being released last night, Mesa 10.2 made it out late last night followed immediately by Mesa 10.2.1 to take care of a build failure that sneaked into the final release.
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The Witcher: Wild Hunt is the third installment in CD Projekt Red’s open-world action role-playing video game series, which is very popular among fans of western RPG titles. The game was announced as a next-gen title for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The developer also mentioned that it would bring the game to Linux if SteamOS, in future, provides constant Linux environment, which it did, and now it looks like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS.
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For anyone firing up Steam today for some weekend gaming, you may notice there’s a large advertisement on Steam’s main page with a notice that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS (Linux).
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FLASHOUT 2 is a fantastic looking fast paced futuristic racer that is now available on Linux. It looks a lot like the old Wipeout games that’s for sure.
They confirmed to us in the past that they were developing all versions next to each other, so to regular readers it should be no surprise that it has day 1 Linux support!
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The latest major update to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 was released this week and the Linux support has taken another step forward.
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This is the 10th PC and Android bundle, which contains 10 games, 9 of them also playable on our beloved Linux OS!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Before sometime I got in touch with KDE community and was overwhelmed by it. Then I became a member of this community and started exploring about open source environment. The most fascinating thing about KDE community members is how committed they are to open source technology. Through IRC I would be able to contact with genius coders all over the globe. It’s been quite a time that I am using open source software. It is very much important to aware people about open source. We can have access to all robust and efficient soft wares for free. After being a part of KDE it interested me to use open source systems and I am really enjoying this.
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The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.
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As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.
Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories
So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.
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I am Anuj Pahuja(alasin), a Computer Science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, India. It is my first GSoC and I can’t thank KDE Community enough for accepting me as a student.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Most of the themes that can pull this Mac OS X transformation work on desktop environments like GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and so on, but not all of them work in Unity. The designer of this particular version made it compatible with GTK 3.10 and it works in Ubuntu as well.
“The goal is to keep it as close as possible to ambiance on the code base with the same look as the original cupertino. If that isn’t possible for an element I will prefer the look of cupertino,” said the designer on gnome-look.org.
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New Releases
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GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, has been released and is now available for download.
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Robolinux 7.5.3 is a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian, and its developer thinks that it can be the solution for people who look to protect their privacy.
If you remember from previous releases of Robolinux, the developer of this particular distribution came up with a working idea on how to move people from the Windows platform to Linux without them having to give up their favorite applications.
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SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt desktops is now available for download.
The SparkyLinux 3.34 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie” and is not all that different from the previous versions in the series, at least not in this particular aspect.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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OpenMandriva Lx 2014 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux. It is one of the distributions that rose out of the ashes of Mandriva Linux; the other being Mageia, and, to some extent, ROSA Desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Several weeks back, we reviewed Scientific Linux 6.5, a rather spartan incarnation of the legendary RHEL 6, which might be considered too boring and outdated for modern home use. Well, not so. Once long ago, I showed you how to transform CentOS into a home use beast.
Today, we will do it again, with the most comprehensive guide on Scientific Linux pimping ever made on Planet Earth. Here, you get a bit of everything, and then so. Best of all? This guide is also relevant for CentOS and even Fedora, so make sure you keep it close to your heart. Let’s go.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller just announced that fortnightly public Fedora Board meetings are starting up again. The first meeting will be on Monday the 9th of June at 17:00 UTC time. (Matthew notes in the email to fedora-announce that the command date -d ’2014-06-09 17:00 UTC’ is an easy way to convert this into the timezone on your Fedora machine.)
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We previously posted about some of the logo design ideas that Máirín Duffy was working on for the 3 products of fedora.next (Cloud, Server, and Workstation). Since that post, Máirín has also posted a bunch of other iterations, and I also entered the fray with a few ideas of my own. Now, Máirín has done another round of design ideas. Check them out, and join the discussion over on her blog.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week, Apple announced the new OS X Yosemite, and Linux users across the Linux-verse stood up and proclaimed “Oooo, I’d like to lay my hands on the lily-livered swab is writ that forgery!” Why so up in arms? Because Apple has done what Apple does — riff on features from other platforms and claim they’ve recreated a wheel that will make your life far easier. What did they do this time? Let’s chat.
One of the big features of OS X Yosemite is included in the Spotlight tool. For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the OS X search tool that, up until Yosemite, searched the local drive. As of Yosemite, anyone who has touched the Ubuntu Unity Dash will notice something very similar to Scopes.
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When Ubuntu released Unity Scopes, a very large and very vocal group from the Linux community cried foul, that Scopes was an invasion of privacy, was insecure, and would probably steal their identity…
…maybe not that last bit. But there was plenty of backlash from the community (many of whom didn’t even use Ubuntu).
How will the Apple community react when they start using the Scopes-like feature in Yosemite? They’ll love it. They’ll realize how convenient it is to be able to, from one location, search their local drive, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and countless other sources.
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You would think that writing about the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 would be easy but it is hard to write about one of the biggest Linux distributions without repeating everyone else’s sentiments or covering the same ground that was covered with Ubuntu 13.10.
With that in mind please don’t be disappointed that much of what I will be writing here has been written before.
There is nothing revolutionary about Ubuntu 14.04, especially if you have already tried Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04. The improvements to Ubuntu have been slow and steady.
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Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2014) in Barcelona, Canonical has announced the first two phone manufacturers that will create Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones: Meizu and Bq.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s been much talk in the past about creating a spin/derivative of Ubuntu Linux using the MATE Desktop Environment fork of GNOME2. While no spin materialized for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, talk of developing a new spin is again happening.
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Linux Mint 17 Qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
Linux Mint usually comes with four desktop editions: Cinnamon Desktop Environment, MATE Desktop Environment, KDE and XFCE, although currently, only Cinnamon and MATE editions are available, XFCE and KDE edition should arrive shortly.
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Phones
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NSA-grade security is now coming to an Android device near you.
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The Samsung Z looks and feels very much like Samsung’s Android smartphones. There’s the tiles section at the top of the home screen, with some app icons at the botton, and there’s the pull-down notifications and settings tray at the very top. You also get the hardware Back and Menu buttons, in addition to the main Home button. The Settings app looks almost identical to Samsung’s Android version.
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LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing directory services. It runs on a layer above the TCP/IP stack incorporating simplified encoding methods, and offers a convenient way to connect to, search, and modify Internet directories, specifically X.500-based directory services. It is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol. LDAP utilizes a client-server model.
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While it initially seemed revolutionary, open source software is actually rooted in traditional IT processes. Technology, after all, has always been about collaboration and continuous improvement. (In the early days of the ARPANET, for example, researchers established a “request for comments” procedure to improve the project.) Of course, there have been trepidations raised about open source. But the always-active open source communities are more than happy to address any concerns. As a result, more than one-half of the software acquired over the next several years will be open source, according to industry research.
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SaaS/Big Data
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SQL is the gateway drug to enterprise adoption says analysts at recent developer conference. Hadoop Summit, leading big data developer conference, saw the maturation of the Hadoop ecosystem. Hadoop is one of the necessary requirements in realizing the promise of Big Data’s application growth in the enterprise, and key players have emerged among those most influential in this development.
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Databases
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SQLite 3.8.5, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine, has been released with an impressive list of changes and improvements.
Most of the SQLite releases are maintenance ones, but from time to time the developers make some important changes. The current update features a few new options, so an update is recommended.
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BSD
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One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.
FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.
FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I wanted to make this post to make it clear to the community regarding GNUstep’s position on the new Swift language. If the language is released as open source then GNUstep will fully support it. If it is, however, not released as open source then we will either take steps to create an implementation ourselves or provide any assistance needed to a group of people other than ourselves who are willing to take that on.
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Yesterday was a big day for defending our freedom and privacy on the Internet. The FSF and its supporters joined the ranks of thousands for Reset the Net, the biggest-ever day of action against bulk surveillance.
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Not only the pixmaps and colours can be changed, also the style of the interface. This include the menu style (vertical, in-window or Mac OS style), the scrollbar position (right or left), the behaviour of contextual menus, popup list and pulldown list (so these can have similar behaviour of the gtk components). The Silver theme include an style that let users run GNUstep’s apps on, for example, Gnome without problems.
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GNU remotecontrol relies on OS file access restrictions, Apache authentication, MySQL authentication, and SSL encryption to secure your data. Talk to us you want to find out how you can further strengthen the security of your system, or you have suggestions for improving the security of our current system architecture.
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The developers behind the Nettle project are out with a new major update to their dual-licensed GPLv2 and LGPLv3+ cryptographics library.
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Security
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Queen’s Speech: Hackers who risk lives by attacking food, energy and police computer networks face life in prison
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Several vulnerabilities have been patched in the Linux kernel that could have led to a denial of service or privilege escalation.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
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NEW YORK — The U.S. government, citing possible “exceptionally grave harm to national security,” told a federal appeals court it wants to give the public less information about its legal justification for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas.
The Justice Department, Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency made the request in papers submitted late Thursday to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal.
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Washington, Jun 6 (Prensa Latina) The White House asked Friday a federal judge for authorization to publish the minor possible quantity of information about the ” legal arguments ” of the Government to kill American citizens by means of the use of drones.
Several government agencies, including the CIA, made an application to the appellate court in the city of New York, to avoid delivering texts to The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who had requested under the mandate of the Freedom of Information Act.
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In his drama Drones, filmmaker Rick Rosenthal poses complex security, political and ethical questions about drone attacks in the ongoing war against global terrorism.
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A young Queenslander killed in a US drone strike in Yemen told his family he was teaching English there and, while there may have been more to the story than that, his family say they have been denied a burial, a death certificate and closure.
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Now he’s got one thumb on the drones and the other on the Oval Office TV remote control watching “Plays of the Week” on ESPN.
Sounds like a boss to me.
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A silenced press has broader implications. For instance, journalists are kept out of North Waziristan, where the U.S. has been concentrating its drone strikes. Washington says these strikes are killing mostly militants, and are nearly always effective operations. Islamabad claims that large numbers of civilians – including children – are being killed. The two governments present very different numbers. Without journalists to investigate, who is to say where the truth lies?
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‘I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government.’.
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Transparency Reporting
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For which, the whistleblower organisation Wikileaks replied: “@CIA we look forward to sharing great classified info about you,” along with links to CIA-related revelations in the Wikileaks website.
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Newly revealed chat logs may corroborate an imprisoned hacker’s story: An informant facilitated Anonymous’ attacks on Stratfor and hundreds of foreign websites.
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An Australian man killed in a US drone strike in Yemen moved to Christchurch to escape a troubled past, friends say.
Christopher Havard, 27, was killed in Yemen last November alongside dual Australian-New Zealand national Daryl Jones, who went by the name Muslim bin John.
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I have concluded that, regardless of any personal egos involved, Julian Assange (in his bold creation of Wikileaks), Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower), and other individuals who have put their lives and careers on the line for all of us … are, to America and the world, HEROES. For that, I thank them.
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The Ecuadorean ambassador to London says that a £6 million policing bill after two years of stalemate over Julian Assange is “not our problem”.
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In the near future governments will control every aspect of human life, with even human DNA taken at birth and encoded right into your ID, says Julian Assange. A conference in New York discusses whether the internet might become a tool of suppression.
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Finance
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C. J. Polychroniou, for Truthout: It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivist bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I despair sometimes that society as a whole has lost all sense of how a democracy ought to operate. State abuse has become the norm.
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Censorship
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Anti-coup protest organizer Sombat Boonngam-anong, captured Thursday, tracked using his IP address
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The Serbian government is facing increasingly frequent accusations of web censorship. The interventions by the OSCE and the European Commission, the reactions of prime minister Vučić
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The most recent – and perhaps unintended – turn of the screw came on May 12 when the Media Development Authority (MDA) released its proposed amendments to the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act for public consultation.
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The publishing industry’s inexplicable surrender to RSS worker Dinanath Batra’s recent barrage of demands to cleanse their books on Indian history of “anti-Hindu” content seems to have created a quick and easy censorship model that is likely to be a quite a hit with the religious fringe.
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14 cartoonists have left satirical magazine El Jueves over the past 24 hours and leading Spanish daily El Mundo has suspended two correspondents over censorship accusations on Twitter.
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Spain’s royal accession faced its first dispute last night over plans to grant the outgoing king legal privileges against prosecution for paternity scandals.
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Privacy
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Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
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In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.
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On June the 5th last year, British newspaper the Guardian published the first leaks from US intelligence worker Edward Snowden. Exactly one year on – Mr. Snowden, who is wanted in America on espionage charges, remains in Russia on temporary asylum. CCTV UK correspondent Dan Whitehead takes a look at what effect the intelligence leaks have had on governments and security agencies worldwide.
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A private server startup has raised over $1 million in less than an hour and a half, breaking the crowdfunding record.
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A federal judge in California withdrew a temporary order requiring the National Security Agency to retain the data it collects under a controversial and little understood section of the FISA Amendments Act after the NSA argued that being forced to hold onto the data would both be illegal and overwhelm its computer systems, rendering the United States and its allies vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
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Encrypted Gmail. Transparency from mobile providers. Maybe even a legal ‘revolt’ against ‘Orwellian’ surveillance. But until we get real reform, NSA and Co may survive in the shadows
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More e-mail providers are using encryption, meaning messages can’t be intercepted and read by the NSA or hackers.
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One year ago Thursday, one of the most consequential leaks of classified U.S. government documents in history exploded onto the world scene: The first story based on documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was published. Americans finally knew the spy agency was sucking up virtually all of the data about who they called and when.
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The good news from Glenn Greenwald’s latest book is that we’ve arrived at the future that science fiction always promised. The bad news is that, rather than jetpacks, we’re getting a cyberpunk dystopia – less Isaac Asimov and more William Gibson, as it were.
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Reflecting on the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first revelations of rampant NSA surveillance program overreach, a whistleblower who preceded him sees both light and darkness on the horizon for the public’s rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association.
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Abby Martin features an exclusive interview with Top NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, NSA Technical Director (1965 – 2001) & Kirk Wiebe, Senior NSA Analyst (1975 – 2001). The panel discusses the history behind the NSA’s illegal spying, both domestically and abroad, as well as their experience as witnesses to the agency’s transformation into an unconstitutional surveillance apparatus following the events of 9/11 and the FBI’s determination to crack down on their dissent.
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Influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is taking the Obama administration to task for its response to the international scandal over U.S. surveillance and the resulting harm to U.S. tech companies.
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“Now, Eric Schnowden has his time, he gets an hour on TV, he gets a hoorah from Brian Williams, but I think we ought to say to the national security staff that while we look at the constitutionality and other issues here that we do not demonize them,” she added.
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Thursday marks exactly one year since whistleblower Edward Snowden’s first revelations were published in the Guardian newspaper. But before the world knew about Snowden, two other National Security Agency (NSA) employees had already described the massive reach of the agency’s activities.
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Yesterday’s transparency report from Vodafone raised a very intriguing question: why did Vodafone feel obliged to redact aggregate surveillance statistics from their UK report?
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The performer Stephen Fry condemned the government’s failure to act over the Snowden revelations at the start of the Don’t Spy on Us Day of Action in London today.
In a pre-recorded video, Fry said that using the fear of terrorism, “is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country”.
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The self-created end of privacy in the United States was brought about as much by technology as desire. Those who claim there is little new here — the government read the mail of and wiretapped the calls and conversations of Americans under COINTELPROfrom 1956 to at least 1971 – do not understand the impact of technology.
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Everyone is writing and thinking about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose first revelations were published one year ago today. But it was also one year ago that Chelsea Manning’s trial began at Fort Meade in Maryland.
Manning provided the “Collateral Murder” video, hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. She was convicted of multiple offenses including five Espionage Act offenses in 2013 and was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
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Civil Rights
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The Gates Foundation is all about solutions that make the greatest impact on vulnerable populations. So why ignore the 68,000 women who die each year from unsafe abortions?
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A new study concluding that Americans tend to take hurricanes with female names less seriously than those with male names proves just how implicitly sexism is embedded in the culture of this nation. And a look at these photos of a Tennessee survivor of domestic violence should also perhaps elicit the question: “What is it about the culture of the U.S. that generates such misogyny?” – See more at: http://uprisingradio.org/home/2014/06/06/the-common-roots-of-misogynist-culture-in-pakistan-and-the-u-s/#sthash.GpiU1MKA.dpuf
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Freed US soldier Bowe Bergdahl developed a love for Afghan green tea, taught his captors badminton, and even celebrated Christmas and Easter with the hardline militants, a Pakistani militant commander told AFP Sunday.
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The Islamabad High Court’s recent ruling ordering the registration of an FIR against the CIA’s former boss in Islamabad is the latest in a series of embarrassing verdicts that have been handed down due to poor coordination between the federation’s counsels and government departments.
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Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon.
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With a plot that sounds like a Jason Bourne move, on June 2 the Supreme Court declined to review Risen v. United States, a case raising an important question on First Amendment protections for the media but in a context that understandably left conservatives concerned over national security.
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The CIA is close to finishing its review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and hopes to have it ready by July 4, Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.
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One of the greatest Serbian writers, and surely the greatest witness of Serbian 20th century and a man who was directly involved in all the most crucial events of Serbia’s history from World War II until a few days ago when he passed away at age of 93, left his legacy to his friend and publisher Slobodan Gavrilovic.
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Top senators thought you wouldn’t notice. Behind closed doors, they wrote up new indefinite detention and Guantánamo provisions in the annual defense policy bill, and then waited 11 days to quietly file the bill.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Kim Dotcom is pulling out all the stops in his fight against the U.S. government and his adversaries in Hollywood. On the table now sits a $5 million bounty for anyone prepared to reveal behind-the-scenes wrongdoing and corruption. Dotcom told TorrentFreak how it will work.
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The domain of a large streaming TV show site was hijacked yesterday and began diverting to an imposter site. That’s the claim from WatchSeries-Online.ch, a site that in its previous form had been riding up towards the Alexa 1000. But is the real story as straightforward as that? Typically of these sites, absolutely not.
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Send this to a friend
06.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We all know that Linux has changed the world….in small ways and large One of the ways it’s changed the world is by changing the way work gets done in corporations, big and small, around the world. As with the computer itself, the effects of ever-advancing Linux seem evolutionary and “slow & steady” from day to day. But in the 20 years since its introduction, the impact Linux has made in macro is truly staggering!
Today everything from cars and jets to every supercomputer and most servers in datacenters have Linux somewhere…doing something important. Linux is, indeed everywhere! How’d that happen? And more importantly, what will happen next?
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And I think that’s why many people prefer OS-X over Windows or Ubuntu/Fedora. For everyday tasks as email, picture stuff, booking flights, doing taxes etc. OS-X definitely offers a good solution. And being UNIX-y enough to be used in a Linux delpoyment context, you get a good compromise.
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Desktop
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When Google launched Chrome OS, it touted it as a nearly entirely cloud-centric operating system. In fact, it wasn’t designed to store data or applications locally at all, or do anything local, really.
Since then, Google has wisely hedged that bet, and it is doing so in a big way as it finally gives Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies and TV offline. Google announced offline viewing last month and new Chromebooks are indeed pulling the feat off via a new app for Chrome OS.
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Server
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Oracle and Extreme Networks are the latest companies to join the vendor-driven OpenDaylight Project, which is developing an open-source platform for software-defined network and network-functions virtualization.
Also joining the group June 5 was supply-chain services firm Flextronics, bringing the total number of members in the consortium to 39. The numbers have more than doubled since April 2013, when Cisco Systems, IBM and 16 others announced the formation of OpenDaylight.
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There’s no doubt that Linux professionals are in high demand. But how much are they getting paid? I took a peek at the average Linux salaries page on SimplyHired and it was quite interesting to see how much various Linux jobs paid. See for yourself in the image below. You can also compare Linux salaries on that page, and you can search SimplyHired for Linux jobs in your area.
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Kernel Space
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The “ARM64″ pull request pertaining to EFI was sent on Thursday. This newest 64-bit ARM EFI patch-set enables EFI stub support similar to the x86 EFI stub support. The Linux EFI stub kernel support on (U)EFI systems to let the firmware function as the bootloader and to boot directly into the kernel without having to deal with a separate bootloader such as GRUB2 or Gummiboot.
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Most of the sound driver updates for Linux 3.16 revolve around ASOC (ALSA System-on-Chip) changes but there’s also a number of other noteworthy commits. HD Audio changes include Tegra HDMI support, a ThinkPad T440 dock fix, Realtek codec updates for several chips, Firewire audio support improvements, and various other changes.
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Rafael Wysocki has sent in his ACPI and power management pull that will target the next Linux kernel release cycle.
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For many months now Intel has been working on RAPL support within the Linux kernel as part of their power-capping framework as a power feature for Intel hardware on Linux.
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Graft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.
Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.
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The amount of changes and enhancements for this branch of the Linux kernel is rather large and the developers have added numerous drivers and other improvements. This is an LTS release and it’s likely that it will be updated for a long time.
“I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.41 kernel. All users of the 3.10 kernel series must upgrade.”
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Graphics Stack
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For those interested in DisplayPort MST support on Linux to support the specification’s multi-stream transport ability, there is now a revised patch-set providing this support.
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Applications
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FFmpeg 2.2.x is the latest major release and this current build is just a maintenance version. It comes with a lot of new features, such as HNM version 4 demuxer and video decoder, Live HDS muxer, a complete Voxware MetaSound decoder, WebP encoding via libwebp, VP8 in Ogg demuxing, libx265 encoder, and more.
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Proprietary
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Migrating to the Linux platform is not an either/or proposition. Linux as a computing platform is so flexible that it offers users a have-it-your-way menu of software options.
One option is the Linux desktop. Individual users in home computing, SOHO and SMB operations can choose from a variety of enterprise-class Linux distributions. The Linux desktop OS offers a no-cost or low-cost alternative to the frustrations of Microsoft Windows or the limitations of Apple’s Unix-based OS X platform for its relatively costly Mac hardware.
Another migration path is to forgo acclimating office staff to the Linux desktop. Instead, enterprises can opt to run their back-office and server operations on a Linux server. Linux servers have a rigorous giant footprint in the networking and cloud computing worlds. Linux servers are commonplace in many other enterprise settings.
A third migration choice is to run a full Linux shop. Standard office computing software is readily available in open source packages for office suites, Web browsing and graphic production tasks. Open source database applications connect famously with back-end software and servers. Plus, Linux does not need hardware-specific buy-in requirements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It just so happens on the tenth birthday of Phoronix that 500 games are now available for Linux via SteamOS.
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id Software has a long history of making games that stems back as far as 1991. Most gamers will only remember the hugely popular releases in the Doom and Quake series, but there were many more, and much older titles that were released before they hit the big time.
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LIMBO caused quite a stir when it was released for Linux being wrapped in a custom wine wrapper by Codeweavers, but that saga looks like it’s coming to and end.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You might know that Okular has a plugin system, for adding support for more document formats. And you might know that Calligra since years also provides a plugin to Okular, which adds support to view slides from files in the OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) format. And not only for the ODP format: by simply using the Calligra import filters for PPT and PPTX you can also view the slides locked away in those formats.
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Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.
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I am glad that I accomplished my first task to integrate political map with marble.
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A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.
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Over the past several GNOME releases, we have been aiming to stabilise GNOME Shell as much as possible. We have been largely successful in this: the last major UI change was in 3.10, when we introduced the combined system status area, and the main improvements in the recent 3.12 release were for performance and bug fixing. This is a good thing. At the same time, there is one area where a number of us still feel that bigger changes are needed. This is notifications, particularly the Message Tray.
In this post, I’m going to present a new set of designs for notifications and the Message Tray, which we’re hoping to implement for the next GNOME release. As ever, these aren’t set in stone and are in a state of evolution. The aim of publicising the designs is to get feedback so we can improve them.
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RoboLinux is a robust Linux desktop solution for a home office, as well as for SOHO and enterprise users looking for a well-protected migration path away from other operating systems. Its modified traditional desktop design and built-in virtual machine packages for running windows XP and Windows 7 from within the Linux desktop make it an easy and reliable option.
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In today’s Linux news, LinuxInsider has a review of RoboLinux saying it “smooths the Linux migration path.” Makulu Linux 6.1 is said to be “big, beautiful, and fun.” A new flaw has been patched and Shawn Powers discusses the new Linux professional.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0.1. With this release we bring some much needed overhaul and advancements to our Linux desktop to make it the most stable, and easiest to use yet.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I’ve added to the Steam package repository for Fedora an alternative kernel module for xpad, the X-Box gamepad driver. This variant contains patches created by Valve to improve the driver and its behaviour.
The module is available in both akmod (RPMFusion) and dkms package formats.
This made my 3rd party X-Box controller work without any issue in Steam games and in the Big Picture Mode interface!
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This new design allows for a greater amount of detail when glancing at your notifications, rather than just an icon, and the number of unread notifications. The upstream developers seem to be targeting getting this new design implemented for GNOME 3.14, so hopefully we should see this in Fedora 21 Workstation.
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Debian Family
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With it having been since late last year when trying out the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant that pairs Debian’s GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel in place of Linux, I ran some fresh trials on one of our test-beds this week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to Alan Pope, one of the Ubuntu developers, The Calendar, Calculator and Music applications, part of the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps have received support for the Click Store, meaning that this apps can be easily kept up to date via the Click Store update manager, without needing a second developer to authorize the process.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn was temporary scheduled for release on the 16th of October 2014, but now the official date has been decided, Ubuntu 14.10 will be released on the 23rd of October, 2014.
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OpenProducts is prepping an Ubuntu-based private file and email server called OPI with LUKS-based microSD encryption, and optional USB or cloud backup.
Like Sher.ly’s recently announced Sherlybox, the OpenProducts OPI device runs Linux, and is intended to enable a private cloud controlled solely by the user. While the Sherlybox is more of a network attached storage (NAS) device with optional onboard storage, OPI is a multifaceted, secure server that offers NAS-like access to external storage. Unlike the Lima device, which depends on USB storage, OPI instead uses encrypted microSD storage.
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Taking place next week from 10 to 12 June is the next Ubuntu Developer Summit where plans about Ubuntu 14.10 with regard to Mir, Unity 8, Ubuntu Phone, and other topics will be discussed by developers.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu distribution features numerous flavors, like KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, but not all the major desktop environments are used. It looks like a new one is brewing, based on MATE.
Ever since the introduction of Unity, some of the Ubuntu users have been pining after GNOME 2, the desktop environment in use until Ubuntu 11.04 arrives. It looks like it had a lot of fans and a part of the Linux community is still hoping that the good days will return.
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Qnap unveiled a Linux-based, SOHO-focused “TS-X51 Turbo NAS” device with 2-8 HDD bays, plus private cloud sharing, video transcoding, and virtualization.
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The AllJoyn open source project is the core interoperability framework hosted by the AllSeen Alliance and works on Linux, Android, iOS and many other operating systems and platforms. This ability to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of the OS or manufacturer will enable a simple, seamless and universal experience for consumers and businesses.
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SoftBank and Aldeberan have teamed up on a Linux-based, $1,930 personal robot named Pepper that can read emotions and respond autonomously.
As we gradually approach the “singularity” when robots overtake human intelligence, we often comfort ourselves in believing robots will never duplicate our often troublesome capacity for emotion. Yet such James Kirkian sentiments may prove suspect as roboticists make robots more sensitive to emotions while using emotional expression to communicate.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung and Barnes & Noble announced on Thursday a co-branded device called the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, a 7-inch reading-focused tablet designed to compete with the Kindle Fire HDX and the Nexus 7. It’s the first sign of life in some time for the Nook brand, the lineup of ebook readers and tablets that have been consistently great but never popular enough to unseat Amazon as king of the reading device. Now, however, with the combined retail and marketing weight of Samsung and Barnes & Noble, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook may have the might to find a place once again. (And there’s only the slightest irony in the fact that Microsoft owns part of the Nook brand, meaning it now owns yet another Android device.)
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At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.
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Some time ago, I read Jos’ “meta” blog post. Jos argues that contributors to free software projects should blog more regularly. In my own “meta blog” post, I will confirm everything that Jos writes and share a few of my own thoughts on why blogging is important for everyone who is part of a free software community.
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Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).
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LinkedIn has overhauled its search engine infrastructure in favor of a new system dubbed Galene, a homegrown engine designed to improve search results and problems with maintenance, the company plans to announce Thursday.
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They’re routine activities for people, but this was a Willow Garage PR2 alpha robot. By navigating through eight doors and using nine outlets, it notched an important milestone—using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to accomplish its complex mission.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has just received another update for the 36 Beta branch of the software.
The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is not the stable branch, which means that you shouldn’t rush to replace your current one. There still are a number of stability problems, but the development is progressing quite nicely.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I’ve spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.
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The Hadoop Summit went on this week in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, sponsored by Hortonworks and Yahoo. There were some interesting keynotes, including one from Microsoft on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” and Red Hat officials delved into “Enterprise Hadoop and the open hybrid Cloud.” At the Summit, it was clear that Hadoop has become a true open source success story. It’s also driving down enterprise storage costs.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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With Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of HP Helion, there are questions lingering about how the company can compete in the public cloud market, while using OpenStack as a way to get into the enterprise.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new build in the LibreOffice 4.3 Beta branch, bringing even more changes than the latest update in the series. It looks like 4.3 will be quite interesting, but it’s going to take a while until it’s released.
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Education
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Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.
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BSD
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According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.
“In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA’s massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA’s job a little harder. We’re releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.
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Today we’re joining our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in kicking off the Tor Challenge, an effort to strengthen the global Tor network that protects Internet traffic from surveillance.
Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. Tor relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.
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Public Services/Government
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How did Australia scale up to cope with all of its public research agencies at the same time? FutureGov spoke with Allan Williams, Associate Director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to find out how they did this.
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Long-time readers of this column may remember the great Digital Economy Bill saga back in 2010, which culminated in one of the most disgusting episodes in recent Parliamentary history, with the Bill being approved by a near-empty House of Commons in the dying hours of the last government, and with no substantive debate whatsoever. The result was an appalling piece of legislation, whose putrefying corpse is still polluting the UK’s digital landscape, acting as an ever-present reminder of just how badly the Labour treated the online world when it was in power.
Labour is now out of power, and trying to get back into power. I leave readers to decide for themselves whether it would be better or worse than the present incumbents. Instead, I want to concentrate on two initiatives that the Labour Party is taking to help it come up with some decent policies for the digital world.
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Openness/Sharing
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People from around the open source community will share with us, starting on Monday, how open source is being used to better and improve the world of science—in areas of academia, research, access, software, and more.
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Comics legend leading Electricomics project that aims to revolutionise comics on mobiles and tablets with new app
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Standards/Consortia
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The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.
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The adopter program lets potential adoptees run the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance test for possible certification as their driver’s implementation being conformant to the official specification. The ES 3.1 test is obviously built atop the existing OpenGL ES 3.0 test.
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Hardware
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This is a quick unboxing video of the Intel NUC device that was given out to attendees of the Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and represents reference hardware that developers can use Tizen Common to test and develop their applications with.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The language is the language of intelligence service tasking memoranda, which Obama is consciously or unconsciously reproducing.
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Transparency Reporting
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I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.
Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Fox News hosts or guests cited a discredited report by the Chamber of Commerce seven times, even though it studied a scenario far stricter than the actual rule from the EPA. According to the executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries.”
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Finance
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The New York Times (6/4/14) took a look at one of the economic puzzles of the last few decades: If growth has been strong, why aren’t we seeing a greater reduction in poverty? Interestingly, the research the Times is relying on offers some explanations–ones the paper doesn’t see fit to mention.
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It’s not often that anti-corporate activists are heard from in the corporate media. Do they really need to be called “party poopers”?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prisoner swap that freed US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has attracted an enormous amount of controversy. Much of it is silly partisanship; Republican Sen. John McCain–remember him, the media’s beloved “straight talker”–endorsed a prisoner swap with the Taliban until he was against it.
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A growing number of mainstream media outlets are holding Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) accountable for flip-flopping on his support of a deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban capitivity.
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Censorship
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In other words, the Guardian, a UK newspaper, is admitting that it simply doesn’t feel safe locating its SecureDrop implementation inside the UK. For people who believe in press freedom in the UK, this is a pretty scary statement — just the latest in the past few years that have really called into question the UK’s support for a free and open press.
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Privacy
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A year ago I stumbled across a story about a worrying new surveillance programme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was identified as the source of the disclosure, I was awestruck by the bravery of this unknown person.
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It’s a year since The Guardian published the first of many news stories about the scale of GCHQ and the NSA’s intrusion into our private lives. Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the stories had global implications, exposing the insecurity of the Internet, straining relationships between the US and its allies and raising questions about who has control over the agencies that purport to protect our freedoms.
And as my conversation in Germany showed, surveillance has damaged global freedom of expression, affecting the way we think when we use the Internet. There have been other consequences to free speech in the UK as well. We have fallen five places in the Freedom House world ranking of countries’ press freedom. This was as a result of legal threats made by the Government against The Guardian, the destruction of hard drives in the newspaper’s offices and the detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.
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We get this a lot. There are a million answers (our favorite short one is “Nothing to hide? Really?”) but here’s something thoughtful and comprehensive to share with a friend the next time it comes up. The short version? None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things (starting with our own lives first) that privacy gives us.
Imagine a world where you were constantly being judged by everyone around you, suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything you did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules. In that kind of world, social and economic progress grinds to a halt, because everyone’s afraid to rock the boat!
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The Free Software Foundation has released a guide to encrypting email to mark one year since the disclosures of NSA blanket surveillance by analyst Edward Snowden.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.
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Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless operator outside China, says governments in some countries have installed permanent listening “pipes” into mobile networks, allowing authorities to monitor all communications and data without alerting or getting cooperation from network operators.
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Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.
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One of the important results of Snowden’s leaks over the last year is that the companies involved are not only becoming more open about how their services have been used by the NSA and GCHQ to spy on people,
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Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a ‘nightmare scenario’
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2) As if #1 wasn’t bad enough, Google has chosen to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Namely, the long-standing, mature, fully-debugged gpg2 open source OpenPGP standard codebase is being rejected out of hand, again because they want to do things ‘their’ way by creating a duplicate, immature, bug-laden codebase port of gpg2 as an incomplete subset into slow, interpretive Javascript. That’s right. Javascript. gpg2 is fully compiled C/C++ code.
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A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
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Civil Rights
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A local New Hampshire police department agreed Thursday to pay a woman who was arrested and charged with wiretapping $57,000 to settle her civil rights lawsuit. The deal comes a week after a federal appeals court ruled that the public has a “First Amendment” right to film cops.
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New York Times reporter James Risen might be headed to jail soon for refusing to reveal the source of his critical reporting on the CIA.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s no such thing as “just a Linux sysadmin,” which is what makes Linux professionals so incredibly valuable. We’ve all been hearing that the demand for Linux professionals is “at its highest ever!!!” for years. In recent years, though, it hasn’t just been Linux nuts like me saying it. You may reference the 2014 Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and assume they’re biased, but a quick search over at Monster.com shows that the demand for Linux professionals is a real thing.
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Server
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Cavium is aiming be a force of nature in the ARM chips market with its new ThunderX lineup of system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs announced today. Alongside the ThunderX announcement, Cavium is also partnering with multiple Linux distributions, including Fedora and openSUSE.
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The devices support a variety of Linux distros, with KVM and Xen virtualisation support, Java and GCC development support.
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Kernel Space
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The HID/input pull request for the Linux 3.16 merge window has been sent in with some useful additions.
First up for the HID Linux 3.16 pull is an RMI driver, which is for supporting Synaptics RMI4 devices over USB or I2C. The RMI driver right now uses its own RMI4 implementation but will ultimately become a transport driver for the RMI4 library once it’s been merged upstream. This driver was developed by Synaptics along with Red Hat and other independent kernel contributors.
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After a period when Linux kernel updates were smaller than usual, the developers have started once again to send patches and fixes, even for slightly older kernels, like 3.12.x. This is the most advanced Long Term Support kernel version and it’s expected to see more changes than the rest of them.
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The KVM virtualization update for Linux 3.16 brings improvements mostly for less common CPU architectures. With the Linux 3.17 kernel should come more interesting work for x86 fans but KVM on IA64 is likely to get the boot.
Paolo Bonzini sent in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes this morning for the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request brings a lot of changes for IBM’s S390 architecture with regard to optimizations, support for migration, GDB support, and other improvements. Within the ARM space the only noteworthy change was support for the PSCI 0.2 hyper-call interface.
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There are so many Linux distributions out in the wild, but there is only one de facto thing that they have in common: the Linux kernel. But while it’s often talked about, a lot of people don’t really know exactly what it does.
Let’s take a look at what the Linux kernel really does and why it’s needed, with as few geeky terms as possible.
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This is a short and vague glimpse to the interfaces that the Linux kernel offers to user space for display and graphics management, from the history to what is hot and new, to what might perhaps be coming after. The topic came current for me when I started preparing Weston for global thermonuclear war.
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Graphics Stack
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The Nouveau DRM graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA support hasn’t seen any fundamental re-clocking support breakthroughs for the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel but the support can be easily enabled for select GeForce GPU models.
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In continuation of the Phoronix article from a few days ago about AMD Adds Gallium3D H.264 Profile Encoding Support, that work has now landed within Mesa’s Git code-base.
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X.Org Server 1.16 is expected to be officially released in early July. This major X.Org Server update clears over one thousand compiler warnings, lands in-server GLAMOR support and many GLAMOR-related improvements, works better without root privileges, improves Ultra HD 4K monitor support, and has many other changes.
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Besides being able to try out re-clocking with Linux 3.16, there’s also several other changes lined up for this next kernel release cycle when it comes to the Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA graphics support.
Here’s the key changes currently living within the Nouveau DRM repository that should be pulled into DRM-next and land within the Linux 3.16 merge window:
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Benchmarks
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To complement the initial results yesterday of trying 60+ graphics cards on the open-source Linux GPU drivers — with today being the ten year birthday of Phoronix — here’s the second round of our mass open-source graphics driver testing. While in Wednesday’s article were the raw OpenGL results for the wide-range of graphics processors on the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau articles, in today’s article are complementary results providing a brief look at the system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, CPU usage, and GPU thermal information when testing the hardware in the same configuration.
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Applications
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I suppose it’s not the fault of todo.txt that lifehacker.com left its greasy fingerprints on it. And perhaps I’m not being fair by immediately assuming that lifehacker.com is just glomming onto an otherwise useful script in hopes of pulling a little traffic its own way.
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Syncthing is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go. Similar to BitTorrent Sync, the tool can be used to synchronize files between computers however, unlike BitTorrent Sync, Syncthing is open source.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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That’s quite a big barrier to break-down, which means it should be easier than ever to use VOGL and that’s impressive work especially as it’s open source.
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Half-Life 2′s VR mode is now out of beta for Linux, so all of you with your fancy-pants head-gear can get swalled up by Half-Life 2′s visuals like you are really there! This update includes Lost Coast, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Half-Life: Source as well.
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A new technology is coming to open source that promises an integrated, high-quality and consistent streaming analytics application framework. The technology, codenamed “jetStream,” will allow original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, system integrators, service providers and developers to create Big Data analytics and streaming apps that address business use cases such as real-time analysis for spam filtering, network intrusion detection and analytics, location analytics, and social media market analysis.
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The UNIGINE Engine is built by Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time and the updates for the engine always bring numerous improvements.
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The Russian developers responsible for the Unigine Engine have begun to share details on the next iteration of their visually impressive, Linux-friendly game and visualization engine.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment 0.19 Alpha was just tagged as the very latest desktop / window manager work that includes improved Wayland support for E19.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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From January 18th to 25th, Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona. The sprint was focused on the work of the upcoming few months, and covered a wide range of aspects of these projects.
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I am Bhaskar Kandiyal a student pursuing masters in Computer Applications and I have been accepted as a student to work for KDE as a part of GSoC this year! My mentors are Jonathan Marten and Kevin Krammer and I would like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to work on this project.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In the time off over Christmas and the New Year I decided to investigate & learn about the creation of GNOME Shell extensions. As an amateur astronomer, I have an interest in knowing what the “seeing conditions” will be like in the forthcoming nights. There are a number of different websites which provide forecasts, as well as apps for Android and iPhone. I use the Android AstroPanel application quite frequently, but most of the day I’m sitting in front of my laptop and would rather have the data presented there, alongside the regular weather forecast, rather than on my phone. So after finding that extensions are quite simple to create, I decided to create an extension for displaying an astronomical weather forecast for GNOME Shell.
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GNOME Classic is a GNOME 3 desktop designed to offer the look-and-feel of a GNOME 2/MATE desktop, that is, of a traditional or classic GNOME desktop.
It’s for people who are not fond of the default GNOME Shell. It comes with every installation of GNOME 3, offered as an option in the login screen’s Session menu.
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GNOME developers are making some very important changes that will come into effect with the release of the 3.14 branch, and it looks like the notification system will also get an overhaul.
The current notification system that is being used in GNOME is not all that bad, but it could be better. In fact, there are quite a few extensions that change the way notifications are handled in GNOME, so it stands to reason that the developers can make some improvements.
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The GNOME developers have finally decided that the time to upgrade the icon theme has arrived, and it looks like the 3.14 release will see some changes in this department.
One of the first things a user sees when starting a distribution powered by GNOME is the icon set used. You would imagine that developers paid more attention to something that is responsible with first impressions, but you would be wrong.
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Canonical provides a minimal Ubuntu install CD. It’s smaller than the regular installation ISO and it installs a minimal version of the distribution. At its most basic, it gives the user a command line, network connectivity and not much else. From this bare-bones beginning, it’s possible to selectively add components while leaving out most of the cruft that tends to come with a standard distribution.
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There are a lot of tools and applications available to security researchers to conduct penetration testing. Many of those tools run on the open-source Linux operating system, though not every distribution is properly configured to be a proper platform for security research. That’s where the Kali Linux distribution comes into play as an optimized Linux distribution built for security researchers. The Kali Linux 1.0.7 distribution was officially released on May 27, providing users with a number of new features. Kali Linux was originally known as Backtrack Linux, before being renamed and rebuilt in March 2013. One of the primary new features in Version 1.0.7 is the introduction of encrypted USB persistence for Live images. With that feature, Kali Linux can be installed onto a USB storage key, with user storage that can be updated and fully encrypted. One of the key benefits of Kali Linux is that it assembles in one place many tools that security researchers need. Tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, Web applications, password attacks, stress testing and even hardware hacking are all included. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features of the Kali Linux 1.0.7 release.
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New Releases
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The Clonezilla team released a new development version for their Linux distro with just a small update for the Debian base and a couple of changes.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 2, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.0.0, the first release in v3.0 stable series.
This is the first release with musl libc instead of uClibc and is not ABI compatible with earlier versions, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading. See http://alpinelinux.org/edge-musl on how to upgrade.
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This has been a rocky couple of weeks for the Makulu Linux distribution, but with the release this week of Makulu 6.1 Xfce, things are looking good again.
With the initial 6.0 Xfce release they switched to the LMDE installer, and that seemed to lead to a plethora of problems. The lead developer, Jacque Raymer, spent what must surely have been a week in Hell fixing the problems, improving the integration of the Mint Installer with the Makulu distributions, and rewriting the post-installation setup scripts. The result of that massive effort is the Makulu Linux Xfce 6.1 release.
The release announcement mentions some of the problems and explains some of the work that went into solving them. The release notes, which are actually the original 6.0 notes with some additional 6.1 information on the end, give a much more complete overview of the 6.x Xfce releases.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Lennart Poettering has added two new service sandboxing features to systemd.
For improving the security of Linux services, Lennart added ReadOnlySystem and ProtectedHome settings for services. ReadOnlySystem will mount /usr and /boot as read-only for the specific service. The ProtectedHome setting mounts /home and /run/user as read-only or replaces it with an empty, inaccessible directory.
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Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cerner Corporation, a global health care information technology company, has successfully leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enhance the stability and performance of its world-class application hosting services. Combined with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped Cerner meet the healthcare industry’s growing demand for IT solutions and services.
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Fedora
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Being a research student is really tough. I mean tough! The most difficult part is keeping up the self discipline, day after day, week after week. As a research student, you make your own schedule, you even make your own syllabus pretty much. I handle the syllabus part just fine, but I struggle with maintaining a disciplined schedule. It takes a while to get into a stable rhythm where you work according to plan and remain focussed on the task at hand, for however long it takes. On the other hand, it’s really easy to upset said rhythm: a late night coding spree, a night out with friends, an unexpected task that makes you diverge from your plan for the day etc. are often sufficient to make me sleep late and mess up the next day. Self discipline requires commitment, and a lot of hard work. Luckily, I’m not alone in this struggle. Here’s a helpful post on improving self discipline: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/self-discipline/. Since I spend most of my day at a computer, I went around and looked for tools that would help me keep focussed on my work; keep me away from distractions (yes, Facebook is a distraction); and help me work according to the plans I make.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mirantis and Canonical today announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu. The companies will also collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported.
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The development of Ubuntu 14.10 is underway for a couple of months already, but things are just starting to shape up for the operating systems from Canonical and it looks like the devs have decided what kernel version they will be pursuing.
It’s difficult to say what Linux kernel will be integrated in Ubuntu 14.10, but some estimates can be done. The Ubuntu developers are looking to settle with Linux kernel 3.16 as their target, but that is not set in stone and things ca still change until the launch.
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Canonical has finally settled on a release date for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and the previous, temporary date announced has been changed by a week.
Shortly after the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Canonical started to work on the next version of Ubuntu, 14.10. This is quite normal and the development cycle for Ubuntu is about six months. Also, the version number of Ubuntu says that it has to arrive in October.
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A touch-friendly version of Ubuntu Linux debuts on Dell tablets and laptop hybrid devices at Computex 2014 trade show in Taipei, Taiwan
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The development of Ubuntu Touch is separated on a number of branches, only one being stable. Also, the developers are considering building a separate branch of Ubuntu Touch that will get RTM (release-to-manufacturer) status and will be focused on bug-fixes and stability improvements. So, the developers may use the “derived distribution” feature of Launchpad, which branches the entire distribution or some parts only, into a new distribution.
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The Ubuntu Touch development has been powering on for the last year and a half, and Canonical has made great progress. The Ubuntu for phones operating system has been separated in a number of branches, and one of them is considered stable.
From time to time, the Ubuntu devs promote an image that passes all the internal tests to the stable branch but, for a mass release of the system, the OS will have to be much better.
That is the reason why the technical lead for the Foundations Team, Colin Watson, made a very interesting proposition regarding a new Ubuntu Touch version that will be designated RTM (release-to-manufacture).
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Flavours and Variants
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LINUX MINT 17 has been released, marking a significant milestone because it’s a long term support (LTS) release that will be updated for five years.
Distrowatch reported the news, quoting Clement Lefebvre, who said, “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”
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Reviews of Linux Mint 17 dominated the news feeds today. Our round-up includes five reviews, video tour, and a screenshot slideshow. It’s probably not much of a surprise, but consensus is two thumbs up for Linux Mint 17.
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Linux Mint 17 qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
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A $149 “Sherlybox” NAS debuted on Kickstarter today, based on a Raspberry Pi core, and offering a secure VPN that creates an invite-only cloud service.
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Over the past couple of years we’ve been able to bring our readers an amazing array of Raspberry Pi projects that we are genuinely proud of. From big projects such as building your own robot and quadcopters down to the little stuff like making melodies with Sonic Pi or making Pong.
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Arynga, Inc. , an innovator and leader in the delivery of intelligent vehicle software management solutions, announced its recent partnership with the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics® , a leader in Linux-based infotainment, automotive software and network design. The two companies publicized this partnership today at the 2014 Telematics Update Conference in Detroit, where Mentor debuted the integration of CarSync™ , Arynga’s software update management platform, with the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) .
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Enea (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor for telecom infrastructure equipment, today announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation concerning embedded Linux training courses. Enea is one of four announced training partners to date, and can thereby offer Linux professionals the full range of Linux Foundation courses, in addition to its own training curriculum.
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Embedded Linux development and commercial support for the AMD G-Series family is available through Mentor Embedded Linux and Sourcery CodeBench, as well as no-cost Mentor Embedded Linux Lite.
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The talks cover a wide range of challenges and issues associated with porting Linux or Android to new embedded hardware platforms and SoCs. Topics include overviews of Buildroot, Yocto, and the Device Tree; discussions of issues such as SMP support and boot-time reduction; and an example of supporting a new ARM-based SoC from Allwinner.
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If you’re anything like us – and dear Lord we hope you are not – you sometimes sit staring at your Raspberry Pi, willing it to do more. Unfortunately our mental prowess is not powerful enough to materialise extra features or tweak the performance of the ARM chip, so we instead turned to the internet and looked for ways to upgrade our Pi.
We came away with ten items that can help make your Raspberry Pi usage just that little bit better; from the simplest of USB cable switches to full-on touch screen LCD displays for the Pi. We then wrote a feature about it which you can read all about in the latest issue of Linux User & Developer.
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Phones
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In mobile we are losing the free world called the Web and the Net. How do we save it?
Already most of us spend more time on mobile devices than we do on desktops and laptops, put together. We also can do a lot more stuff, in a lot more places, on mobile devices than on computers. There were more than a million iOS apps on the shelves of Apple’s store in October 2013, and I’m guessing there are at least that many Android apps on Google’s shelves by now.
Meanwhile, app development on computers is slacking off—so is Web development, except as required to accessorize mobile apps. And on mobile devices, use of the Web is fading as well. According to Flurry Analytics, the Web’s share of mobile use dropped from 20% in 2013 to 14% in 2014. In “The Decline of the Mobile Web”, Chris Dixon writes.
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Android TV “certainly shows Google’s character as an organization,” said Brett Sappington, director of research for Parks Associates. “I don’t know of any other organization that would take three tries to get it right. Google embraces risk more than other organizations do.” The challenge is getting the mix of user interaction and ease of use right, he added.
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Ballnux
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The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen OS is here, even if it will likely be a long time before most of us can get our hands on it. But forget about phones – Tizen is also about cars, TVs, home automation, wearables, and more.
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Hey developers, do you want another good reason to join the Tizen Store and sell your applications? During the Tizen Developer Conference the Tizen store has launched a great revenue share promotion in which you receive 100% of the sales revenue for applications and In App Purchase sold during the promotion period. You get all the money for a full year. Check below for additional information
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Upstream is a new podcast featuring interviews and conversations with people who are moving open source forward. The podcast is produced by Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. In their first episode, Joe Brockmeier talks with Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch about her Sunday morning keynote at the Twelfth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 12x) in February this year. In Why Checking Your Privilege is Good For You, Leslie asks how we can use our level of privilege—whether in our field, in our community, or in our job—to help others, with lower levels of privilege in said field, community, or workplace, to get involved and succeed.
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Red Hat has announced the general availability of Software Collections 1.1, their update of common web development tools, dynamic languages, and open-source databases. Red Hat Software Collections provide newer versions of these key open-source packages than what is offered by default in RHEL while being backed by three years of Red Hat support.
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A common challenge to the security of open-source software is the ability of teams to focus on writing and testing the code. Counter this with organizations that dedicate entire teams solely to testing and improving the quality of the product.
As James pointed out in our discussion, the difference is often the passion. OSS projects appeal to the craft of solving a problem. It provides an opportunity to contribute, to collaborate, to improve.
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OSSEC is a cross-platform host intrusion detection system. Hence it’s also known as OSSEC HIDS. It is Free software released under the GNU General Public License, and features log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and real-time active responses. If you intend to run a server anywhere, this is one of the first applications you want to install on it.
OSSEC is a much better security application than Fail2ban, another popular host intrusion prevention application. OSSEC offers a centralized management server with support for agent and agentless monitoring. A complete description of its features are available here.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is all about online video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities, and educational organizations will gather to join insightful sessions, workshops, round-tables, and parties about new products and a wide range of topics. Topics include OTT TV, video-based sales and marketing, video-powered learning and training, creating social and personalized experiences with video, the use of video by large cloud vendors, air droids and more.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, the world’s most loved web browser has come a long way. Once touted as a faster alternative to Firefox has turned itself into a significant player in the OS marketplace. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google has ensured that pretty much everything you do on your desktop can be done in your web browser. Taking this vision further, the search behemoth turned the web browser into a full-fledged operating system. Running on top of Linux, Google Chrome OS has become a crowd favorite. Its ability to sync seamlessly across all devices has made the initial naysayers give Chrome OS a second chance.
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Mozilla
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Video game creators will be pleased to hear that the WebGL PlayCanvas Engine has been open-sourced. Mozilla announced the move today on its developer blog and you can access the entire engine sourcebase right now over on GitHub.
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I am a hipster Flash hater. I hated Flash before Steve Jobs told it was bad. I hate Flash before Adobe said there would be no Flash 7 for Linux. I don’t have Flash on my machine. I even coined “fc;dw”.
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Mozilla is starting a new research project targeted to usher in better security on the Internet. The Cyber Security Dephi initiative, announced in a blog post from advocacy director Dave Steer, will leverage resources from experts in academia and computer security companies to develop new online security strategies.
The announcement comes alongside Mozilla’s Reset the Net initiative, which calls for a day of action to improve security against widespread surveillance.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Open source Big Data vendor Talend has rolled out version 5.5 of its data integration platform. And speed is the headlining feature of this new release, which promises Hadoop performance increases of 45 percent.
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Earlier this week, Mirantis and Canonical announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.
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CMS
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The founder of open-source Drupal content management system details how the 100-year evolution of photography can inform open-source development and the upcoming Drupal 8 release.
It took more than 100 years of evolution for the modern photography industry to reach its current state, and there are lessons from that century that apply to the modern world of cloud and Web development too. That’s the message delivered by Dries Buytaert, founder of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS), during his keynote address at the Drupalcon conference June 3 in Austin, Texas.
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BSD
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FreeBSD developers haven’t forgotten about the 9.x branch of their operating system, even if they have already released 10.0. This is a strange and not very common situation, where a development branch is actually lower in version than the latest stable.
This only shows the commitment of the developers to the people who are still using 9.x and who want to continue employing it. This means that several updates are needed and 9.3 Beta 1 is quite a big release.
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Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download. (link goes to release versions of the packages.
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As expected, DragonFlyBSD 3.8 has been released. This release brings several new features to the popular BSD operating system but the 3.8 series will be the last to support 32-bit releases.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The guide recommends free software tools like GnuPG and Enigmail to protect email communications from prying eyes.To accompany the guide, the FSF also released a shareable infographic.
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Public Services/Government
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Australia’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), John Sheridan, today clarified the government’s plans to release all code from its proposed new content management system (CMS) to the open source community.
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Open Enterprise has been charting the continuing rise of open source software for many years. In numerous areas, its dominance is evident, but there’s one – local government – where its success has been more limited. The most famous example of a city moving to open source is Munich, but even that has been a huge struggle to complete:
More than ten years ago the city of Munich took a decision that was bound to put its IT administrators in the spotlight. At that time it was clear that Microsoft would soon stop supporting Windows NT 4.0, the operating system that ran most of the more than 10,000 desktop machines in the Bavarian capital. The IT specialists and politicians in Munich had to decide: a migration was inevitable, but to where?
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Openness/Sharing
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Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting in northern California yesterday, and there were a few important messages for anyone interested in the entrepreneur’s vision for the future.
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Security
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A new study from Netskope and Ponemon Institute has revealed that IT and security professionals are expecting cloud services to increase the likelihood and economic impact of data breaches.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end.
EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler yesterday in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago. They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.
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One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.
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It’s been almost a year since the June 5, 2013 revelation that the US government was collecting, in bulk, the telephone metadata of every telephone call to and from the United States. The National Security Agency leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden would eventually expose surveillance programs, including Prism, XKeyscore, Tempora, and Muscular.
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A year ago today, June 5 2013, The Guardian, a UK newspaper, published the first of its exclusives based on documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Leaving aside the incendiary debate over whether Mr Snowden is a traitor and enemy of the state or a brave citizen who liberated millions of people from illegal surveillance activities, there is no argument over just how significant his activities were in the context of data security. That the phrase “post-Snowden” has passed into common parlance among security professionals is evidence enough.
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OpenSSL 1.0.0m and OpenSSL 0.9.8za also contain a fix for CVE-2014-0076: Fix for the attack described in the paper “Recovering OpenSSL ECDSA Nonces Using the FLUSH+RELOAD Cache Side-channel Attack” Reported by Yuval Yarom and Naomi Benger. This issue was previously fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g.
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The good news is that these attacks need man-in-the-middle position against the victim and that non-OpenSSL clients (IE, Firefox, Chrome on Desktop and iOS, Safari etc) aren’t affected. None the less, all OpenSSL users should be updating.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Kiev’s Junta “anti-terrorist op” has aimed principally to retake administrative or symbolic buildings held occupied by disaffected people in the Donbass region, which strongly reject the idea of being ruled by a government instrumented by fascists and Nazis. These buildings are meant to be retaken by force, as the Ukraine government refuses talks with the political representatives of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, etc, and which have established autonomous administrations after their respective referendums on sovereignty.
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Translation – ”Thanks for sending so many young Scots to die in Iraq and Afghanistan for us. Look forward to seeing them die in Syria or Iran soon. Keep the cannon fodder coming. Sorry have to nip off now to approve some teenagers on a drone kill list. Keep storing those nuclear warheads for us.”
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Israel launched air attacks against Egypt’s airfields at 7.45am on 5th June 1967. Within a couple of hours most of the Egyptian air forces was destroyed on the ground. At the same time, Israeli tanks scythed across the Sinai Desert heading for the Suez Canal and its troops initiated fighting on the borders with Syria and Jordan. False reports, meanwhile, claimed that Egypt had launched a major attack on Israel, which was fighting back in self-defence, a familiar refrain ever since. By mid-morning, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was telling the US ambassador in Tel Aviv “an ever larger curtain of lies” and claimed that Israel had “no intention of taking advantage of the situation to enlarge its territory.” Another lie.
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In a nice li’l tweet, King railed against the incredibly controversial swap of five Gitmo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier kept prisoner-of-war by a Taliban-aligned group in Afghanistan for the past five years. Upon his return, details have emerged that seemingly indicate Bergdahl defected from his troop before his capture, while the official narrative has always been that he was “taken in battle.”
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The fact that finding yourself on a police watchlist can lead to a death penalty meted out on the other side of the world should worry our attorney-general. Why doesn’t it?
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The Prime Minister’s claim that Kiwis are being converted to radical Islam and joining al-Qaida lacks credibility…
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A Christchurch academic and lawyer has accused the Prime Minister of washing his hands of the killing of a New Zealander (Muslim bin John) and an Australian (Salma al Russi) in a US drone strike in Yemen.
Speaking at a public lecture in Christchurch, David Small said that the moment New Zealand intelligence agencies hand over information to a country with an active kill-first-ask-questions-later drone campaign, the New Zealand government has a responsibility to ensure that the subject of that intelligence is not subject to extra-judicial killing.
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The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has ordered the police to register a First Information Report (FIR) against former Central Investigation Agency’s (CIA) station chief Jonathan Banks for his involvement in 2009 drone strike that killed family members of a tribesman.
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Campaigners say court decision could open floodgates to more criminal cases against controversial strikes and call for international arrest warrant against American spy
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Islamabad’s High Court on Thursday ordered police to press charges against the CIA’s former station chief for murder, conspiracy and waging war against Pakistan.
Judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui issued the orders following a 2010 court petition by drone activist Kareem Khan, whose brother and teenage son were killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan tribal district.
The former top spy left Pakistan in December 2010 after his identity was disclosed through the court case, and there is little expectation Islamabad will seek his return to face charges.
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There is, in fact, an easy way for the Department of Defense to fulfill the president’s wishes. It could release redacted investigations of incidents in which civilians were killed during combat engagements involving the U.S. military. Although this is not well known, the DoD has conducted thousands of these investigations, generally in a thorough and professional manner. More important, most of them are already releasable by request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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The commander, identified as Jafaar al-Shabwani, was believed to be one of the four people killed in the strike, though the identities of the other three are completely unknown beyond being labeled “suspects.”
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Having lost faith in the ability of U.S. courts to provide justice and accountability for their relatives’ deaths, the family members of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 have decided not to appeal a court decision dismissing their lawsuit challenging the killings.
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The Taliban warned the U.S. during prisoner-exchange negotiations that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that U.S. drone strikes had come close on several occasions to killing the soldier while he was in captivity, U.S. officials said.
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An attack by a suicide bomber on the home of the CIA-linked General Hifter who is leading a campaign against the government and Islamic militias called Operation Dignity killed three people.
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His two decades in exile in United States gave rise to accusations he was linked to the CIA first from the Gaddafi regime, and then from rival rebels.
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But he remains a figure of suspicion for many veterans of the uprising, with his U.S. exile leading some of them to accuse him of links to the CIA, something also claimed by Gadhafi regime.
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Al-Masry Al-Youm asked about his long period of exile in Virginia, where the CIA’s headquarters are located. He maintained a steady tone, confirming that [claims he collaborated with the Americans] were lies launched by his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood. He explained that if he was going to spy for anyone, it would have been [former President] Moammar Gadhafi when he was at his peak.
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The 117 Irish soldiers based in Syria as part of the UN Disengagement Observer Force – the thin blue line separating Syrian and Israeli forces on the Golan Heights since 1974 – are coming under attack from Syrian rebels armed, trained and paid by the US, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Government needs to protest loudly to these countries to protect the lives of its soldiers and the aims of the UNDOF mission.
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The right-wing media is denouncing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a “deserter” who wasn’t worth ransoming from the Taliban, but the real villains are the architects of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars who frivolously put the many Bergdahls in harm’s way, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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Transparency Reporting
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What separates a democracy from a dictatorship? Government transparency, among other things. Here’s a new way to help get the important stories told.
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NSA whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe will speak at the news conference along with EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, a member of the ExposeFacts editorial board.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Palm oil is everywhere. This globally traded vegetable oil is found in thousands of products you buy off the shelf, like ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, toothpaste, soap, cosmetics. Palm oil is in hundreds of products we routinely buy yet, environmentally, it’s incredibly destructive. Although palm oil is relatively cheaper to produce, animals and indigenous communities suffer tremendously due to the cultivation. Studies have proven that while palm oil is a very successful ingredient it has proven to be detrimental to the well being of the orangutans, causing a decrease of at least 90% along with other species
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The Keystone XL oil pipeline would be vulnerable to attacks threatening water supplies for millions of homeowners and farmers, according to a report by NextGen Climate, a political group led by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.
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Censorship
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Obama’s first job after college in 1983 was with the CIA front company Business International Corp.
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We all know that China and their “Great Firewall” of censorship exist and we have a general idea of just how deep the censorship goes. We’re also aware of the justifications that the Chinese government use for this censorship, including the notions that they’re just protecting their innocent citizens from all the evil on the internet, as well as censorship committed by some of their antagonists (including the USA). But if you thought that this censorship was chiefly about pornography or current events, you’re quite mistaken.
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We should begin to expect more transparency as more information is revealed in the wake of the revelations that the NSA has been spying on citizens, by recording their telecommunications and digital transmissions.
At the moment, the ruling is directed at Europeans, and Google is reported to be receiving more than 10,000 daily requests. However, globally, other citizens can also expect the effect to be assimilated throughout the virtual ecosystem, as the discussion about online privacy is ignited.
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Shares in Russian internet search engine Yandex will begin trading in Moscow on Wednesday in a move that will please the Kremlin and could shield the Nasdaq-listed company from any tightening of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.
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Privacy
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End-to-end encryption offers another layer of security by encrypting data leaving a user’s browser until it is decrypted by the recipient. The service has been available for some time via tools including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), but such tools have failed to become mainstream as they require a higher level of technological know-how.
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When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.
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A federal judge raised privacy questions while dismissing a lawsuit filed by an Idaho woman against President Barack Obama regarding the collection of cellphone information by the National Security Agency.
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We’ve written plenty about the case Smith v. Maryland, which established the dangerous Supreme Court precedent that there is no 4th Amendment expectation of privacy to be found in any data or information you give to a third party. Judge Richard Leon, back in December, ruled that the NSA surveillance efforts were so different from the situation in Smith (involving police getting dialing information on a single person from the phone company) that it wasn’t an applicable precedent in the case in front of him, brought by Larry Klayman. That case is now being appealed.
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A run-of-the-mill public records request about cell phone surveillance submitted to a local police department in Florida has unearthed blatant violations of open government laws, including an incredible seizure of state records by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the Justice Department. Today the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida filed an emergency motion in state court to preserve the public’s right of access to government records.
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In terms of collecting images, no one stated anything to the contrary. The collection is likely operating like many other NSA collections — on a large scale that increases the likelihood that incidental collection of American data and content will occur. The “appropriate legal steps” are the same ones that have been used as talking points over the last year.
Likewise, no one suggested in the article that the NSA targeted US citizens. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about the NSA’s programs is the fact that they’re clearly untargeted. The NSA doesn’t select a person and start the surveillance from that point. The surveillance is pervasive and ongoing and any selection tends to occur long after tons of data/communications have been collected. It’s the after-the-fact nature of the programs that makes them so dangerous. Further, the lack of solid minimization rules means tons of data from bulk collections sits around in NSA servers just waiting for someone to find a reason to look through it. So, while the NSA may not “unilaterally target American citizens,” it has the mechanisms in place to do so.
As for Roger’s last non-denial, it was clearly stated in the New York Times article that there was no indication that the NSA had access to US drivers license databases. Rogers’ last denial addresses “some people” (whoever they are) that have a clearly wrong interpretation of the leaked documents, but doesn’t address what was actually written. And it completely avoids the undeniable fact that, with as many “input” channels as the NSA has, collecting the sort of information a drivers license database holds would be simple enough, even without direct access.
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The volume of email cloaked in encryption technology is rapidly rising as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major Internet companies try to shield their users’ online communications from government spies and other snoops.
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Edward Snowden’s recent revelation that the NSA can bug cell phones even when they are turned off left some experts split on whether it is true or not. But a group of hackers claim that at least there is a way to protect your phone from spies’ ears.
Snowden, who exposed the American government’s secret mass surveillance program, has been making headlines in the media for almost a year with shocking details about the scale of snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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It was last October that the Washington Post mentioned about leaked slides from the NSA’s top secret MUSCULAR data interception program, sharing details on how the NSA was able to step in and intercept data from Google’s cloud servers through an exploitation in an SSL gap. That particular slide has proven to raise a fair amount of controversy, especially so where Google employees are concerned. The comment read, “SSL added and removed here :)”, and did not go endear itself to Google employees. Of course, revenge is a dish best served cold, and Google has not forgotten about that, having hit back in a latest Easter Egg in their latest email encryption plug-in.
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US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday he was reconstituting a task force to coordinate the work of several Department of Justice agencies on thwarting homegrown terrorism within the US.
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Cheers and laughter could be heard late last night through the walls of a small Hamburg office as staff celebrated an unlikely win; their punt to build a NSA-subverting server that encrypts everything a small business might do in the office had made bank with a record-breaking $US1 million in crowdfunding sourced in 89 mins.
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Security technologist Bruce Schneier tells DW why he finds it curious that the German BND is getting a free pass on surveillance and why Europe should take the lead on protecting privacy in the digital age.
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Last week, leaked secret documents revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent to the NSA, has asked the German Parliament for an additional 300 million Euros to extend its surveillance program in an effort to rival that of the U.S. and U.K.
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The government’s secret surveillance program becomes an issue in the Portland case
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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A year has passed since Edward Snowden started telling us what really was going on in the world. Since that date, various holders of power have been struggling – without success – to reclaim the control of the narrative, the control of the news flow.
But in the age of the net, the power of narrative rests squarely with the many, rather than with the elite. People have become aware of mass surveillance, even if they haven’t become aware of its full consequences yet. But the story is out. The proverbial cat isn’t just out of the bag, but has left the entire city and is halfway across the continent. This hasn’t prevented an ivory tower establishment from playing “no see, no hear, no speak” monkey games, pretending Snowden does not exist and that people don’t already know what we know.
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It’s the day we began to learn just how incredibly intrusive government spying on average Americans had become in this technological age. June 5, 2013 – the day we began to understand what was at stake – our freedom, our privacy, our personal lives. The day the first of many news stories – courtesy of Edward Snowden – began to paint a picture of a shocking new world.
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US companies such as Yahoo Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People’s Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.
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As you read this, the United States will be waking up to the one-year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first leaks on his country’s surveillance programs to the world’s newspapers.
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A year after Edward Snowden revealed the vast scope of the US data dragnet, America is still reeling from the fallout, which damaged ties abroad and triggered fears of “Big Brother” government.
In the latest twist since Snowden handed over thousands of US intelligence secrets last June, Germany has launched a criminal probe into snooping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
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The National Security Agency’s digital face book may or may not include images scraped from Facebook. An agency spokeswoman declined to divulge that information to The New York Times.
The agency has managed to intercept millions of images, “including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images,’” according to documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those documents describe the trove of data as presenting “tremendous untapped potential,” the Times reported.
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Thomas Drake: Well it generated a worldwide discussion and debate about surveillance and what is at stake in terms of individual sovereignty and privacy and how far the US in particular in partnership with others, including other countries and other security services as well as major telecommunication concerns and internet service providers in gathering data, collecting data and finding out everything there is to know about us. And much of it has been conducted in secret, and he was able are able to bring out significant documentation, prime evidence to actually prove it.
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Reports began to surface in early April that the IBM’s sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo—which is based in Beijing, China—was getting close scrutiny from U.S. agencies around issues of national security. Government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FBI, buy x86 servers from IBM, as do the largest telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-lenovo-server-deal-may-take-longer-than-expected.html#sthash.m6Wan9Dl.dpuf
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The opinion of Edward Snowden is wide ranging. Some call him a traitor, others call him a patriot. The truth sits firmly in the latter. Edward Snowden is a red, white and blue patriot whose act of civil disobedience came at a price everyone should revere.
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The NSA document leaker joins Google, Mozilla, Reddit, and many others in a campaign and day of action that aims to help Internet users “take back” their privacy.
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It was eight years ago that we first learned of a man named Mark Klein. He didn’t work for the government; he worked for the phone company. When he started asking questions about a secret room in the building where he worked, there was no turning back.
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Yesterday, advocates for government transparency argued for the release of more documents that could reveal how the Federal Intelligence Act Surveillance (FISA) Court has provided oversight of the US intelligence community and confirm which telecom companies cooperated with the government. It’s the latest step in an uphill battle that’s been waged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2011 for records they say may reveal disputes between the FISA court and the intelligence community, confirm the existence additional surveillance programs, and provide official acknowledgment of some essential details of known programs that have been already revealed in the media.
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Earth to Glenn Greenwald: If you write a book slamming the New York Times, it’s naïve to expect favorable treatment in the New York Times Book Review. Been there, done that. Twice as a matter of fact.
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Australia ”pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Things seem to have gone downhill since then. One NSA slide details a program called BLARNEY by which the agency pressures such U.S. corporate vassals as AT&T into assisting with the illicit surveillance of their customers. Seeing this for the first time, I had a flash of inspiration. The reader may recall how the ACLU kept trying to sue the NSA for the bulk warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, including presumably those American citizens who work for the ACLU, but the courts wouldn’t grant them standing to launch the suit since all of that was classified and thus couldn’t be revealed in court. What the ACLU needs to do now is track down whoever it is whose homemade St. Patrick’s Day block party invitations the NSA ripped off to get this BLARNEY logo and have them sue for copyright infringement.
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Prof Kevin P.Clements calls for a New Zealand commission of inquiry to re-evaluate the value of the Five Eyes security arrangement.
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As reported earlier this week, the National Security Agency is now collecting photos from online to create a massive facial recognition database. Americans shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about that, says new National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, according to Washington Post article today headlined, “New NSA chief seeks to reassure public on surveillance.”
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The new head of the National Security Agency has distanced himself from previous government suggestions that whistleblower Edward Snowden is a foreign spy. Officials including former NSA director Keith Alexander have contended that Snowden may have worked with Russian or other foreign intelligence agencies. But at a public forum with Bloomberg News, new NSA chief Michael Rogers shot down that theory.
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The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating nearly a year after journalist Glenn Greenwald initiated a deluge of reporting on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, including a cache of NSA documents stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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CCR President Emeritus Michael Ratner and NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney examine the relationship between the NSA and U.S. global dominance, the stance of Democrats and Republicans towards surveillance, and mainstream media coverage of these issues
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A tool to target dissidents
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Google and other companies are using encryption on emails, but they are still not completely private. One thing that many people fail to realize is that the encryption is from the server side. It does not stop those at the email providers from reading the content of emails.
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A pledge for developers and site operators: Here are best-practices for people who make mobile apps, host sites, and write code to make the Internet more secure against mass surveillance. For example, mobile developers can use cert pinning and end-to-end encryption to keep their users safe and private. And websites can use SSL to protect their users’ privacy when they use the net.
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As June 5 approaches — and with it the one year anniversary of the first reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks — the privacy community is calling supporters to redouble efforts to improve the NSA “reform bill,” which I call the USA Freedumber Act, in the Senate.
I explained here why the Senate is unlikely to improve USA Freedumber in any meaningful way. The votes just aren’t there — not even in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Benjamin Franklin said it all: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”
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More than 12 years after 9/11, the United States continues to have a foreign policy mindset that demands zero tolerance on terrorism and treats even minor threats like existential challenges. In the pursuit of perfect security and in meeting the demands of a hugely expansive view of American power, the U.S. has failed to consider the ultimate consequences and potential political fallout — both at home and abroad — of what achieving that goal means. And that’s a challenge that goes far beyond the NSA.
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Recent revelations that the government can remotely turn on a phone and listen to conversations come without press examination if this historic spying capability is being misused
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Civil Rights
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Ashley Smith, a nineteen year old, mentally ill, inmate committed suicide while under suicide watch at a Correctional Institute in Canada. Ms. Smith was imprisoned at fifteen for throwing apples at a postal worker. During her imprisonment she suffered multiple cases of emotional and physical abuse. The first and mildest abuse she suffered was being denied sanitary products and adequate toilet paper during her menstrual cycle. The worst abuse she suffered was a combination of emotional and physical, and occurred when Ms. Smith was transferred between nine different institutions seventeen times. When she was transferred between institutes she was restrained by officers so she could be hooded and duct taped to her seat while she pleaded with them to stop hurting her.
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But in a groundbreaking ruling in January, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman granted Daoud’s attorney Thomas Durkin the right to examine secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act records, which Durkin hopes could provide grounds for having the case against Daoud thrown out.
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Daoud was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in September 2012 at the age of 18 after allegedly trying to detonate a device given to him by an undercover agent. He later pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and trying to damage or destroy a building with an explosive.
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Over the weekend the government of Qatar brokered a dramatic deal between the US and the Taliban to swap five Guantánamo prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier held as a prisoner of war for almost five years. Flexing his political clout, President Obama demonstrated his ability to navigate with ease through the Congressional obstacles in the way of releasing prisoners from Guantánamo. Some House Republicans accused the President of breaking the law to get his way. But the Obama administration made it clear that the President had added a “signing statement” to the bill restricting the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, saying that the restrictions violated his Constitutional prerogative.
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He’s Venezuela’s democratically elected president. It doesn’t matter. Washington’s dirty war continues.
It’s done so since Chavez’s December 1998 election. He became president in February 1999. He served until his March 5, 2013 death.
He survived Washington’s April 2002 coup attempt. A 64-day 2002 – 03 general strike and oil management lockout.
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President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.
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New Labour were the chief culprits in moving Britain away from a liberal democracy and into an authoritarian state.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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I am writing in response to NPRM 14-28 — your request for comments regarding the “Open Internet”.
I am a trained computer scientist and I work in the technology industry. (I’m a software developer and software freedom activist.) I have subscribed to home network services since 1989, starting with the Prodigy service, and switching to Internet service in 1991. Initially, I used a PSTN single-pair modem and eventually upgraded to DSL in 1999. I still have a DSL line, but it’s sadly not much faster than the one I had in 1999, and I explain below why.
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On June 6, during the next Council meeting, ministers will be invited to share their position regarding the proposal for a Regulation on Net Neutrality. After the rise of eurosceptical forces in the recent European elections, will the European governments be ready to support the European Parliament’s vote and defend our freedoms?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Three years ago, we wrote about how Disney applied for a trademark on “SEAL Team 6″ just two days after the Navy SEAL’s Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. While public outcry resulted in Disney dropping the trademark application a few weeks later, the situation apparently woke up some trademark lawyers at the Pentagon to get busy trademarking.
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Copyrights
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Things have been getting more interesting on the Malibu Media front lately. The company, which is responsible for 40% of all copyright cases, has certainly faced claims of abusive and seriously questionable practices. But some new information suggests it goes much further down the rabbit hole of questionableness. Like Righthaven and Prenda before it, new accusations are coming out about some highly questionable shell games to try to hide what’s really going on.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Massive open online courses offer IT professionals the opportunity to learn about some of the tech industry’s most in-demand and current topics for free. Available to anyone with a Web connection, MOOCs cover a range of hot tech topics including software defined networking, cloud computing, security, drone development, artificial intelligence and mobile programming.s
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I did a full review of an earlier version of North Korea Linux on Desktop Linux Reviews a while back. There are some interesting and scary videos in the review of what life is like inside of North Korea. I’ll certainly take a pass on running North Korea Linux as my primary distro, but I’m sure it will appeal to somebody out there.
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Desktop
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In a blog post constructed as rhythmic verse, Google has confirmed that Chromebooks–portable computers running the Chrome OS platform–are coming to nine new global regions: Norway, Denmark, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Belgium, New Zealand, and the Philippines. As we’ve reported,
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Server
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The NUCs run Ubuntu server and are storage hosts and the primary interface to the external world. The system has 8x Parallella boards and a shared gigabit Ethernet switch, giving a peak performance of around 208 GFLOPs.
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Kernel Space
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Linux has already transformed data center economics on the server side, and Cumulus Networks is set to do it again – this time through the network. The company behind Cumulus Linux, the first distribution for data center switches and other networking hardware, is part of a broader enterprise movement toward open networking.
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Intel will begin shipping the Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” processor this month and thanks to Computex now getting underway we’re able to publicly talk about this high-performance chip.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent out his various pull requests for the Linux 3.16 kernel. Of the subsystems maintained by Greg KH, the staging area again represents a bulk of the user-interesting changes.
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The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward.
Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the ‘merge’ window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.
For the Linux 3.16 kernel cycle, that tried and true system will change somewhat.
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Among other pull requests in the past day like the new staging work and the plethora of ARM enhancements, Ingo Molnar sent in his scheduler changes for the Linux 3.16 kernel.
Of the highlights for the scheduler tree with the Linux 3.16 merge window are NUMA scheduling updates for better performance, CPU idle changes to improve the high level idle scheduling logic, standardized idle polling across architectures, and continued work on preparing better power/energy-aware scheduling. Another change to point out is for using the deepest C-state always when in the “freeze” sleep state.
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With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.
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Benchmarks
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I’ve tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.
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Applications
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0.27.1 is more than your traditional point release: 0.27.1 is our best release ever. While it doesn’t have major new user features, it has received over 340 improvements.
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Samba 4.1.8, an app that seamlessly integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, is now available for download.
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Psensor, a hardware temperature monitoring tool, was updated recently with an option to display the temperature on the panel (next to its AppIndicator icon), along with other improvements and bug fixes.
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Proprietary
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Intel has published a new Linux kernel patch-set that adds Quick Assist Technology support to Linux along with a driver to handle their DH895xxC hardware accelerator. This is a new chip for trying to accelerate cryptography and data compression tasks.
Quick Assist Technology is a new Intel technology for better accelerating cryptography and data compression operations. The Linux implementation consists of a kernel driver to connect to the Linux kernel crypto framework and a Linux user-space library with a QuickAssist API for application porting. Intel Linux developers have already patched OpenSSL’s libcrypto and Zlib for taking advantage of this Intel technology.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.
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Amarok is the default application installed with openSUSE but I would certainly recommend using Clementine instead.
Clementine feels lighter, has a nicer interface, the online options work better and there is better support for external audio devices.
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This year, it is besides the recurring multimedia topics, a lot about improving the new KDE Frameworks, the related documentation and the development experience with IDE’s and such.
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The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).
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Though the Krita team was one of the first to start the tradition of having sprints, with the first Krita Sprint in Deventer, in 2005, Krita sprints are rather infrequent! But, of course, we also meet each other during the more regular Calligra sprints.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.12 was released on March 26 (2014), but it didn’t start shipping on many distributions until very recently. In this post, I’ll let you in on what I think about it; the cool (good) features and those features I think the developers need to take a closer look at and try to make it better and more user-friendly.
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Initially we were thinking to go with libical ( an open source reference implementation of the icalendar data type and serialization format .) But GTG is not a calender, that’s why we dropped the idea.
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There a few reasons why you might want to build your own distribution. You might want to build a custom install CD to match the policy of your organisation. For example, a GNOME desktop with Chrome as the web browser might be the standard desktop where you work. That touches on another motivation for wanting to create a customised installer: sometimes the creator of the distribution makes a decision that you simply don’t like. Canonical’s decision to switch to its own UI, Unity, ranks amongst its most controversial decisions. However, by using some of the methods that we explore here, you could create a distribution that is standard Ubuntu, but with a traditional desktop that you are more comfortable with.
There are other, niche reasons for wanting to build your own distribution. You might need to put something small and lightweight together for an older computer. You might need to build a live media ISO that you are able to carry around with you and to bring your favourite set of tools to bear when you need them.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” LXDE, Razor-Qt and Enlightenment 18 is out.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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The latest update to Slackware-current brought us a new kernel (3.14.5) and a new gcc compiler (4.8.3).
This warranted a build of new multilib gcc packages. Get them from your nearest mirror. I also refreshed the “compat32″ layer of packages – this is the set of converted 32-bit Slackware packages which you’ll need at a minimum, so that you will be able to run most of the 32-bit software that is out there.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has expanded the company’s strategic alliance with SAP AG to make it easier for customers to adopt and run the SAP Data Management portfolio, including the SAP HANA platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), SAP IQ software, and the SAP SQL Anywhere suite on Red Hat’s open source solutions.
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Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat’s announcement that it will support SAP’s HANA is good news for SAP and Red Hat hardware partners like Dell and IBM.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron to lead the next Red Hat community Linux distribution.
Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.
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Last month Robyn Bergeron stepped down as the Fedora Project Leader while now Red Hat has found her replacement.
The Fedora Project team has selected Matthew Miller to be the new Fedora Project Leader, a long-time Fedora community member, member of Red Hat since 2012, and was the founder of Boston University’s BU Linux distribution.
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I’m proud to have been part of the Fedora community since the early days. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Fedora as my full-time job for the past year and a half. And now, I’m excited to be stepping into a new place within the community as Fedora Project Leader. These are incredible times in computing and in free and open source software, and we have incredible things going on in Fedora to match — the next years are full of opportunity and growth for the whole project and community, and I’m thrilled to be in a position to help.
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Debian Family
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Six months after the release of the first version, we are pleased to announce the updated of ISOs Tango Studio to version 2.2. This new version has been updated to Wheezy 7.5, contains some new features and bugfixes, as well as an update of the best open-source applications available for sound creation.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next Ubuntu Linux release, Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” will likely be powered by the 3.16 kernel.
Given that Linux 3.15 is being released this week and Linux 3.16 should be christened around the end of July or early August, it makes sense that Canonical developers are focused on shipping the 3.16 kernel for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu 14.10 has a feature freeze on 21 August, the final kernel freeze on 9 October, and the official release on 23 October.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is strengthening its ties to system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturer Cavium through expanded support for the ThunderX family, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.
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It is not a coincidence that Cavium, a maker of MIPS processors aimed at networking equipment and other embedded uses chose the Computex 2014 conference in Taipei, Taiwan to announce its entry into the ARM server chip space. Many of Cavium’s customers for its ThunderX processors will come from Taiwan, where a large percentage of the world’s servers are designed and manufactured these days – and usually for the hyperscale datacenter operators who will be on the cutting edge of the ARM adoption curve for servers.
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Canonical, Microsoft, and Apple want the same thing from their operating systems, but they go about it in different ways. It’s only possible to estimate for Canonical how long it will take them to achieve their goal because their product is open source, but it’s much harder to do this for the other companies.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is among the most popular Linux desktop distributions in use today, thanks in large part to its core focus on improving the desktop experience for users. It’s a focus that has been in place for Linux Mint since day one. When Clement Lefebvre developed Linux Mint in 2006, he did so with the goal of creating a user-friendly desktop version of Linux. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux, adding new desktop, setting and configuration elements. The latest version of Linux Mint, version 17 (code-named Qiana), is based on the recent Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” release, which is what is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Lefebvre has pledged that Linux Mint 17 will also be an LTS release and will continue to receive security updates for five years, until 2019. Lefebvre has also pledged that until 2016, the core package base will remain the same, which is intended to make it easier for users to upgrade to new versions of Linux Mint. As is the case with other Linux distributions, there are multiple desktop user interfaces that are available to users. With Linux Mint, however, there is a particular focus on the Cinnamon desktop, which was created by the Linux Mint distribution itself. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of the Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon release.
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The $130 Linux-based Crock-Pot WeMo Smart Slow Cooker was unveiled at CES earlier this year, and will be available in stores soon. I got to spend some time with one this week and thought I’d share some early impressions ahead of the full review. Belkin and Jarden Home Brands’ app-controlled slow cooker struck me as an unlikely smart home contender at first. Slow cookers are about as low maintenance as possible, so how much value could WeMo integration add to something already so straightforward?
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Phones
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There are a lot of headlines being generated about open phone platforms this week. Apple CEO took a shot at Android at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, even as he announced that many APIs and platform-level features in iOS are going to be opened up for developers for the first time.
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Ballnux
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Dell has added two new Android-based models to its Venue lineup of tablets. Both the Venue 7 and the Venue 8 tablets now run Android 4.4 KitKat and come with budget specifications.
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Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).
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The Korean electronics company, which earlier this week unveiled a new smartphone running the open-source operating system, on Tuesday showed off Tizen-based TVs, cameras, and wearables — some of these devices for the first time. The gadgets, displayed at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, all are part of Samsung’s efforts to create a broad ecosystem for Tizen, its alternative to Android.
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Zettaset has expanded its Big Data security offerings with the announcement of support for Hortonworks and other open source Hadoop 2.x distributions in its Orchestrator management and security platform.
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With fewer defects being found in major open source projects than in large proprietary software packages, what are the security strengths and weaknesses of open source development?
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It was HP Networking’s Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer who said seven months ago that she couldn’t see why anyone would use an OpenDaylight controller in their SDN. But it was also Bethany Mayer, now senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business, who drove HP to raise its membership investment and participation in OpenDaylight just two weeks ago.
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In today’s Linux news, a new project manager is named for Fedora. Nick Heath says Open Source is more secure because of a “heightened focus on quality controls.” And a team of developers are trying to save TrueCrypt one way or another.
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Perforce Software todayannounced it has released open source versions of P4CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is a conference all about open source video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities and educational organizations, healthcare, media broadcasters and new-media publishers.
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Web Browsers
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In 2013 the browser wars sprouted a new rendering engine: Blink. When Blink forked in April 2013, Webkit had a total of 1.8 million lines of C++, 2,500 commits per month and was the most popular browser engine. On mobile, Webkit backed the top 3 browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Android Browser), accounting for the majority of mobile eyeballs. This post is a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?
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SaaS/Big Data
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Want a fully open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud framework? Apache’s just made Stratos a top-level project.
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Education
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At Opensource.com, we love sharing stories about the ways open source tools and principles are changing the nature of teaching and learning today. Over and over, we’ve seen how approaching education the open source way can transform classrooms all over the world.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year’s GNU Tools Cauldron is taking place next month at the University of Cambridge where some very interesting compiler-related discussions will be taking place.
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His talk was quite how I expected it to be. He was idealist – Aditya and I discussed that he had to be it, as the face and primary driver of Free software. Richard spoke of the advantages of Free software, where he pointed out the numerous back doors that have been found in proprietary software to spy on users. He spoke of the GNU time line, how he had started it, how Emacs and other things came about. At some point of time, he expressed his annoyance to the fact that people confuse GNU and Linux, and free software and open source software. He spoke of how people think Linus is the father of free software etc. I quite enjoyed his talk. At some points, though, I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t really need to use negativeness to put his point across. He didn’t just differentiate between free and open source software, and he didn’t just say how free software is better than the open source philosophy, he went on to stress on why open source wasn’t good enough. If you’ve seen his sessions, you’ll probably understand what I mean.
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Openness/Sharing
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When one thinks of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology, they probably think of the large industrial level printers by 3D Systems, that cost in the $XXX,XXX range. These certainly are not 3D printers that an ordinary person would have in their home or garage. They aren’t even printers that the ordinary person has direct access to.
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Hardware
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Given this ASUS ultrabook is only a few months old, hopefully the ultrabook will be able to work out fine until the mobile Broadwell processors hit the market when I decide on my next laptop/ultrabook or end up back with a MacBook Pro.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP in April was met with a collective gulp by the IT community. For good reason: Approximately 30 percent of all desktop systems continue to run XP despite Microsoft’s decision to stop offering security updates. Furthermore, a critical security flaw in Internet Explorer 8 disclosed recently by HP’s TippingPoint Division opens the door to remote attacks on XP systems that use IE8.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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There is a tendency to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin is orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, sending in irregular Russian forces to stir up pro-Russian separatist sentiment.
As guesses go, this might not be a bad one–but journalism is supposed to be about presenting evidence to confirm such speculation. The New York Times clearly has a hunch about deep Russian involvement in Ukraine. The ways it tries to confirm this hunch are curious.
[...]
What you’re left with from the Times is the suggestion that the lack of direct evidence is probably proof that Russia is up to something– i.e., “leaving no fingerprints.”
During the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists spent their time poring over state propaganda in an attempt to understand what was really going on in the USSR. It bears some resemblance to what one might be seeing in the New York Times now.
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The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster, often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.
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The California State Senator, Leland Yee, has been charged with the conspiracy to deal firearms, as well as wire fraud. Yee was arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI-agent in exchange for donations towards his campaign. The allegations towards Yee outlined in an affidavit from an FBI agent were not only pointed towards the Senator, but to twenty-five other people as well. According to the court documents, the allegations against Yee included a number of favors that he had requested in exchange for campaign donations. He also performed “official acts” in exchange for donations to get himself out of a $70,000 debt that he acquired during a failed San Francisco mayoral bid.
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The Country Ratings Poll asked more than 24,500 people from 24 nations whether they felt positive or negative about 16 countries and the EU. The UK finished third, with 56 per cent of those surveyed saying they thought it was having a good influence internationally.
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On Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from retweeting delusional sycophants begging him to run for president to comment on the successful rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States’ last (and only) prisoner of war in Afghanistan.
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The Fierce Take: There is no doubt that Skype Translate could be an invaluable business tool, though the skeptic can’t help but wonder if the NSA would also utilize this to bolster its various wiretapping efforts.
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In that sense, we as a country are paying another price as a consequence of the Republican clown show. Blind trust in government is never a good thing for a civilized and free society. But when the opposition is so blinded by its own ideology that it is deaf to the facts and mute to a constructive discussion to prevent mishaps from occurring again, it means they cannot be trusted to hold the government accountable.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, Sting of the Drone. We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, tells Democracy Now! he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Clarke says. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least — were war crimes.”
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The relatives of three United States citizens killed in American drone strikes without trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit they filed against Obama administration officials.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has quite rightly called on the Obama administration to publicly disclose its legal justifications for the claimed power to order the killing, without trial or hearing, of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being terrorist leaders planning attacks against the United States. The dispute came up, most recently, in the context of David Barron’s successful nomination to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. As a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron reportedly co-authored at least two memos providing the legal rationale for the administration’s decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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Wherever there is the threat of war there are always people banging the drum—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is among the worst.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork.
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The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
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Charity calls on EU to end reliance on imported and domestic fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency and boost renewables
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Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan announced Monday is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power.
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Finance
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Class and ethnicity, rather than ability, will probably determine the adult lives of Channel 4′s 11-year-old dinner guests
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I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man
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It’s well-established by now (Extra!, 7/06) that political reporters prefer to talk and write about Democrats who stay close to the “center” instead of placating the left-wing party base. This is simply smart politics, these observers note, since it’s always better to be in the middle, because that’s where most people are.
The problem is that pundits’ idea of the “middle” doesn’t seem to correspond to reality.
[...]
How opposing a minimum wage increase and keeping taxes low for corporations and the wealthy centrist? These are not popular policies in general, and certainly not among Democrats in the state Cuomo governs. Nonetheless, Bruni is keenly worried that Cuomo may be promising too much to other Democrats, who might tug him away from this “middle” and “hijack his legacy.”
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Yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the highest minimum wage in the country. Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the bill into law this afternoon, just after 1 p.m. in Cal Anderson Park. The first phase of the wage raise is scheduled to start April 1, 2015, and headlines around the country seem to be asking if Seattle, the progressive urban utopia, is just the beginning of a nationwide trend.
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Censorship
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Given the many porn stars on Twitter, it’s unclear why Pakistan went with Knox; perhaps the fairly widespread national dislike of Duke* is international. “Dear Twitter Team,” writes Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority in his request, which was posted on Chilling Effects by Twitter. “Please block the following unethical links.” In the list that follows is the “videos and photos” portion of Knox’s account: https://twitter.com/belle_knox/media, which is thoroughly NSFW (not safe for work) as well as NSFP (not safe for Pakistan). Apparently, Batin doesn’t mind her tweets; he just doesn’t want his country to see her photos and videos. The same request asks for the removal of a url that would perform a search on Twitter for “Burn Quran” photos, calling it blasphemous.
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Google and other internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the top world search engine took a first step towards upholding an EU privacy ruling.
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State claims Mordechai Vanunu is still a threat to security a decade after his release from prison.
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Privacy
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The move came just hours after Google called out email providers, including Comcast, for not using encryption. Google Tuesday publicized for the first time the share of its email traffic with other providers that remains encrypted. According to Google, fewer than 1% of Gmail messages sent to Comcast.net addresses remained encrypted on a sample day last month.
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The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was “probably not” working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA’s allies to the contrary.
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Says lying does more harm than good
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The National Security Agency hasn’t exactly stopped spying on Americans en masse just yet, but a new court filing accuses the NSA of unlawfully destroying the evidence it collected against United States citizens for years.
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With the tap of a finger, iPhone users will soon be able to lock their doors, turn off appliances and even use a baby monitor, all thanks to Apple’s new software “Homekit.” However, not everyone is convinced creating a smartphone with your smartphone is entirely secure.
“What I would really be concerned about is that data. The secure data that is opening your doors and turning your lights on and watching your baby, where is that being stored?” said Christian Argie, owner of Top Notch Computers in Charlottesville.
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Edward Snowden’s latest revelation about the NSA’s snooping inspired an extra dose of shock and disbelief when he said the agency’s hackers can use a mobile phone as a bug even after it’s been turned off. The whistleblower made that eye-opening claim when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, holding his iPhone aloft during last Wednesday’s interview, asked, “What can the NSA do with this device if they want to get into my life? Can anyone turn it on remotely if it’s off? Can they turn on apps?
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit an Idaho woman filed against President Barack Obama and other federal officials over the National Security Agency’s collection of cellphone information.
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A federal judge in Idaho urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule against the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of telephone records while saying his own hands are tied by legal precedent.
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However, Rogers insisted the agency was not collecting such images of U.S. citizens, unless they were linked with an investigation of a foreign subject, and then only after taking the appropriate legal steps.
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The Snowden revelations hit like a bomb, sending out shrapnel which risked severing US ties with friendly and not-so-friendly states alike. Here are the top eight bilateral debacles sparked by NSA spying, whose fallout could be felt for years to come.
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Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range has decided to launch a criminal investigation into alleged hacking of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA), a German daily reported Tuesday.
The mass spying on German citizens by the NSA, however, will at least provisionally not be placed under formal investigations, Xinhua reported citing German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
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Foreign technology services providers such as Google and Apple can become cybersecurity threats to Chinese users, security analysts said, one week after China announced that it will put in place a security review on imported technology equipment.
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A Bahamas foreign service team will travel to Paraguay this week to address the Organization of American States (OAS) on the controversial allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States is recording and storing audio from every cell phone conversation in The Bahamas.
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A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
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Over the past year, as the Snowden revelations have rolled out, the government and its apologists have developed a set of talking points about mass spying that the public has now heard over and over again. From the President, to Hilary Clinton to Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others, the arguments are often eerily similar.
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Australia “pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Most Australians want their government to spy on other countries, including allies like the United States and New Zealand, the 2014 Lowy Institute poll has found.
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In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.
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On June 4, 2014, one day before the anniversary of the Snowden revelations, Poland celebrates 25 years since the fall of an authoritarian regime. On this occasion, President Obama is visiting Poland and meeting with many heads of states—including officials who were affected by the mass surveillance scandal carried out by the NSA. The United States and Poland have a long tradition of official visits between their leaders. These visits symbolize a close, allied relationship between the two countries and “help advance many political and economic issues.” Since October 2013, the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish NGO, has tried to understand the relationship between the Polish and United States’ secret service organizations. Panoptykon believes that the Polish government, by accepting mass and pre-emptive surveillance, is reverting back to the much contested practices of the former, authoritarian regime—practices that triggered the revolution 25 years ago. Thus, the NGO has organized a user-generated campaign for June 4, urging people to welcome President Obama to Poland by vocalizing their thoughts on mass surveillance.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has accredited Lockheed Martin for its Cyber Incident Response Assistance program to help users of national security systems respond to cyber attacks.
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Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called the USA Freedom Act. The bill was intended by its authors to end the National Security Agency’s broad and privacy-shredding bulk data collection program, but the final version that passed is so weak that bulk data collection will still be permitted.
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A year ago tonight, the world confirmed what most people already suspected. Privacy is dead and the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984 is alive. An obscure technician, Edward Snowden, began releasing documents stolen during his work on behalf of America’s most shadowy intelligence group. He proved the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people.
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Almost a year after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency, some people are still wondering how he had access to so many classified intelligence documents.
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Posted at 7am on Tuesday on the website Change.org by French daily L’Express, the petition had garnered over 33,000 signatures and counting by 5:30pm.
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Back in December of 2012, we wrote about (and agreed with) Julian Sanchez’s suggestion that Google should do end-to-end encryption of emails, even if it (only slightly) mucked with its advertising business model. The impact on overall security would be great (and this was before the Snowden revelations had even come out). As Sanchez pointed out, not only would this (finally) drive more widespread adoption for email encryption, it would create enormous goodwill among privacy advocates. About six weeks ago, we mentioned this again, when it was rumored that Google was trying to make encrypted email easier, though it was said that it wouldn’t go “site-wide” on end-to-end encryption.
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In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, ” No Place to Hide.”
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Apparently, the UK government worked very hard to get the Guardian and others not to publish certain details about how GCHQ (and NSA) tap certain underwater cables that connect the internet around the globe, as it turns out that they get lots of help from BT and Vodafone Cable (via its purchase of Cable & Wireless). Those two companies apparently get paid handsomely for helping the government tap into these undersea cables.
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Greenwald responded with a column that included a statement from Snowden saying he had not worked with Campbell and speculating the documents were actually by the British government as part of an attempt to make the case his leaks were “harmful.”
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Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme – including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East – have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.
The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.
British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.
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Last month, ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy.
Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.
In a letter sent Thursday to the bankruptcy judge in the case, Jessica L. Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice.
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We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. In response, the DOJ apologized, insisting that it didn’t think the data was relevant — but also very strongly hinting that it used that opportunity to destroy a ton of evidence. However, this appeared to be just the latest in a long history of the NSA/DOJ willfully destroying evidence that was under a preservation order.
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Civil Rights
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Hundreds of Amazon chiefs clashed with police in Brazil last week as the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 12, draws closer.
According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s copy1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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The government may not mean to kill people with mental disabilities but it’s deeds, not motives, that matter, and when the coalition subtracted political cost from economic gain, it found those with disabilities were the easiest people in Britain to dispose of.
Mental health is the NHS’s Cinderella service, even in good times. In recession, it’s hammered. Simon Stevens, the new chief executive as NHS England, has given us his priorities. He gabbles that he wants to “future proof” the NHS “against challenges ahead”.
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Weinstock, who reportedly felt pressure from the judge to convince his client into waiving his right to a speedy trial, snapped back in defense. Then Murphy challenged Weinstock to a fist fight outside.
“You know, if I had a rock, I would throw it at you right now,” Murphy says in the video above. “Stop pissing me off … If you want to fight, let’s go out back and I’ll just beat your ass.”
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He blew the whistle on CIA waterboarding, but the government keeps trying to sweep the issue, and him, out of sight. From prison, John Kiriakou says it’s time for a special prosecutor.
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Maybe if schools stop handing misbehaving students over to police officers, aggrieved parents won’t be nearly as aggrieved… or so likely to sue. Schools are publicly funded already, but that’s no reason to keep dipping into homeowners’ wallets to pay out settlements for schools’ bad decisions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Rep. Bob Latta achieved an impressive feat last week in introducing some legislation, which he claims is to make sure the internet remains “open and free.” While we’re big supporters of an “open and free” internet, what’s most amazing here is that almost everything that Latta claims about the bill is not true — including the whole “open and free” bits.
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If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the whole net neutrality fight, you’d know that the key issue is whether or not broadband services should be reclassified under Title II of the Telecom Act. In the early to mid-2000s, the FCC declared both cable and DSL broadband to be information services under Title I, rather than telecommunications services under Title II. This basically means they are not subject to common carrier rules, including non-discriminatory rules that are the key issue around net neutrality. And, of course, the telcos are putting up a big fight over this, listing out a supposed parade of horribles that would happen if they were reclassified under Title II.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Possibly one of the last bits of cultural detritus from the extremely bizarre Flappy Bird story makes its way to us via chiptune artist Ben Landis, who spotted a rather audacious claim from an entity calling itself “Samuel David Entertainment.”
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Over the past few days, an IP battle has erupted at print-on-demand service Zazzle over a 3,000-year-old Greek letter. New York artist Paul Ingrisano was granted a trademark for the following symbol, apparently in reference to his initials.
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This may be the biggest legal controversy to engulf the mathematical constant pi since that time in 1897 when the Indiana legislature tried to declare it equal to 3.2: A Brooklyn artist is claiming a broad trademark in T-shirts, jackets, caps, and other apparel featuring the Greek letter, resulting in the mass, temporary removal of thousands of products from the custom t-shirt printing site Zazzle.
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Copyrights
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A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), urging the Senate to push back on an amendment to the House’s recently-passed defense funding bill that would keep the Obama administration from going forward with its plans to shift Internet oversight.
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We’ve written a few times about Spanish company Ares Rights, which presents itself as an “anti-piracy” firm, but rather than searching the internet for unauthorized movies and music, has a long history of working for Latin American governments, using questionable copyright claims to censor the internet and take down content those governments don’t like. The latest example may be the most extreme, as Ares Rights used a DMCA claim in the US to block the website of Ecuadorian newspaper La Republica for a period of four hours last week.
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As the discussion over the EU’s decision to force Google to uphold a “right to be forgotten” continues, various industry heads have begun to weigh in on the subject, pointing to this as evidence that Google could do more to combat piracy.
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Send this to a friend
06.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Want a brand new desktop, media centre, gaming machine or server? Build it yourself! You’ll save money and have complete control over what components go into the PC. We show you what you need to consider, and what software, distros and tools you need to build your very own Linux PC.
We show you how to install Linux on a Chromebook.
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Server
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Linux server demand is rising due to demand from cloud infrastructure deployments, according to IDC, and is expected to continue to grow in the future. In the first quarter of 2014, Linux server revenue accounted for 30 percent of overall server revenue, an increase of 15.4 percent, IDC said.[1] IBM has supported development of Linux on System z for more than a decade, and today there are over 3,000 certified applications for Linux on System z. In addition, IBM is supporting the development of skills to take advantage of these applications through the IBM Academic Initiative.
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Kernel Space
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It’s always a great show of solidarity when two organizations with similar values figure out a way to support each other, and that’s exactly what the Linux Foundation and Code.org are doing.
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Olof Johansson sent in a bulk of the new ARM work on Monday that’s targeting Linux 3.16. Among the highlights of this Linux ARM work include:
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The eighth release candidate for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been released. The official release of Linux 3.15 should happen next week, but meanwhile Linus has decided to open the merge window for Linux 3.16 one week early.
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The first pull request for the Xen virtualization updates for the Linux 3.16 kernel have now been submitted.
David Vrabel sent in the early Xen features and fixes this morning for the Linux 3.16 merge window. Most prominently to Xen in Linux 3.16 are ARM architecture improvements. In particular, there’s now ARM suspend/resume support and ARM multi-call support.
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Merged for the Linux 3.13 kernel was the multi-queue block layer allows for better SSD performance with reduced latency and by balancing I/O workload across multiple CPU cores and supporting multiple hardware queues. With the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel, the “blk-mq” code is expected to be feature complete and deliver great performance.
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Graphics Stack
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After sharing the views of another developer this weekend about OpenGL being broken compared to Mantle and Direct3D, another game developer has come forward with his own “rant” that also says OpenGL has problems but it also has potential.
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Support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 and the Present Extension are finally supported by the mainline Intel X.Org graphics driver.
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Similar to functionality offered by other drivers, Mesa might finally have a shader compiler cache to save compiled GLSL shaders to the disk in an effort to reduce the start-up time for modern Linux games.
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Benchmarks
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Before moving to the raw number, lets first clarify the terminology.
A lossless compression algorithms is a mathematical algorithms that define how to reduce (compress) a specific dataset in a smaller one, without losing information. In other word, it involves encoding information using fewer bit that the original version, with no information loss. To be useful, a compression algorithms must be reversible – it should enable us to re-expand the compressed dataset, obtaining an exact copy of the original source. It’s easy to see how the fundamental capabilities (compression and ratio and speed) are rooted in the algorithm itself, and different algorithms can strongly differ in results and applicable scopes.
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To complement the recent ACPI CPUfreq vs. Intel P-State Scaling With Linux 3.15 testing that was done using an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system, here’s some similar tests done using a low-power Intel Celeron N2820 “Bay Trail” SoC within the Intel NUC.
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While yesterday’s Linux testing at Phoronix revealed Intel Bay Trail graphics are slower than Windows when running in comparison the updated open-source Intel Linux graphics stack, at least the Bay Trail performance for Intel’s N2820 NUC has improved in the past few months under Linux.
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Applications
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Maybe you already heard of the cwrap project. A set of tools to create a fully isolated network environment to test client/server components on a single host. socket_wrapper is a part of cwrap and I released version 1.1.0 today. In this release I worked together with Michael Adam and we implemented some nice new features like support for IP_PKTINFO for binding on UDP sockets, bindresvport() and more socket options via getsockopt(). This was mostly needed to be able to create a test environment for MIT Kerberos.
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Nuvola Player, a web interface for cloud music services that runs in its own window and provides integration with a Linux desktop, has advanced to version 2.4.0.
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ASCII art is a graphic design technique that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures put together from characters defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. These characters are letters, numbers and special characters such as # / and \. ASCII art is as much a constituent element of the Internet as emoticons, cats, or acronyms such as ROTFL.
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Proprietary
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If it hasn’t happened already, there will come a time when you’ll wish your computer was running a different operating system. Whether you’re a competent software developer or simply a user desiring an application exclusive to an OS other than your own, there are plenty of valid reasons for why you’d want to use another OS. Despite what you might think, however, you don’t necessarily have to adhere to your supposed monetary and spatial restraints given the amount of available virtual machines.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Nuclear Throne the excellent 2D procedural death labyrinth that becomes quite the bullet hell has been updated with alpha #29 with more weapons!
I don’t say “bullet hell” lightly either as it gets increasingly frantic as you reach higher level enemies and I’ve not made it very far at all due to the game being so unforgiving at times.
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Steam Skin Manager is a tool developed by +Martin Kozub for changing the Steam for Linux appearance. The app comes with 4 skins by default: Ambiance, Radiance, Light and Blue and it also lets you easily add more themes.
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The latest monthly update to the popular Unvanquished open-source game is now available.
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Crytek has just announced Homefront: The Revolution as a new first-person shooter game that will feature native Linux support with the CryENGINE and launch on the same-day as for other platforms.
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After Homefront developer Kaos Studios was shut down the property was passed on to Crytek, who quickly got to work on a sequel and acquired the franchise rights after THQ filed for bankruptcy. Crytek and Deep Silver have now announced that Homefront: The Revolution is coming in 2015, and have revealed the first cinematic trailer. The game is exclusively new-gen, and is set for release on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?
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We are pleased to announce Plasma Media Center 1.3 beta release!
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The previous week i was working on the Activity Switcher (it is the sliding button on right of your screen), which is written in QML2. The activity Switcher is reusing the activities component for managing the activities. So the only real difference between the Activity Switcher and the desktop Activity Manager, is its layout which has been created with QML2.
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The most famous and loved will always be the balad of the Active lands of Plasma where the society became so enlightened they managed to expel the Royal Society for Putting Things on top of other things.
What the future (KF5) brings?
Ok, stopping with the story now.
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Almost two weeks have passed since we returned from the sprint, but we are now only beginning to sort out and formalize all the data and notes we did during the meeting. The point is, this time (as well as during the last sprint in 2011) we had three painters with us who gave us immeasurable amount of input about how they use Krita and what can be improved. This is the case when criticizing and complaining was exactly what we needed 
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Apple has just announced OS X Yosemite, the new and improved Mac OS, but it turns out that at least one of the design decisions from the new operating system is not “original.”
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A candidate vying to become one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation has raised the issue of Red Hat’s “domination” of development of the GNOME Desktop Project, claiming that “for the last several years, Red Hat’s wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME.”
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New Releases
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Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. I am pleased to announce the release of Finnix 110, which includes Linux kernel 3.13, updated Debian upstream software, bug fixes and feature enhancements.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Summary: The companies expect the effort to enable customers to take their existing SAP license to the cloud and add Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA to their service mix on the SAP Marketplace.
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Here’s a list of activities and bugs fixed the KDE team has been working on the past month.
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Fedora
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SnowBird Linux 20.1 has been dubbed Misha and is based on Fedora 20. This distribution is considered to be a respin of Fedora, which means that it shares most of the features, but there are also a few major differences.
“Run any of the Windows Flavours (XP, Vista, 7 or 8) and want to give SnowBird a try but don’t know where to start? Run SnowBird Linux directly from the disc. Download the latest version and burn it to a dvd using your favourite burning tool. In case you need a free disc burner, download CDBurnerXP. Keep the disc in the drive and restart your computer to boot from SnowBird Linux without modifying your computer,” reads the website.
The distribution uses the same GNOME 3 desktop environment like Fedora, but the developers have also integrated a number of GNOME extensions that should make users’ lives much easier. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is pretty far from anything done in Windows operating systems, so the potential Windows users will have to be pretty open to new things…
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Debian Family
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Overclockix, like KNOPPIX STD (remember that one?), is one of those rare use specialist distributions that will always prevent it from widespread adoption, but that’s not the point. It was discontinued in 2005 and has recently been revived by several enthusiasts on the Overclockers forum. Read the full announcement here. Back then it was built around the KDE 3 desktop, but the new development team have held a poll where Gnome Shell came out top as preferred environment.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Linux-based Ubuntu OS is finding its way into tablets with Dell’s latest Inspiron hybrids, which can function as tablets and laptops.
The PC maker is offering Ubuntu as an OS option alongside Windows 8 on its new hybrids, the Inspiron 11 3000, which has an 11.6-inch screen, and Inspiron 13 7000, which has a 13-inch screen.
The hybrids turn from laptops into tablets when the screen is rotated 360 degrees, much like Lenovo’s Yoga, which pioneered the design. Dell announced the 19.4-millimeter thick hybrids at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Monday.
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The Ubuntu Software Center has been around for quite some time and it changed a lot since its launch. The project hasn’t been improved in a while and it looks like things are stagnating a little. This is where the App Grid comes into play, an application that is fully capable of replacing Ubuntu Software Center right now.
There is no doubt that some of Ubuntu’s success as an operating system can be attributed to the Software Center.
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Although most people think of Windows-based PCs when they think of Dell Computer, Dell has actually been more friendly to Linux over the years than any of the other major hardware makers. The company has delivered computers running Ubuntu in both India and China, and the company’s “Project Sputnik” effort involved customizing a Linux-based laptop for developers. Now, Ubuntu has found its way onto tablets from Dell, under the Inspiron hybrid product line.
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The Linux ecosystem is full of Ubuntu-based distributions, but building such a Linux OS is not as hard as you might think, especially if you have the proper tools – in this case Ubuntu Mini Remix. Users don’t need to be programmers (although it’s useful) in order to build a custom Ubuntu OS.
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OpenStack has been in the news a lot… well, we have just had the OpenStack summit in Atlanta after all.
Many say that the “problem” with OpenStack is that it is still regarded as a “moving target” and work in progress, augmenting and updating as it does twice a year.
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Flavours and Variants
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1. Mint (3546 average number of hits per day) / 2. Ubuntu (2028) / 3. Debian (1851) / 4. Mageia (1401) / 5. Fedora (1353) / Source: DistroWatch
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Minimalist distros are an important option for many Linux users. Not everyone wants tons of desktop glitz and zillions of bells and whistles. Lubuntu has always been a terrific option for minimalists who prefer to stay within the Ubuntu family. Now Lubuntu 14.04 LTS is available and it follows in the footsteps of previous releases by providing a high-quality desktop distro that is light-weight and fast.
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Linux Mint has long been one of the most popular desktop distributions, so it’s always a big deal when a version is released. This time around it’s Linux Mint 17. This review covers the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 17, but much of it also applies to the MATE version with the exception of changes to the MATE 1.8 desktop.
As to which desktop environment you should use, I think it just gets down to your own personal preference. MATE is a more traditional desktop while Cinnamon has a more modern feel to it. If you aren’t sure which one you might like better, my advice is to try both of them and then make your decision.
Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release. It will receive security updates until 2019. The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016, so upgrading should be a piece of cake once you start using Linux Mint 17.
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Ah Linux, we meet again. I am on a perpetual journey to find the perfect Linux distro. Sadly, I am finding it not to be elusive, but downright non-existent. You see, operating systems based on the open-source kernel are very fragmented in experience. It is hard for the stars to align and have everything you want be represented. Maybe you like the available environments for a distro, but hate the package manager. Or maybe you love the community support, but find the release schedule too slow.
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Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is now available for download and it looks like this flavor is gaining more popularity with the community. Let’s take a closer look at this MATE-powered version and see some of its features in this screenshot tour.
Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is in the first tier of flavors that usually ships and it’s one of the most used versions from the entire Mint family. It all has to do with the MATE desktop environment, which is much appreciated by the fans of the former GNOME 2.
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The good news is that Mint 17 isn’t just another update to an increasingly popular Linux distro – some would claim the most popular distro.
The really good news is that Mint 17 is a great release on which Mint can build a solid base. Of course it remains to be seen whether Mint can get the software updates and backports that users might want and need while remaining with the LTS base. In the mean time though, Mint 17 is off to a great start.
You’ll get Mint 17 in two different flavours, both of which feature the project’s homegrown desktop environments – MATE and Cinnamon.
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When most people think of Ubuntu derivatives, they usually categorize them into an “Ubuntu with a different desktop environment than Unity” category. However, according to Ubuntu, they refer to Ubuntu-based distros with different desktop environments as a derivative as well as distros using their own tools/apps/goals as customizations.
In this article, I’ll be exploring the upside and downside to Ubuntu-based customized distros.
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The OpenPandora is a handheld, Linux-based game system with the guts of a low-power PC and the ability to emulate classic video game consoles. It’s based on open source software… and now the hardware designs are also open source.
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The autonomous Raspberry Pi-powered robot yacht built by British students that competes worldwide
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Anyone looking for an extraordinarily small Linux mini PC might be interested in the new AsiaRF Linux mini PC which has this week launched over on the Indiegogo crowd funding website looking to raise $6,000 to make the jump from concept into production.
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Aaeon announced a compact, wireless IoT gateway that runs Linux on an Intel Quark X1000 Series SoC, and works in conjunction with an Asus Cloud Service.
The Aaeon “AIOT-X1000″ IoT gateway supports the Gateway Solutions for IoT architecture (aka “Moon Island”) unveiled by Intel in April. Aaeon’s product joins other “Moon Island capable” gateway systems previously announced by ADI, Adlink, Advantech, Eurotech, and Portwell, not to mention Intel’s own Gateway Solutions for IoT reference design. Although Intel’s reference design supports a choice of either Atom or Quark processors, Aaeon’s device, introduced this week at Computex in Taipei, casts its lot squarely with Quark.
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Company executives announce the new center at Computex, and say it will be established in Taiwan.
ARM is ramping up its efforts in the increasingly competitive markets of the Internet of things and wearable devices with the creation of a new chip design center in Taiwan.
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LG is today congratulating itself on selling one million of its webOS smart TVs. After announcing the new Smart+ TVs at CES in January, the Korean manufacturer released a range of models in March, and took just under four months to hit today’s milestone. It’s now predicting it will sell 10 million by “the first half of 2015.”
“Rather than continuing to add more and more functions into our smart TVs that few people will ever use,” says LG’s head of TV In-kyu Lee, “we’ve decided to focus on simplicity … consumers seem to share our view that this is the right direction for the evolution of smart TVs going forward.” The new models are still in the process of being rolled out globally, and LG says webOS TVs will be in over 150 markets by the end of June. It’s also planning to bring more “LG Smart+ TV Experience Zones” to retail outlets in order to better promote the range.
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Phones
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The Nokia N900 smartphone launched in 2009 and for a time was quite popular with Linux enthusiasts, now has a modem driver within the mainline Linux kernel.
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Ballnux
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With Computex Taipei happening this week and the Tizen Developer Conference starting tomorrow in San Francisco, Samsung has finally announced their first Tizen smartphone. The Samsung Z is this forthcoming Tizen phone.
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After years of rumoured launch dates, Samsung has unveiled its first smartphone powered by the “open source” Tizen operating system, the Z
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Android
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Officials in China have pushed for domestic operating systems on both PC and mobile for some time now, but they’ve never been able to unseat the foreign standard bearers on either platform.
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It looks like major computer makers are finally warming up to operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, and they are also experimenting with open source operating systems. Not onlly is Dell out with new tablet hybrid devices that run Ubuntu, but Hewlett-Packard has announced a new Android-only laptop. The 14-inch, Tegra-driven Android system is called the HP SlateBook 14, and will be available on August 6 for $399.
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While Samsung is trying to create an early-bird monopoly in the smartwatch market, Apple and Google are busy working on a smartwatch of their own. Though both the smartphone giants haven’t announced anything yet, it’s only natural to assume that they’re not going to overlook such a huge market. Samsung, with their Galaxy Gear smart watches was the first big company to make a foray into wearables. Serving as a mere companion to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, these smart watches haven’t been met with glowing reviews. Many find the Gear smartwatch clunky, lacking features, and overall, an unbaked product. Though Samsung made the first Gear watch based on Android, it has quickly realized its mistake and switched to Tizen instead. Thus, we don’t have any major Android-based smartwatch available yet. Given that the smartwatch competition has just commenced, we, as tech fans, have some seriously high expectations from Google. If Android were to make its face shown on a watch, it better be good. That’s why we’ve listed some of the things we want from an ideal Android smartwatch.
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Dell also is adding a new entry-level all-in-one (AIO) system, the Inspiron 20 3000 Series, which offers a 19.5-inch high-definition display and is powered by quad-core Pentium chips. In addition, Dell rolled out new Venue 7 and 8 tablets that run Google’s Android mobile operating system.
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Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed.
Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday.
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The FreeXperia team of contributors help maintain CyanogenMod support for Xperia devices, and they’ve done such a great job that Sony has decided to hire one of the group’s developers. Alin Jerpelea was one of FreeXperia’s founders in 2010, and he is now the newest member of Sony’s Developer Program. Having already built up a reputation for his work bringing the freshest CyanogenMod ROMs to Sony devices, he will now help the company with its open source initiatives.
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What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.
angular-rt-popup (New, github)
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Skymind is providing commercial support and services for an open source project called deeplearning.4j. It’s a collection of of approaches to deep learning that mimic those developed by leading researchers, but tuned for enterprise adoption.
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Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni solved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.
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Telecom service providers may acknowledge the value of open source technology, particularly as they adopt virtualization, but they are not entirely ready to embrace it warmly, a panel discussion here revealed.
Five large service providers — AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), and Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI) — were represented on a single panel as part of a pre-conference NFV workshop, and while they agreed on a lot, open source technology didn’t get a consensus vote.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Do you trust the National Security Agency or the Internal Revenue Service more than Google or Facebook? If so, you’re not alone. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that most Americans do not trust big tech companies.
Mozilla’s Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, says “data hygiene” should be something every new or established tech company should be thinking about. Dixon-Thayer sat down with Reason TV at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas this year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now in the development phase for its next major release code-named Juno, set to debut in October. Among the major new features in development is a technology known as “Ironic,” which provides bare metal server provisioning capabilities.
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Another Big Data analytics company has entered the open source realm. Guavus has become an official sponsor of the AMPLab, a research initiative hosted at the University of California at Berkeley to drive open source Big Data innovation.
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In historical terms, NASA worked with Rackspace to develop OpenStack back in 2010.
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ownCloud announced in their blog that Claudine Bianchi has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The move aims to secure a stronger position in File Sync and Share for the most popular open source software in this category.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the first Release Candidate for 4.2.5 branch and it comes with numerous changes and improvements.
According to the changelog, the text rotation has been fixed, the upper margin of multi-page floating table has been fixed, the set-all language menu has been added, output file extension is now adjusted when exporting, accepting and rejecting changes in a selection is now allowed, the strange brightness and contrast adjustment from Microsoft Office has been corrected, and the mapping between ATK and UNO roles has been improved.
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CMS
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Who has time to handle post-CMS deployment needs when there’s so much to do developing the platform? That’s the thinking of the creators of Tendenci, an open source content management system (CMS) project for associations and other nonprofits (NPOs).
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Funding
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Trifacta, which specializes in data transformation to help companies prepare data for analysis and interpretation, has secured $25 million in series C funding.
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BSD
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Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there’s support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple’s MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This month, we welcome: Mohammed Isam Mohammed, author and maintainer of the new package GnuDOS. Edscott Wilson, author and maintainer of the new GNU package libdb. Vaibhaw Pandey, new maintainer of GNU groff. Sebastien Diaz, new maintainer of gnukart, along with his work on many other GNU packages. * Amadeusz Slawinski, new co-maintainer of GNU screen. Thanks to all.
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Public Services/Government
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Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.
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The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We’ve looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He’s got a knack for communication: concise with impact.
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IT strategists working for the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch municipality of Ede will participate in a conference organised by South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National IT Promotion Agency, to be held on 3 June in the capital Seoul.
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The press has taken a near-sighted view of the crisis, spinning in ways that only create a partial picture.
The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)
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Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, highlighted at the conference that an open and transparent government is not enough if it lacks civic participation. “In my view, openness and transparency should stimulate their sense of ownership in open government.”
Dr Alanna Simpson, Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank-Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, told me that the Indonesian Government is a leader in making open data and open source available.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.
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The highly publicized journey of HealthCare.gov has major implications for the relationship between open source standards and government technology.
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Programming
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But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash makes manipulating the game’s source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.
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Family members said one of the other victims was the wife of a New Jersey borough commissioner. James P Leeds Sr told the Associated Press that his 74-year-old wife, Anne, died Saturday night in the Massachusetts crash. Leeds said he got a text from his wife from the plane at 9.36 p.m, four minutes before the crash.
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The island’s appeal is simple: couples of mixed religion can have a civil ceremony that, though not allowed back home, will still be recognised in law
[...]
In 1980, 61 Lebanese brides and 78 Lebanese grooms were married there, as well as 98 Israeli grooms and 99 Israeli brides. In 2013, there were 2,131 Israeli weddings, 581 Lebanese ones, and 35 Syrian unions. Some municipalities, such as tourist-friendly Livadia, report even more startling figures; last year, of the 1,000 or so weddings it recorded, 350 were Lebanese, 425 were Israeli, and 20 were Syrian.
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Science
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Soviet cosmonaut and first spacewalker in the world, Aleksei Leonov, celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday. In March 1965 he was outside his spaceship for 12 minutes, connected to the craft by a 5.35 meter tether. Later, Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leonov is also an accomplished artist, whose works are displayed in many art galleries in Russia and abroad, and an author of several popular books about space. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have congratulated the legendary cosmonaut, who was twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title, on his anniversary and wished him good health, happiness and success. “Your professional biography, rich in significant and truly historical events, and all your life is a worthy example of unblinking devotion to the cause and of enormous personal courage,” Putin said in a telegramme, published on the Kremlin website on Friday.
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“It’s interesting that 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, the early Earth experienced a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment where there were a lot of impacts, including large impacts, and this period also overlaps with the evidence of the earliest life on Earth,” said Haley Sapers, an astrobiologist at the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program at McGill University in Montreal. “One might ask why life arose during such an inhospitable part of Earth’s history. Maybe impact cratering had a role in the origin of life.”
Impacts on a water-rich planet like Earth or even Mars can generate hydrothermal activity — that is, underwater areas boiling with heat. Seafloor hot springs known as hydrothermal vents more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface can be home to thriving ecosystems on Earth, including giant tube worms 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The impact that created the Ries crater may have generated hydrothermal activity lasting as long as 10,000 years, given microbes time enough to colonize the area.
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Health/Nutrition
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An unholy alliance of pro and anti- GMO countries have struck a deal that will sweep away the obstacles to genetically engineered crops in the EU. By allowing – under limited circumstance – individual member states to prohibit the growing of GMO crops on their territory, the European Commission expects to boost GMO cropping in the EU overall.
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Belinda worked as a model, lived in a nightclub and often went to noisy parties. There was loud music wherever she went. Then she went to art school, where she listened to music through headphones while she painted. Now, with a quieter job in finance, she lives with the legacy of irreversible damage to her inner ear.
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Security
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Both prosecution and defense lawyers have begun to present their closing arguments as the trial against several News Corp. employees for compromising the privacy of crime victims, royalty, celebrities, and politicians.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It’s not surprising then, that, picking up on one of the latest technology trends, the United Arab Emirates’ Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum would launch a “Drones for Good” competition, offering $1 million for the best positive drone design. The UAE will be taking international entries for drone ideas in categories like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, economic development until August.
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The American government has killed four Americans with drone strikes since 2009, all of which were completely detached from any notion of due process. At best, the DOJ builds a case against the foreign-located citizen and, if the target resides in a nation where the US can get away with utilizing weaponized drones, the American citizen is sentenced to death via push-button operator.
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A four-year-old girl whose face was blown off during a US drone strike in Afghanistan was kidnapped by American troops and hidden by an international organization, her family says.
The child, named Aisha Rashid, was travelling with her parents, a sibling and several other relatives from Kabul to their home in the village of Gamber in Kunar province on a hot September day, when the drone exploded, Expressen.se reported. An uncle, Meya Jan, is at home on his farm in that village when he receives a phone call about the strike from the neighboring village. He and others rush to the strike.
Suddenly they hear a voice. “Water, water…”
It is Aisha. She is missing a hand, her leg is bleeding, and there is nothing left of her eyes or nose.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting of the Drone.” We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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A few days ago, Phil reported on Yousef Munayyer’s take on the nauseating Wolf Blitzer interview with “CNN analyst” (and former Israeli Ambassador to the US) Michael Oren on the recent IDF sniping murders of two Palestinian teenage boys.
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Every time the working class and poor of Latin America try to take a step forward and write their own history they confront the power of U.S. imperialism. It uses whatever is in fashion at the time — coups, blockades, manufactured protest movements, referendums or trade sanctions — to turn back the clock.
When longstanding polarization in Venezuela erupted into street protests in February and March, the United States, true to form, played its usual role in the unrest. Using money, tough talk and lobbying among Latin American countries, the U.S. tried to shore up opposition to the elected government of Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor.
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Not wavering from his foreign policy mission of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to restore an Islamic Caliphate under their control, Mr. Obama has ordered the training and arming of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Assad. Current reports indicate that the forces loyal to Assad are gaining ground against the Muslim Brotherhood–supported rebels.
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The release of U.S. government contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban prison depends solely on the “political will” of President Barack Obama, a Havana spy who spent more than 15 years behind bars in the United States said on Monday.
To support that assertion, Fernando Gonzalez cited Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban members being held at Guantanamo for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American POW in Afghanistan.
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Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China’s spreading Communism in the early 1950’s, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy’s spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.
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Last weekend, a White House press report distributed to 6,000 journalists, included the name of the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, alongside said title.
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A night-time car chase in Cleveland that ended on a schoolyard where more than 100 shots were fired at the suspect’s vehicle appeared to be over when an officer opened fire again, a prosecutor said in announcing charges against the patrolman and five police supervisors.
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President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials.
On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans.
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Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes that captured weaponry appears to be the most important fuel of the armed rebellion, followed by self-made arms and materiel, and then foreign-supplied items.
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The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation mandating sanctions against Venezuela as officials there presented evidence of US involvement in a plot to bring down the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
The bill, passed in a voice vote by the House with only 14 members in opposition, demands that the Obama administration draw up a list of Venezuelan officials allegedly responsible for repression during violent protests that have been organized across the South American country since last February. They would be sanctioned with the freezing of any assets in the US and the denial or revocation of visas.
Washington’s step closer toward another blatant imperialist intervention against Venezuela came on the same day that government officials in Caracas publicly presented what they described as evidence of US involvement in a plot by the far-right in Venezuela to overthrow the government and assassinate President Maduro.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.
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A group of people, including religious leaders in Berrien County, are taking to the road from Chicago to Battle Creek to protest what they see as a menace from the sky.
The participants will walk from Chicago to Battle Creek on June 3-14 to protest the use of armed drones in the “War on Terror,” that they say kill innocent civilians, create more enemies and undermine America’s standing in the world.
“The use of armed drones pose many legal, strategic, tactical, and ethical problems,” said the Rev. Dan Scheid of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Benton Harbor, who will walk and host discussions on the issue. “As a citizen of the United States and of the world, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is bad public policy. As a follower of Jesus, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is immoral, and my baptismal and ordination vows compel me to witness against them.”
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According to local officials in the eastern province of Kunar, the US-launched drone was on a targeted attack which killed and injured unknown people, some of them civilians.
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San Salvador – Sanchez Sanchez Ceren, 69, a former leader of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front(FMLN) was sworn in as the president of El Salvador. He had won the presidency in a close March runoff vote against his conservative opponent.
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Bay Area officials in Oakland are reviewing seven years of police disability retirements after learning last month that one of their former officers was collecting a disability pension even while he was working for the FBI.
Former Oakland police officer Aaron McFarlane received more than $52,000 in disability benefits each year while he was working as an FBI special agent in Boston.
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His parting shot was a call for a European FBI to tackle cross-border crime gangs and the call for UKIP to follow in the footsteps of Sinn Fein ex-MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who did not take up the seats they won in the Commons.
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In the words of Charles Krauthammer, a strong critic of Obama and supporter of the George W. Bush administration who has neoconservative tendencies: “And you didn’t hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism. It was the rhetorical equivalent of that classic national security joke in which the presidential aide, devoted to policy option X, submits the following decision memo…
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The difference between Bush and Obama is that the latter is much more selective in his interventions. Such a correction was what the American people wanted when they elected Obama in 2008 — and inevitable after the two unsuccessful wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson characterized the naysaying surrounding climate change as par for the course in footage aired on Monday from his interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes,
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Friends of the Earth claims chancellor handed out £2.7bn of incentives to North Sea oil and gas firms
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Even as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny at home, America’s dirty and unwanted coal is being embraced in one of the world’s cleanest energy markets: the European Union.
At the biggest power plant in the U.K., operated by Drax Group PLC, a small black mountain of a million tons of coal sits at the base of a dozen 374-foot cooling towers.
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A fierce debate has been raging between climatologists and Superfreakonomics authors Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, culminating in an impassioned New York Times blogpost yesterday by Dubner. From RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network
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Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.
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Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.”
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Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday.
After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered evidence of systematic abuse and a flawed monitoring system that contradicts the Brazilian government’s claims to be coping with the problem of deforestation in the Amazon.
In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace cited five case studies of the fraudulent techniques used by the log launderers, including over-reporting the number and size of rare trees, logging trees protected by law, and over-extraction. It notes how forest management officials are implicated in the wrongdoing and several have previously been fined or detained for similar crimes in the past.
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During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a “creeping national security crisis” that will require the armed forces to “respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food.”
The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.
A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a “threat multiplier,” but now – even worse – a “catalyst for conflict”, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades…
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Finance
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With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.
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As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.
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We are joined by Aviva Chomsky, whose new book, “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” details how systemic prejudice against Mexicans and many other migrant workers has been woven into U.S. immigration policies that deny them the same path to citizenship that have long been granted to European immigrants. She also draws parallels between the immigration laws now in place that criminalize migrants, and the caste system that has oppressed African Americans, as described by Prof. Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow.” Chomsky’s previous book on this topic is “They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths about Immigration.” She is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
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Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the city’s minimum wage to the highest level of any major US city – $15 (£9) per hour, twice the national minimum.
Wages would begin to rise next year, ultimately reaching $15 from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 over three to seven years, depending on the business.
A councillor who supported the push said the vote “sends a message heard around the world”.
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Well, this ought to cause a stir at this summer’s garden parties among Canada’s elites.
Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada Governor (now the Governor of the Bank of England) has come forward to condemn what he calls “unchecked market fundamentalism.”
He delivered the remarks last week at the Conference for Inclusive Capitalism, an annual gathering of global political and financial elites that featured keynotes by Carney along with Prince Charles and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
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Residential and commercial buildings are seen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Home prices in major Chinese cities registered their first monthly decline in 23 months in May.
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Amid the upheavals in Thailand, Ukraine and Egypt, wealthy elites have used popular movements and elections to ratify decisions in their favor.
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Except for one big difference. By early 2016, the era of record-low interest rates is over. Borrowing is getting steadily more expensive. And the result is starting to destabilise our entire economic model.
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A few weeks ago, an official from the Cabinet Office gushed on his blog about a jolly exciting trip, a kind of pilgrimage, to Amazon and Google in Seattle and San Francisco. Francis Maude, the unofficial government minister for paperclips and parsimony, led the expedition. It was mindblowing, the official reported afterwards.
They looked at the IT, were given a sneak preview of the cutting edge innovations. It seemed they had unlimited time to talk about all manner of things. But there was no indication that anyone raised the fact with these multinational behemoths, that on any right-thinking estimation, they owe us billions of pounds in tax. Amazon’s UK subsidiary paid £2.4m in corporate taxes in 2012, despite sales of £4.3bn. Google paid £11.6m in the same period despite sales of £506m.
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Senior football officials in Africa received over $5 million in bribes to make sure Qatar won the bid for the 2022 World Cup, the Sunday Times reports citing leaked documents.
According to the paper, the money came from former FIFA vice-president and infamous Qatari businessman, Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Bin Hammam reportedly used 10 slush funds controlled by his private company – as well as cash handouts – to make dozens of payments of up to $200,000 to the heads of the 30 African football associations.
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The front page of USA Today (5/23/14) blew the whistle on federal workers: They are tax deadbeats who owe billions in back taxes.
The story also revealed that they owe less than most people.
Confused?
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A new progressive tax code would end the assault on shared prosperity, create jobs, and help save the planet, says Nobel Joseph Stiglitz
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Serbia’s prime minister accused Europe’s chief security and rights watchdog of lying on Monday after it alleged his government tried to smother online criticism of its handling of devastating floods last month.
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Google has had one demand every seven seconds to suppress information about people’s pasts, it was revealed on Sunday.
The rush of censorship requests follows the internet giant’s move to provide forms allowing people to ask that certain information about them be hidden when their name is searched online.
The figures indicate that large amounts of material could disappear from public reach as a direct result of an EU court decision that search engines must enforce a “right to be forgotten”.
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Egypt’s internationally renowned satirist, Bassem Youssef, has announced the end of his popular television show, citing pressure from the authorities.
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I’ve avoided talking about this story until it progressed further. Historically Google has had many take-down requests, many to do with “piracy” and there’s also court order’s for ISP blocks on domains – we already have an increasing trend towards censorship. But is some censorship good? Whilst the copyright take-down’s and ISP blocks are mostly useless, with the recent ruling involving Google removing search results for you and me, requires further examination.
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Bold initiatives characterize India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who famously lives in a 27-story building in Mumbai, a city where most people languish in slums. Last month, his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., sought to prevent circulation of a new book which claims that Reliance successfully pressured the previous Indian government to double the price of natural gas. Amazon received a cease and desist notice, as did even an individual who had merely forwarded an e-mail invitation to the book’s launch. And Thursday, Ambani moved to buy a whole swath of the Indian media: Bloomberg News reports that Reliance, which has already invested $11 billion in a high-speed cellular network, will now spend $678 million for majority stakes in two major media companies, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. and TV18 Broadcast Ltd.
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Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools–a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities–are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.
The first step came in January 2011 with new regulations for online media that could be used to restrict coverage, including applying the kingdom’s already highly repressive press law to online media. Shortly after, the Ministry of Culture and Information began blocking local news websites that failed to register, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.
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Privacy
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But as documents released by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed last year, the hijacking of our civil liberties has continued, albeit surreptitiously and sleazily by functionaries at NSA. Snowden’s revelations showed the agency had been secretly harvesting millions of emails and instant-messaging contact lists of everyday Americans. Judges have challenged the practice’s constitutionality with one calling it “almost Orwellian.” – See more at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2014/jun/02/dont-let-us-freedoms-tumble-in-balancing/#sthash.V2lRraKK.dpuf
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On Sep. 1, 2013, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that in 2012 the NSA had spied on the email of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the latter case during his presidential campaign.
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Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, wanted by US authorities and currently living in Russia, said in a TV interview Sunday that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
“I would love to live in Brazil,” Snowden told Brazil’s Globo TV.
Snowden’s temporary asylum in Russia expires in August. Washington has revoked his US passport, so his travel options are limited.
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Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance and data collection by the government-corporate complex.
Halfway across the ornate sitting room, Julian Assange stands with his back to the door, drinking a bottle of beer. It is early on a summer evening, June 22, 2013, and the Embassy of Ecuador in London is hosting a small party to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of his arrival in need of asylum. While Assange stands chatting calmly about the future of his anti-secrecy enterprise, Wikileaks, few people in the room know that he is worried. Sarah Harrison, his principal researcher and confidant, is only hours away from slipping out of Hong Kong with Edward Snowden, who, at that moment, is fast becoming the most hunted man in the world.
Close friends and supporters of Assange mill around the room, helping themselves to the buffet and arguing about software and the state of the world – in that order. Assange himself, with his longish white hair and black jeans, looks slightly out of place in the scene, bordered as it is by stiff-legged, gilt-painted settees. After a year, however, he’s completely at home here, laughing and joking with the security guys, lawyers, and hacker guests, talking thoughtfully about the escalating struggle for control of electronic information.
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Facebook just announced a new feature to its app, which will let it listen to our conversations and surroundings through our own phones’ microphone. Talk about a Big Brother move.
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A new email service being developed by a group from MIT and European research center CERN promises to bring secure, encrypted email to the masses and keep sensitive information away from prying eyes.
“We guarantee only the sender and receiver can read the messages,” said Andy Yen, a co-founder of ProtonMail. “We have zero access to user data.”
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This will be the occasion for us to brief colleague ministers on the most recent developments here in The Bahamas with regard to the recent allegations of the recording of Bahamian mobile phone calls by the United States.
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Nearly one year on from the first revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is still business as usual. The NSA continues to scoop up all the data it wants, while the technology companies which have co-operated with it all along continue to try and convince the public that they are doing what they can to curtail such activity.
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Canada’s next privacy Commissioner is a federal Justice Department lawyer who counsels the government agencies that impact privacy in Canada the most—agencies such as the NSA’s Five Eyes cyber surveillance partner Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which operates an extensive, secretive metadata collection program that the country’s citizens know very little about.
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In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, NSA secret-leaker Edward Snowden set himself a low bar and claimed success: His leaks, he said, have gotten us talking about these important issues. Mission accomplished? Let’s think about that…
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Ben Wizner, attorney for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, got into it with Up host Steve Kornacki Sunday morning over whether Snowden had sacrificed his moral authority as a whistleblower by fleeing the United States (and eventually ending up in Russia) rather than accepting the legal consequences of leaking classified information. To this Wizner posed: “Do you think people who used the Underground Railroad should have stayed and faced the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act?”
“So you’re likening them?” Kornacki asked. “That’s quite a comparison.”
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The late 1960’s and early 1970’s was the heyday of legal privacy as we came to know it in the 20th century. From the Supreme Court first came the family planning cases that made contraception legal in 1965, and which continued up to abortion rights and most recently the decriminalization of sodomy law almost always used against same sex relationships. Next came a decision that required law enforcement to obtain a warrant for tapping a phone line for content and the subsequent Congressional action to instantiate that decision; those laws are the foundation for the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Consumer protection privacy laws were continuing apace with rules that required companies that kept “scores” on individual’s credit to allow the individual access and the right to correct the record in the event of misidentifications or mistake. Another flavor of this era is the law that produced one of our better known sectoral laws, FERPA, or the one that protects education records. Often overlooked is the plainly named Privacy Act of 1974.
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USA Freedom Act hides behind ‘fog of legalese’ to give NSA more spying power
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Want real surveillance reform? Well, we almost had it. The USA Freedom Act started off with a roar before being slightly weakened (compromised is the word being used) by the House Security and Judiciary Committees. Still, it had wide ranging support across the floor. It was a sufficient start to a bill set to curtail the surveillance programs in the United States considerably and the civil liberties community in Congress rallied behind it.
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Early this week, the FBI announced that five Chinese hackers had been indicted for spying on American companies. That’s right, economic espionage.
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Major websites such as Reddit, Imgur and DuckDuckGo are to take part in the June 5 “Reset The Net” anti-NSA spying online campaign.
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The Reset the Net campaign aims to encourage direct action, urging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools
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Edward SnowdenEdward Snowden. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
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Oliver Stone will write and direct a film about Edward Snowden, one of two high-profile films in the works about the National Security Agency leaker.
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Acclaimed director Oliver Stone, who has made iconic films like “Wall Street” and “Platoon,” will be directing a film based on the story of Edward Snowden that will be adapted from a book written by Luke Harding, a journalist at British newspaper, The Guardian.
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Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will be adapting the story of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the big screen.
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Former intelligence service provider Edward Snowden, currently residing in Russia and sought after by the US authorities, said in an interview that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
Agence France-Presse cited Snowden as stating in an interview given to Brazilian TV channel Globo that if Brazil gives him asylum, then he would gladly accept the offer and would very much like to live in Brazil. However, the foreign ministry of Brazil has said that it has not yet received any formal asylum appeal from Snowden.
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The Brazilian foreign ministry Monday denied that US intelligence contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has formally requested Brazil for asylum.
In an interview aired by local TV station Globo Sunday evening, Snowden, whose temporary asylum in Russia expires in August, said that he had requested asylum from Brazilian government, and he would be happy to live in Brazil if the government approves his request, Xinhua reported.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago last June, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is expected to announce on Tuesday a deal with DEF CON to hold the final round of DARPA’s two-year Cyber Grand Challenge at the organization’s 2016 Las Vegas conference.
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Every year, the government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. The vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view, even after the investigations are over. The secrecy surrounding these matters is the subject of a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal.
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In one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades, the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from James Risen of The New York Times. Risen is refusing to testify in the trial of an ex-CIA analyst accused of being his confidential source. He has vowed to continue his fight and face imprisonment rather than reveal his source’s identity. Tune in to Democracy Now! on Tuesday when we get reaction to the latest developments from Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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NBC News didn’t broadcast the full interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, but only aired a quarter of it Russia Today reported. Unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9/11 attacks,
The four-hour interview of Snowden by journalist Brian Williams was condensed into a 60-minute programme by NBC.
In one of the portions, Snowden questioned the US intelligence agencies’ inability to stop the 11 September, 2001 attacks in New York, despite having massive amount of surveillance.
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A Downtown attorney filed a federal lawsuit Monday against the president, the heads of the FBI and NSA, and others alleging the government is illegally monitoring his Internet communications, including email.
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Recently e-commerce giant Amazon unveiled a microphone-enabled barcode reader, the Amazon Dash, giving a helping hand to add items to your shopping list. The device was given away free of charge to a select number of Amazon’s Prime Fresh loyalty program users, who can now order their groceries either vocally or through a quick scan of a product’s container (for example a milk bottle). Just say it and get it delivered to your home. “Never forget an item again — Dash remembers so you don’t have to,” says AmazonFresh’s website.
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AFTER more than a week with no answers from Americans or “hard facts” over spying claims, Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell said he plans to raise concerns over allegations at a regional meeting this week.
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Sunde was also involved in numerous tech startups in recent years, including the short messaging service Heml.is (“secret” in Swedish) – reportedly a NSA-proof service – for which he raised more than $150,000 through a crowd-funding campaign.
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A civil liberties coalition wants to nullify the NSA, one lightbulb at a time.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has refused to confirm or deny if it has been eavesdropping on Barbadian cellphone calls.
Agency spokesperson Vanee Vines would say neither “yes” nor “no” to questions from the DAILY NATION on if it had been doing so.
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Mr. Green, why not try making art that calls into question, rather than exploits, our growing lack of privacy?
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For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place
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As that indicates, this is an extremely thoughtful and wide-ranging paper that draws together a number of big issues — surveillance, privacy, governance, geopolitics etc. It’s an important contribution to the debate initiated by the release of NSA and GCHQ documents by Edward Snowden, and anyone interested in what the longer-term implications of those revelations will be really ought to read it.
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On June 1, NBC’s Meet the Press unveiled new polling numbers about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They weren’t very revealing. What was more instructive was how the show presented its debate over Snowden’s actions.
The main participants in the discussion were right-wing Crossfire host Newt Gingrich and hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman.
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Civil Rights
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Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.
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Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.
“The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.
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Coming through passport control is an ordeal, I am followed on the street and hassled by security services. Not all citizens enjoy the same rights
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What is Firedoglake? How does it work? How does the site make money? Are there any other websites you could write for? What do you think you plan to do next?
Sometimes describing what I do at Firedoglake to family, friends and people I encounter after speaking at events is a bit perplexing to people. This is not a more prominent news media organization like New York Times, Rolling Stone or Huffington Post. But I have found not being more prominent uniquely positions Firedoglake to pursue specific projects.
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A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.
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The case had been closely watched as possibly setting an important precedent about the First Amendment, news reporters and confidential sources. Instead, Risen will now face a decision about officially naming his source for a book he wrote about Iran or refusing to answer questions under a Justice Department subpoena. (The source’s name has been widely reported as part of an official legal action.)
Last Thursday, the Justices met behind closed doors to consider accepting Risen’s case for the Court’s next term, which starts in October 2014.
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As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.
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As the World Cup nears, the Brazilian press has reported that the American company Academi, formerly Blackwater, carried out training of Brazilian military personnel and federal police in April.
The training is a facet of the military cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States signed in 2010 during the second term of the Lula de Silva administration in preparation for containing terrorist acts during this year’s World Cup. Academi is a private security company based in the United States, and has used mercenary soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Bill Gertz reported this week on a memo outlining Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens – a memo from 2010. Remember how the blogs and many of us out here were ringing the alarm bells on Obama’s stance that he could use the military and drones against American citizens? Remember how we were marginalized and called crazy for it? Turns out, ‘crazy’ is relative.
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The ICE undercover operation played out in the first decade of the 2000s (roughly 2004 until sometime in 2008) and involved the use of US government front companies to sell aircraft to suspected Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
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In an effort to increase job opportunities for Saudi Arabian citizens, the Saudi government is detaining and deporting thousands of undocumented foreign migrant workers. Part of the deportation process includes detaining large populations in what has been described as “appalling” conditions. These detention centers have had reports of guard brutality, overcrowding, lack of food, and poor hygiene. Furthermore, most of these migrant workers are Somali, and are deported back to one of the most unstable, dangerous areas in the world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So there’s every reason to believe that YouTube is, indeed, bullying the independents into accepting a deal that dramatically undervalues the investment indies make in new emerging artists. Unlike the lack of support songwriters had when PRS experienced the same tactic, the indies can surely count on songwriters to support them in standing up to the bully. But when will the competition commissions around the world do something about it? It’s not only artists that will be worse off if the indies give in – so will music fans all over the world.
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Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co-founder was arrested in Southern Sweden. TPB co-founder was wanted by Interpol and apprehended in a police raid. Peter did not serve prison time for his role in Pirate Bay operations. TorrentFreak noted that he was arrested exactly eight years after police conducted the raid.
Peter was wanted by Interpol for more than two years and he was arrested in a place near Malmö, Sweden. Interpol had been looking after his role in The Pirate Bay case.
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Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.
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06.01.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Kano computer system revolves around two core things: a Raspberry Pi and the Kano OS designed for it. More than just another Raspberry Pi kit, it proved itself with a successful Kickstarter, promising a system that would help get kids into real computing and allow them to start down a path of programming and coding.
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The Sphere icon pack is made by Achim Karsch and features over 24.000 icons for the operating system, covering pretty much all the known applications out there.
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The Australian national Linux conference of 2014, held in Perth in January, looks set to make a loss of nearly $40,000, according to the president of Linux Australia, Joshua Hesketh.
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Server
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Guill, a recent graduate of the masters in computer science and electrical engineering program at the University of Texas in Dallas, built the 40-node Raspberry Pi cluster for distributed software testing. In addition to a list of technical requirements, Guill wrote that he also wanted it to be “visually pleasing.”
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I’ve done a lot of support of government servers and they run for about forever, as in until they serve no further use. Even retired, old servers are often repurposed and put back into service due to budget restrictions and/or long lead times to order new equipment under the required procedures for government procurement. In the United States this is especially true at the state level. When a server is repurposed it is usually reloaded with the current enterprise standard Linux distrubution release and applications, not legacy releases. That’s one common use case.
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Kernel Space
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Intel Broadwell processors will be supported by the P-State driver with the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel release.
Rafael Wysocki sent out the initial ACPI/PM commit queue of the work he plans to send via pull request into the Linux 3.16 kernel when its merge window opens in June.
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We recently visited Linux creator Linus Torvalds at his home office where we talked about The Linux Foundation’s ‘Introduction to Linux’ edX MOOC course, the way he works (more to come on this in the coming weeks) and Mean Tweets.
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Topping the Linux news this evening is a look at the five most popular Linux distributions by ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Also tonight, Jennifer Cloer asks Linus Torvalds about the meanest tweets he’s received. And finally tonight, Jack M. Germain looks at Deepin Linux and Jack Wallen asks if Cinnamon is a worthy replacement for Unity?
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Support for Intel’s Bayley Bay CRB has been added to Coreboot.
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This week at the Network Virtualization and SDN World event in London I’ve had many people ask me some variation of, ‘how is OpenDaylight doing?’ or ‘how are things progressing?’. To answer those questions, I must implicitly answer a different one: how do you judge the success of an open source project like OpenDaylight?
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Work on supporting ARM’s CoreSight technology within the mainline Linux kernel is back underway.
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Graphics Stack
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Here’s some fresh tests of Mesa’s LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for software-based rendering. Since last month, LLVMpipe now supports OpenGL 3.3.
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AMD’s Leo Liu has published a set of four patches that improve Gallium3D’s video support, particularly around H.264 encoding for Radeon GPUs.
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NVIDIA released their 337.25 Linux graphics driver beta this Friday afternoon to end out their work month.
First up, the bug-fixes involve an X crash about querying clock offsets, a performance regression when running KDE with desktop effects using OpenGL compositing, NVIDIA-Settings fix, an OpeNGL rendering corruption fix, a nvidia-installer crash fix, etc.
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Fallout from the many changes introduced early on in the Linux 3.15 kernel cycle are almost all addressed and this next kernel release should happen in the very near future. As some last minute work are some notable fixes for the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics drivers.
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Last week when Mesa 10.2 RC4 was released it was expected to be the final development version and to ship the official release of Mesa 10.2 on Friday, 30 May. The official release didn’t happen but Mesa 10.2 RC5 is out there now with the hopes of shipping the final release next week.
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The new driver from NVIDIA is quite an impressive one and it covers some new GPU models and numerous bug fixes for various issues and bugs.
NVIDIA has three distinct driver versions that are aimed at various users and products, but this Short Lived Branch is the most updated one. This is where the NVIDIA developers make the first updates for their products and it’s also the version that receives improvements for games and applications.
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Benchmarks
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This week there’s already been a high-end OpenGL comparison using the latest proprietary drivers with newer AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Those OpenGL results were followed by a 2D NVIDIA/AMD Linux performance comparison and now to end out the week are some OpenCL compute benchmarks.
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There’s some very interesting tests that will be published on Phoronix in the next few days… Including the results from testing 65 different graphics cards under Linux with varying software stacks.
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I got an interesting email from Michael A. Marks the technical director for Aspyr Media who built his own steambox and ran some OpenGL tests with interesting results.
Before you read too far into it just bear in mind that Michael knows what he is talking about given he’s worked on some AAA titles like Call of Duty & Civilization in the porting process from DirectX to OpenGL.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Anomaly Defenders is now out for Linux and continues the struggle from the previous Anomaly games, only this time you are attacking the aliens! There’s a good deal going on it too.
If you buy directly from Games Republic at our Linux shop not only do you get Anomaly 2 with it, but we even get a tiny cut too! You should also get Steam keys.
Any game you buy from https://linux.gamesrepublic.com/catalog.html gives us a tiny cut and the overall store is run by the Anomaly developers.
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On Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon, the update manager has received an enhanced design and new features, now showing more information, it does not lock the APT cache at startup anymore and does not check for an internet connection anymore. Also, Cinnamon 2.2.0 has been implemented, coming with a redesigned UI for the System Settings, the Hot Corners features better settings, the menu applet got a few new options, MPRIS support has been added by default, the HiDPI/Retina display support has been implemented and the window manager has received enhancements.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Returning to Randa is always tremendous, no matter what the work is. The house in Randa, Switzerland is so welcoming, so solid, yet modern and comfortable too.
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Last but not least, here is my report from the Krita 2014 sprint. It was the fourth Krita sprint and the first one since the previous sprint 2011. In terms of Krita development that a really long time and quite a lot happened since then. After the last sprint in Amsterdam the sprint location was once again in Deventer. As usual the sprint was again very productive and generally fantastic with lots of old faces and some new ones.
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Amarok is one of the most famous music players on the Linux platform and it’s been around for more than a decade. It’s integrated by default in KDE, which might have contributed to its fame, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting alternatives.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I have tried to describe a situation where Web browsing is more tightly integrated with the desktop. There is still a lot of work to do: detailed functionality needs to be refined, assumptions need to be verified, mockups and prototypes need to be created and evaluated…
A browser is a very complex application to design, but luckily there is a lot of knowledge already available that should help us generate ideas and make informed decisions.
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I’ve deliberately not included GNOME in this sweep, as a lot of the core GNOME applications already have AppData and most of the gnomies already know what to do. I also didn’t include XFCE appications, as XFCE has agreed to adopt AppData on the mailing list and are in the process of doing this already. KDE is just working out how to merge the various files created by Matthias, and I’ve not heard anything from LXDE or MATE. So, I only looked at projects not affiliated with any particular desktop.
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This is the first update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and its makers have made quite a few modifications to it.
According to the changelog, the airplane mode menu is now insensitive in the lock screen, the struts are no longer extended to the screen edge, keynav has been fixed for alternatives in AltSwitcher, and the window menus have been implemented in the shell.
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Tartan is a new research and development project by Collabora to yield a Clang analysis plug-in for GLib and GNOME.
The Tartan plug-in loads GObject-Introspection meta-data for all encountered functions to better inform LLVM’s Clang and the plug-in also takes care of detecting common coding practices for GLib. Tartan is licensed under the GPLv3+ by Collabora.
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This latest update for GTK arrives with a multitude of changes and new features, but this is understandable because this is a development release.
According to the changelog, interactive debugging support has been implemented, gesture support has finally landed, the GTK+ widgets can now draw outside their allocation zone, by setting a clip with gtk_widget_set_clip(), GtkStack has added a few more transition types, and the GtkProgressBar is now narrower.
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The latest update to Kali Linux was released a few days ago. Kali Linux 1.0.7 review is a summary review of the main features of this latest upgrade to the security distribution from Offensive Security, a security and penetration training outfit based somewhere on this third rock from the Sun.
The main feature introduced in Kali Linux 1.0.7 is the ability to transfer the system to a USB stick with encrypted persistence.
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Sure, on the desktop, Windows still rules. According to Stat Counter’s’ April 2014 data, Windows has about a 90 percent market share. Out of an approximate base of 1.5 billion PCs, that’s about 1.36 billion Windows PCs. So, guess what’s the number two end-user operating system in the world?
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“Simplicity Linux 14.7 Alpha is now available for download in Netbook, Desktop and X Editions. It is based on Precise Puppy and uses the excellent LXPup by SFS to provide LXDE as a desktop environment for Netbook and Desktop Editions. As usual, Netbook is our cut down version which focuses on web based applications rather than locally installed applications,” said the developer in the official announcement.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2014 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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Telefonica is developing an NFV reference platform and lab in conjunction with Red Hat and Intel as part of a two-year roadmap for deploying NFV internationally.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Tails is a distribution based on Debian and Tor technologies that aims to keep its users as anonymous as possible. It gained a lot more visibility after Edward Snowden said that he used exactly this Linux distribution to hide his tracks. The developers are now implementing more changes and fixes that should ensure it becomes even more secure.
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Earlier this month the Siduction team, which regularly updates snapshots based on Debian Unstable/Sid, released a development build showcasing the new LXQt desktop, the future of both the LXDE and the Razor-qt environments. Siduction have a bit of history here as they featured Razor-qt as a desktop early on and were probably the only distribution to ship a dedicated iso as part of their line-up throughout 2012 and 2013. Besides using KDE 4 for the main image Siduction have shown a great commitment to medium light and lower resource desktops.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If there’s one area of Linux that gets more scrutiny than any other, it’s the desktop. From every corner, the haters and detractors abound. Nearly every publication that offers any focus on the Linux desktop at some point posts a piece about getting rid of the default Ubuntu desktop. Cinnamon is one of the primary replacement contenders.
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Ubuntu developers are trying to shake some of its GNOME dependencies and they have been working towards this goal for quite some time. Ubuntu distributions have been using GNOME packages since the beginning, even before the adoption of Unity as the default desktop environment.
Back when Ubuntu was still using GNOME 2.x to power its desktop, people were complaining about various problems, which in fact were not the fault of the Ubuntu developers. Some of the patches submitted by Ubuntu upstream, to the GNOME project were accepted either with delay or not at all. So, Canonical has decided to make Unity, a project it can control from one end to another.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Deepin desktop design is snazzy yet simple to use. It is one of the first Linux distros to take advantage of HTML 5 technology.
Add its home-grown applications such as the Deepin Software Center, Deepin Music Player and Deepin Media Player, and you get an operating system that is tailored to the average user.
The Deepin Linux development team is based in China. The distro so far is available only in English and traditional or simplified Chinese. It is a very young distro that debuted a few years ago and cycled through just one or two full releases per year as it crawled through its alpha and beta stages.
Deepin 2014 Beta is the latest version, released earlier this month to replace a version released last fall. This current release, based on screen shots displayed on the website for the previous version, substitutes the more traditional bottom panel bar with a docking bar that resembles the Mac OS X look.
Read more
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The new Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the first flavors released are Cinnamon and MATE, which is the norm for this kind of launches.
It’s important to note right from the start that the ISOs for the two versions of Linux Mint 17 usually arrive before the official announcement, which is not too far off. Rest assured, these are the official images from the Linux Mint Team.
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The ISOs approved for Linux Mint 17 aka Qiana stable release are already uploaded and available for download. The release hasn’t been announced yet but here’s your chance to install and enjoy the latest version of the popular Ubuntu derivative! 32 and 64-bit versions of both the Cinnamon and MATE variants are available.
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When you buy a Synology product, you know what you’re getting yourself in to. The company’s designs rarely change between generations, beyond a few small tweaks and improvements to the internals, and its Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system only ever improves with time. Its pricing, however, can leave it out of the reach of the budget-conscious buyer, especially when more than two drive bays are required.
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The Linaro Digital Home Group, or LHG, follows other working groups from Linaro, a not-for-profit company owned by ARM and many of its top licensees. Linaro develops standardized open source Linux and Android toolchain software for ARM-based devices. Previous groups have included the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), the Linaro Networking Group (LNG), and most recently, the Security Working Group (SWG).
As usual, the goal is provide standardized software and requirements for relevant upstream open source projects. In this case, Linaro defines digital home applications as media-centric devices including set-top boxes, televisions, media players, gaming, and home gateway devices. Home automation does not appear to be a central focus.
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Phones
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Though it’s difficult to compare two operating systems that are targeted at different users, Mozilla’s Firefox OS still feels half-baked compared to what Ubuntu offers. While Canonical is focused on making a full-fledged mobile OS that goes head-to-head against Android and iOS, Firefox’s approach is towards making smartphones more affordable. Initial reviews of Firefox OS have been really underwhelming so it will take about a year for us to see both operating systems in the hands of its end users. Finally, it would be a great idea to wait till both operating systems get enough exposure and that would be somewhere around April 2015 where both Ubuntu and Firefox would have (hopefully) reached enough stability to be used on a broader scale.
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Good news for budding developers interested in mobile platforms and devices. The Tizen Developer Conference 2014 (hashtag #TDCSF14) due next week is offering free registration to student developers.
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Android/Linux smartphones are taking 80% of the market shipments while having an average selling price ~$70 less than those other operating systems, you know, on Blackberries and iPhones.
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WebRTC voice and video is now available on Firefox Nightly. That’s the latest news from the Mozilla Foundation and TokBox, the Web communications company that Mozilla Foundation is working with to bring us WebRTC voice and video in my favorite Web browser. To see how this actually works, I decided to download Firefox Nightly and install or run it on my systems.
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s first generation of smartwatches is officially ditching Android. SamMobile reports that the original Galaxy Gear is being upgraded to Tizen, the operating system used on the newer Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo (but not the Gear Fit, yet another model released this spring.) Samsung has made a point of differentiating its software from stock Android — its various Android smartphones are loaded with design tweaks — but in this case, the main difference will be in added features; we and other reviewers found that the Tizen interface looked and operated very much like the Android one.
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Samsung continues to welcome new players into the Tizen family. Its June 2 dev conference may coincide with Tizen smartphone news.
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With Genode version 14.05, we address two problems that are fundamental for the scalability of the framework. The first problem is the way how Genode interoperates with existing software. A new concept for integrating 3rd-party source code with the framework makes the porting and use of software that is maintained outside the Genode source tree easier and more robust than ever. The rationale and the new concept are explained in Section Management of ported 3rd-party source code. The second problem is concerned about how programs that are built atop a C runtime (as is the case for most 3rd-party software) interact with the Genode world. Section Per-process virtual file systems describes how we consolidated many special-purpose solutions into one coherent design of using process-local virtual file systems.
In line with our road map, we put forward our storage-related agenda by enabling the use of NetBSD’s cryptographic device driver (CGD) on Genode. Thereby, we continue our engagement with the rump kernel that we started to embrace with version 14.02. Section Block-level encryption using CGD explains the use of CGD as a Genode component.
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A group of nine research institutes, software development firms and IT companies are building Ossmeter, a platform to evaluate and compare open source software packages and the communities involved in them. The platform will be available as a public service, but the software will also be shared using an open source licence. A study on Ossmeter was published earlier this week by Joinup’s OSOR community.
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Call it the Hadoop Swiss Army knife of cluster computing frameworks.
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Platform as a service (PaaS) is gaining a lot of traction in the enterprise IT world, and you have likely heard about some of the big names like Google App Engine, Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Microsoft Azure, but there are also some open source competitors, such as OpenStack, that are worth noting. Since we have already covered OpenStack quite a bit, here are four other open source cloud platforms you might not know.
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Women in FOSS
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Women make up less than two percent of the open source developer community, according to a 2007 survey by the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The Philadelphia chapter of women’s tech education group Girl Develop It wants to get those numbers up, and it’s starting locally.
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I’ve been asked to remove your blog by several people and I’ve reached the conclusion that it would be a really bad idea because it would set the wrong precedence and it would shift the discussion to the wrong topic (censorship yadda yadda). Questioning OPW should be allowed. The problem with your post is that if not questioned by other people (as many have done already) it would send the wrong message to the public and prospect GSoC, OPW and general contributors. Your blog was the wrong place to question and your wording makes it clear that you have misunderstandings about how the community works.
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Outreach programs need to scale and be sustainable to be a long-term success. Is that the case? I’m not sure myself; depends on the criteria you come up with.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you’re not already talking to your web browser, you may soon be doing so. Just last week, we covered Google’s new “OK Google” voice search features in the Chrome browser, which lets you execute searches with spoken words. Now, Mozilla has announced a partnership with TokBox to build WebRTC-based communications features right into its browser. The features could let users exchange real-time data, audio and video between their browsers.
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GSOC/FUDCon
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Funding
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How Canadian governments and law enforcement agencies access telecom data, the benefits of open source Internet tools for business and the purchase of Internet switching gear are among over $1 million in research projects being funded by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.
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BSD
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We have covered the LLVMLinux project many times with an increasing number of developers from the x86 and ARM world being interested in building the kernel with Clang. Among the reasons for wanting to build the Linux kernel with Clang is for possible performance advantages, faster kernel compilation times when debugging the kernel, using Clang’s static analysis abilities on the kernel code itself, improving the quality of LLVM and Clang by finding missing/broken compiler features, and improving the overall code quality of the Linux kernel by making the code compatible with more compilers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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What do you wish was more open about the world of science—academia? research? access? software? NASA released the source code for their software in April. Who’s next?
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Part of the reason why radium snake-oil products proliferated in the years after Marie Curie and her husband first isolated the element is that the Curies refused to patent the process and, in fact, shared it with the world.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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A Virginia tenth grader says he attacked and killed his parents because they were acting too parental, “taking away [his] iPod and stuff.”
Vincent Parker, a 16-year-old honor roll student, was arrested after he randomly attacked and killed his parents last December.
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They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to adults attempting to explain away inexplicable tragedy by scapegoating the younger generation’s entertainment du jour, that certainly seems to be the case. For our generation, of course, that means video games. We’ve seen it over and over again, from journalists jumping to blame violent games before they have any facts to back it up, to television personalities pretending there’s a proven link when there isn’t, to grandstanding politicians proposing constitution-violating sin-taxes on games just because.
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Science
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For 11 episodes now, the groundbreaking Fox and National Geographic Channel series Cosmos has been exploring the universe, outraging creationists, and giving science teachers across the nation something to show in class every Monday. In the process, the show has been drawing more than 3 million viewers every Sunday night, a respectable number for a science-focused show that is, after all, a major departure from what prime-time audiences are used to.
Cosmos certainly hasn’t shied from controversy; it has taken on evolution and industry-funded science denial, and it has been devoting an increasing amount of attention to the subject of climate change. And apparently that was just the beginning. This coming Sunday, Cosmos will devote an entire episode to the topic.
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Health/Nutrition
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Anyone who buys their own groceries (as opposed to having a full-time cook handle such mundane chores) knows that the cost of basic foods keeps rising, despite the official claims that inflation is essentially near-zero.
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“British girls have become the fattest in Europe” was this week’s brutal headline.
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Consumer products containing ingredients made using an advanced form of engineering known as synthetic biology are beginning to show up more often on grocery and department store shelves.
A liquid laundry detergent made by Ecover, a Belgian company that makes “green” household products including the Method line, contains an oil produced by algae whose genetic code was altered using synthetic biology. The algae’s DNA sequence was changed in a lab, according to Tom Domen, the company’s manager for long-term innovation.
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Security
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Amid mass demos and violence over extravagant World Cup spending showing little promise of return for an impoverished Brazil, Anonymous hackers plan a mass hack attack on the Cup’s sponsors, a source told Reuters.
High inflation and low business investment have hampered the government’s recent attempts to boost the economy ahead of the tournament. All this is happening as some of the country’s most pressing social and other problems have been neglected, with rampant poverty and destitution rife in large parts of the capital.
People are up in arms, staging protest events for a number of reasons, the latest of which are centered on skepticism that the lavish spending on the World Cup will benefit them in any substantial way. This Friday, several simultaneous events blocked Rio de Janeiro’s main roads, paralyzing traffic.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The only winners in war are those who produce the guns, bullets, drones, IEDs, and all the other gadgets to maim and kill.
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Jay Carney is stepping down as White House press secretary, President Barack Obama announced on Friday.
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When Jay Carney steps down as White House press secretary later this year, he will leave behind a trail of memorable clashes with reporters. Here are a few of them:
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Terrorism is a deadly, ever-present menace from which Americans should spare no expense or effort in protecting themselves. Or so our rulers claim.
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Most countries have special-purpose institutions of higher education to train military officers. The United States has 18 such colleges and universities, including federally funded ones such as West Point, state-funded ones such as The Citadel, and private ones such as Norwich University. What distinguishes the United States from all but a few other countries is the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at civilian colleges and universities.
Created in 1916, ROTC is probably the most visible sign of U.S. military involvement on non-military colleges and universities, with its uniformed cadets and midshipmen and university credit for courses taught by military officers on “military science” and “leadership.” Army, Navy), or Air Force ROTC programs are present today on almost 500 campuses.
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Obama said Sloan Gibson, deputy secretary of the VA, would take the helm on an acting basis while he looked “diligently” for a new permanent VA secretary. Gibson, an Army veteran and former banker, had joined the VA just three months ago after running the USO military service organization.
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France and the United States have exchanged statements on the Mistral ships contract with Moscow. Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf has said the United States is concerned about the deal and it believes that the time is wrong for selling the amphibious assault ships to the Russian Federation. The statements were made after French President Hollande confirmed that the deal signed in 2011 is in force to be completed in October. The $1, 2 billion Vladivostok is to join the Russian Navy in 2014 with Sevastopol, the second ship of the class, to be delivered in 2015.
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According to the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, former President George W. Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all committed war crimes during their tenure.
Richard Clarke was Bush’s counterterrorism czar in 2001 and later became the president’s special advisor on cyberterror until he resigned in 2003 and became a vocal critic of the administration. In an interview with Democracy Now! this week, Clarke was asked by host Amy Goodman whether Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could ever seriously face “war crimes” charges for the Iraq operation.
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What is a huge army of private contractors secretly doing in Afghanistan? A leaked PowerPoint presentation explains
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My arrest at Creech along with eight others on April 16 was a “return to the scene of the crime” (the Air Force’s crime, not mine) for me, as I was among the “Creech 14” in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct action against drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few sites from which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there to fly their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has been proliferating around the world and so has the number of drone operation bases in communities around the U.S. My work with Voices for Creative Nonviolence has brought me to the scenes of the crime in Afghanistan, the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone bases in New York, Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.
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Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.
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The Bureau is publishing, for the first time, data showing the types of targets that have been reportedly attacked by CIA drones in Pakistan.
The research is a joint project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at Goldsmiths University, London, and Situ Research in New York. The data feeds this interactive website mapping the strikes, the types of target attacked, and their relative scale.
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Finally, although President Obama ended the use of torture, he continued the drone attacks started under Bush. A Stanford Law School reports states that “there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.” Many say they violate international law, especially since civilians are killed in countries that haven’t declared war upon the U.S. As for the decisions of presidents before Obama, the use of the atomic bombs, massive bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange can easily be viewed as war crimes. If President Bush is deemed a war criminal, then the decisions of presidents before and after Bush should be evaluated in the same manner.
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President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will continue to “take direct action” by ordering drone strikes and capture operations against suspected terrorists “when necessary to protect ourselves.”
In a speech outlining a foreign policy framework that stresses cooperation with allies, Obama said there still would be times when the U.S. must go it alone. He restated a policy he disclosed last May, however, that no drone strike should occur unless there is “a near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed.
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By way of brief background for the unfamiliar, at the most basic level (but with varying degrees of specificity), each proposal would require the President to release a public report on the number of civilian and combatant casualties killed in U.S. drone strikes (for earlier discussions on the substance of the proposals, see e.g., here and here). Back in November, the House and Senate intelligence committees debated including a similar reporting requirement in the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2014. The SSCI-approved version of the bill included the provisions; whereas, HPSCI rejected a Schiff-sponsored amendment to include the reporting requirements in the House version. Ultimately, however, the proposal was never enacted.
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A New York federal appeals court has rejected the government’s request to reargue in secret its order that it reveal a classified memo describing legal justifications for using drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism overseas.
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After announcing it would comply with a federal court order, the Obama administration has decided that it wants to conceal more portions of a controversial memo authorizing the assassination of Americans overseas.
Last week, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice said they would make public parts of the internal document written in July 2010 by then-federal lawyer David Barron that justified the use of drones or other means to kill U.S. citizens accused of terrorist involvement.
The declaration came as the U.S. Senate was considering Barron’s confirmation as a judicial appointee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals—a move that helped convince at least one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, to support the nomination.
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Conservatives say, and this is one of their more successful memes, that poor people are immoral. The proles have sex and kids out of wedlock and expect us (i.e., upstanding middle- and upper-class patriots) to pay for them. They steal Medicare and cheat on welfare. They don’t follow The Rules (rules written by, let’s just say, not them). Which makes them Bad.
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In his May 28 West Point speech on foreign policy President Obama took a swipe at “so-called realists.” But the acolytes of this particular school of thought will by and large be satisfied with his manifesto. The most scathing attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have come from neo-conservatives such as Robert Kagan. They are the ones who will pounce on the Mr. Obama’s latest address, and indeed have already done so.
The West Point lecture was classic Obama: the president was calm and reasonable. And he took an in-between Goldilocks stance designed to differentiate him from the extremes. The latter he characterized simplistically to supplement the rhetorical force, if not the persuasiveness, of his case.
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About two dozen anti-drone protesters greeted those entering the United States Military Academy Wednesday, piggybacking their message onto the fanfare of graduating cadets and a visit by President Barack Obama.
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Some light has been shed on how the drone program works; in October 2013, the Washington Post revealed how the NSA is also involved in the targeted killing program. And early in 2014, The Intercept published more details about how “controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies” used by the NSA for its surveillance programs are also used to identify drone targets.
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It isn’t just John Major who is unhappy that transcripts and full notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George W Bush about the lead-up to the Iraq war will remain secret. The entire world needs details of conversations between Blair and Bush about the 2003 war, but instead the Chilcot inquiry will only get the gist of the talks. For a war which killed 655,000 Iraqis and over one million in total, and for a reason never proven, it cannot be just the former British prime minister who is troubled by the lack of information and transparency.
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IT’S ABOUT as eye-catching a blurb as you could hope for on an Iraq war thriller – an endorsement from embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange himself.
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Chilcot has surrendered in a “bad, bad day for democracy and justice. The establishment of this country, and the security and intelligence services have won again. Truth has lost out.”
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Many believe Blair should be put on trial for his role in taking us to what looks like an increasingly illegal war in Iraq. I would try him for allowing the country to be swamped with millions of new arrivals as, and this fact is absolutely vital to remember, it was not fair to anyone; not those who were already here, those who arrived or those who came along subsequently.
Communities felt they lost their identities, schools were filled to the point that giant cabins were quickly rushed into playgrounds to fit in all the children, many of whom could speak no English, and resentment quickly grew.
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In reality, current US troop levels–about 32,000–are actually about what they were when Obama took office (Think Progress, 6/22/11). A graph that accompanied an NPR story (6/29/11) shows this pretty clearly.
Late last year the New York Times offered similarly misleading spin (FAIR Blog, 11/25/13), reporting that Obama “has reduced the forces in Afghanistan from about 100,000 in 2010 to about 47,000 today.” That’s technically true, but ignores the fact that the troop levels had only gotten that high as a result of Obama’s policy of massive escalation.
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He was said to be a key player in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983 and in the founding of Hezbollah—until he disappeared in 2007. Now a new book claims he’s under CIA protection.
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Reader Peter Smith is none too happy with this newspaper.
As he wrote to me: “I could see The Blade shirking and hiding initially from its duty of reporting to the citizenry about the tragedy when the news first broke, due to the lack of ‘factual evidence…’
“But now the facts are out! I know it and you know it too … time to step up and report first-hand all the facts about this tragedy and all the ramifications coming out of it, including the cover-up.”
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The issue of giving aid to the Syrian rebels has been widely debated with some concerned that weapons and training will end up in the hands of Islamists who have embedded themselves among the opposition.
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Sixty years ago, in June 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ousted the reformist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup installed a brutal right-wing regime and decades of bloody repression.
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Russia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.
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On May 11 a plane arrived at Kiev’s airport in strict secrecy; it was met by the airport’s military personnel rather than the civilian staff. NATO military uniforms, 500 packages of amphetamines, and containers marked as poisonous substances were unloaded from the plane. By order of the Kiev directorate of the SBU, the fighters, the cargo and the containers of poison were not inspected and left the airport in cars with tinted windows. The cargo was accompanied by CIA agent Richard Michael. Aboard the plane were also fighters from the Right Sector and the Polish private military company ASBS (Analizy Systemowe Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz) Othago, created several years ago by Poland’s current Minister of the Interior, B. Sienkiewicz.
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Washington’s role in the coup d’etat in Kiev on Feb. 22 has brought the U.S. a Pyrrhic victory…
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City attempt to reach peaceful agreement over fate of squatters’ civic centre after fourth night of violent clashes in Catalan capital
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While the “use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” The Washington Times uncovering of a 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. As one defense official proclaimed, “this appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens.” Meet Directive 3025.18 and all its “quelling civil disturbances” totalitarianism…
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A SWAT crashed through a family’s door in the middle of the night and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s playpen. A 19-month-old baby was horribly disfigured when it exploded in his face. [Graphic]
Alecia Phonesavanh and her family were staying at a friend’s house after their home had been lost in a fire. The makeshift living arrangements left their 19-month-old baby boy sleeping in a playpen in a shared room. Things were going OK until the local government decided to send paramilitary home invaders to unleash indiscriminate violence upon the home and anyone inside.
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Transparency Reporting
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The US was among the first states to congratulate Ukraine’s president-elect Petro Poroshenko. Yet real US opinions of the new president are more complicated, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables which refer to the billionaire as a “disgraced oligarch.”
For years, the US was keeping an eye on the Ukrainian billionaire and former foreign minister. Between 2006 and 2011, Poroshenko’s name was a direct or indirect subject of hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks.
A simple search for ”Poroshenko” on WikiLeaks’ website gives at least 350 documents mentioning his name. But some of the descriptions provided by US diplomats are far from complimentary.
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Last Saturday, the White House accidentally revealed the identity of the CIA’s most senior operative in Kabul by accidentally including his name on a list of officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit to US troops in Afghanistan. Though it was disbursed to more than 6,000 journalists, all indications suggest that every outlet has complied with the government’s request to refrain from publishing the name.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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FAIR’s latest Action Alert (5/28/14) urges media activists to call out CNN for basing a climate change report around one guest: right-wing climate change denier Ann Coulter. If you write to CNN, please share a copy of your message in the comments below.
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The U.S. government is in the final stages of weighing approval for an overhaul of regulations governing the country’s poultry industry that would see processing speeds increase substantially even while responsibility for oversight would be largely given over to plant employees.
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The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the “very aggressive P.R. operation” they have used for years to silence media criticism.
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I attempted to enter Canada on a Tuesday, flying into the small airport at Fort McMurray, Alberta, waiting for my turn to pass through customs.
“What brings you to Fort Mac?” a Canada Border Services Agency official asked. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” He pointed me to border security. Another official, a tall, clean-shaven man, asked the same question. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” he frowned. “You mean oil sands. We don’t have tar here.”
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Finance
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The bankers, intelligence chiefs and private military strategists are the dukes, energy and arms firms the barons.
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The list of participants for the 62nd Bilderberg meeting that began in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday includes seven Finns. The annual meeting is an exclusive forum for the political and financial elite of the world to engage in informal, off-the-record discussions on a variety of global issues.
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The officially released agenda of the prestigious Bilderberg club meeting is not true, claims RT show host Daniel Estulin, a longtime watcher of the ‘secret world govt’ group. He says he obtained the real agenda for this year’s gathering in Copenhagen.
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Thomas Piketty has accused the Financial Times of ridiculous and dishonest criticism of his economics book on inequality, which has become a publishing sensation.
The French economist, whose 577-page tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become an unlikely must-read for business leaders and politicians alike, said it was ridiculous to suggest that his central thesis on rising inequality was incorrect.
The controversy blew up when the FT accused Piketty of errors in transcribing numbers, as well as cherry-picking data or not using original sources.
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Bedroom tax and housing list squeeze blamed for landlord repossession orders topping 47,000 in three months
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This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low — and that’s partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share.
Here’s a list of 10 tax-dodging corporations excerpted from the Americans for Tax Fairness report.
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Yet another of the world’s central banks has publicly “warned” citizens of Bitcoin. The Argentinian Central Bank has posted a statement about Bitcoin on their official website, warning of the lack of legal tender status, volatility, and Bitcoin’s use in fraudulent activities and money laundering.
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Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.
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The percentage of taxes that corporations pay today are near the record lows of the United States’ total tax bill, even though these corporations are bringing in huge profits. Although this is happening, the unemployment rate still remains high. A study completed by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action shows the damage done by having corporations pay low taxes and the effect on state budgets. The study shows that a small increase in the amount of taxes large corporations pay will have positive effects such as restoring cuts in education and public services, and could possibly restore over three million jobs. As federal aid was declined to state budgets more and more, many states have cut back on taxes claiming that doing so would benefit their economy and create jobs. One example of this was a tax exemption on corporate profits passed directly to individual owners in the state of Kansas. This kept Kansas in a recession. Hard working employees were stuck with paying the taxes that corporations got out of paying. Corporations get out of paying taxes in loopholes such as offshore tax havens, the “executive pay loophole” that allows corporations to deduct performance bonuses from their tax receipts, and the “stock-based pay loophole” that allows companies to deduct billions from their tax bill. People can see that cutting the taxes of corporations is not helping the economy in any state. It is not helping form jobs, and Americans agree it needs to be stopped.
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The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.
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A national charity whose executives earn six-figure salaries used a legal loophole to pay disabled workers as little as three and four cents an hour, according to documents obtained exclusively by NBC News.
An NBC News investigation recently revealed that Goodwill Industries, which is among the non-profit groups permitted to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c), had paid workers as little as 22 cents an hour.
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Censorship
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The MPAA was formed initially in 1922 under the moniker Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was created in order to give films at the time a set of standards by which filmmakers would use as a list to make sure that movies wouldn’t depict excessive violence, sexuality or other practices deemed immoral. It was later changed to the Motion Picture Association of America and placed under the direction of Jack Valenti in the mid ‘60s.
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An extraordinary commentary published in the New York Times Book Review — posted online May 22, scheduled for print publication June 8 — asserts that the US government must be the final decision-maker on whether leaked information about government wrongdoing should be published by the press.
This anti-democratic screed, worthy of any police state, is written by Michael Kinsley, a longtime fixture of the punditry establishment and the former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” program. His commentary takes the form of a review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place to Hide on the Edward Snowden revelations about illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Kinsley ridicules Greenwald’s claim that blanket NSA surveillance of electronic communications is a threat to the democratic rights of the American people, and that Snowden was justified in exposing government criminality by leaking documents to Greenwald and other journalists for eventual publication in the Guardian (US) and the Washington Post.
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The German government is considering setting up arbitration courts to weigh in on what information people can force Google Inc. (GOOG) and other search-engine providers to remove from results.
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Twitter has a reputation as an open platform for expressing one’s opinions. It’s become a place for dissent and debate. It played a key role in the “Arab Spring” revolutions of the last couple of years.
But last week, it agreed to censor a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed in Russia. It also blocked a “blasphemous” account in Pakistan. It’s not the first time Twitter has censored politically sensitive accounts. Now, it seems, Twitter’s reputation as a platform for free speech is at risk.
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Historically, Cambodia has been fairly lax in enacting legislation that stifles freedom of expression online—unlike its neighbors of Vietnam and Thailand— but with more Cambodian citizens gaining access to the Internet, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has attempted to control dissenting views and “immoral actions” online through the drafting of a cybercrime law. A leaked copy of the legislation, which was initially drafted in 2012, revealed some serious threats to fundamental freedoms by making certain speech and other actions online punishable by fine and prison time.
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Google is accepting requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world’s dominant search engine.
The demands can be submitted on a Web page Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court.
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Privacy
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Smári “Mailpile” McCarthy’s lecture Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism sets out a set of technical, legal and social interventions we can undertake to make mass surveillance impossible, starting with this: “The goal of those interested in protecting human rights should be to raise the average cost of surveillance to $10.000 per person per day within the next five years.”
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Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had harsh words for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden during a taped interview with NBC News’ David Gregory of Meet the Press.
“The guy should be prosecuted,” Bloomberg said when asked if he thought Snowden a patriot or a traitor. “You cannot have individual people deciding what information should be released. We have a democratic process and my recollection is things like the NSA surveillance, that, well the process worked.”
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There is really no getting around the fact that staying secure on the Internet is hard, if not impossible, to achieve. Yes, users can do more to keep themselves safe by adopting good security practices. They can choose strong passwords that they don’t reuse for different sites. They can avoid disclosing personal details online and for users that are particularly security conscious, can encrypt the contents of their hard disks. Ultimately however, users have to rely on the software they are using to be secure, especially security software. If this isn’t the case, then no end of good habits will prevent others from secretly siphoning information they can later exploit.
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Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning’s legal cases are destined to be remembered together for as long as their cases are discussed because of the similarities in the cases and their nearly simultaneous evolution which, together, reveal two perspectives on American justice. Nevertheless, the media’s treatment of Manning’s case has been a stark contrast to the manner in which Snowden’s case has been reported. Comparing the two cases reveals a double standard in both the prosecution of the two cases, and in the media’s coverage of those events.
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The safest way to store your documents is on your local hard drive, says SmartKlock founder Jason Fernandes, warning that online cloud services leave you open to surveillance and compromise your privacy
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Glenn Greenwald has just published “No Place to Hide.” The book, which reads like a thriller, is Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in May and June 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent and NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald coordinated the public release of the 1.7 million pages of NSA documents that Snowden took with him in order to prove definitively that the federal government is spying on all of us all the time.
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Pentagon Papers whistleblower doesn’t believe Edward Snowden would receive a fair trial if he returns home to the United States, due to the Espionage Act
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When the four-hour sit-down between journalist Brian Williams and Snowden made it to air on Wednesday night, NBC condensed roughly four hours of conversation into a 60-minute time slot. During an analysis of the full interview afterwards, however, the network showed portions of the interview that didn’t make it into the primetime broadcast, including remarks from the former National Security Agency contractor in which he questioned the American intelligence community’s inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In response to a question from Williams concerning a “non-traditional enemy,” Al-Qaeda, and how to prevent further attacks from that organization and others, Snowden suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.
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The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents , New York Times reported.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is hoarding images of US citizens obtained through communications intercepted in order to use the images for facial recognition programs, confidential documents made public by the New York Times indicate.
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Social-media giant Facebook says it will appeal a court ruling that will allow a Vancouver woman to launch a class action lawsuit against the company.
B.C. Supreme Court Judge Susan Griffin ruled yesterday that there is enough evidence to support allegations made by Debbie Douez that a Facebook advertising product used the names and images of members without their consent.
Griffin says the product, called “Sponsored Stories,” included the names and images of members, an advertising logo and product information, which were sent to other Facebook members.
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Edward Snowden has said the emails released by the National Security Agency to show he had not made internal whistleblowing efforts are “tailored and incomplete”.
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Yesterday, the NSA released an email from Edward Snowden to his superiors asking about the legality of NSA spying, claiming it was the only evidence they had that he ever tried to go through channels before turning leaker; on its face, this is pretty damning. But there’s one problem: six months ago, the NSA claimed that they had no emails of the sort from Snowden, and then this one happened to turn up just in time to counter Snowden’s allegations on US TV that he’d tried to blow the whistle from inside. My guess? Someone as canny as Snowden kept copies of all the communiques he made and flags he raised, and will be shortly making the NSA look like pathetic liars (again).
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An amendment proposed by the House would remove the requirement that the National Institute of Standards and Technology consult with the NSA on encryption standards.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has claimed he worked undercover for the CIA, and said that he would like to return to the US.
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German media has reported that the country’s foreign intelligence agency wants to access social media in real time. The agency reportedly wants to expand digital operations out of fear of falling behind other countries.
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Confidential documents from the BND, Germany’s answer to the NSA and GCHQ, suggest the agency could soon get major funding to improve its online surveillance and hacking capabilities.
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Numerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, according to the journalist leading the reporting on the explosive NSA leaks.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that there was no doubt that the government has destroyed years of evidence of NSA spying – the government itself has admitted to it in recent court filings. In a brief filed today in response to this illegal destruction, EFF is asking that the court make an “adverse inference” that the destroyed evidence would show that plaintiffs communications and records were in fact swept up in the mass NSA spying programs.
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“We were a clear demonstration that official channels didn’t work,” said William Binney, one of a trio of National Security Agency employees who tired to “blow the whistle” on the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities more than a decade before Edward Snowden delivered classified documents from the agency’s files to The Guardian. Binney, now retired, resigned from the NSA in 2001. A year later he and two of his former colleagues asked Congress and the Department of Defense for an investigation of the agency for wasting money and violating privacy rights with a massive data collection program called “Trailblazer,” the successor to an earlier program dubbed “Stellar Wind.” Binney believes that’s the reason why the FBI five years later staged an armed raid of his home.
“Stellar Wind was the basic reason I left the NSA in 2001,” Binney said in a recent interview with Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine. “That’s when they started to take the program that I created to do social network reconstruction of anybody in the world, and direct it against everybody in the United States. That means they were basically putting a PEN register on every phone number in the United States. They call it trace-and-tap, where they put this device on your line and I can monitor who you call, how long you call them.”
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Since breaking the National Security Agency spying story for The (London) Guardian last year, Glenn Greenwald has been the target of attacks from fellow journalists who seem to labor under the delusion that it’s their job to protect the government.
Soon after he reported revelations of government malfeasance provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, NBC’s David Gregory asked Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden … why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”
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The intelligence funding bill the House overwhelmingly passed Friday would make no major reforms to some of the most controversial spying programs, which angered some Democrats.
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More broadly, the United States justifies the lawfulness of its communications surveillance by reference to distinctions that, considering modern communications technology, are irrelevant to truly protecting privacy in a modern society. The US relies on the outmoded distinction between “content” and “metadata,” falsely contending that the latter does not reveal private facts about an individual. The US also contends that the collection of data is not surveillance—it argues, contrary to both international law and the Principles, that an individual’s privacy rights are not infringed as long as her communications data are not analyzed by a human being. It’s clear that the practice of digital surveillance by the United States has overrun the bounds of human rights standards. What our paper hopes to show is exactly where the country has crossed the line, and how its own politicians and the international community might rein it back.
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Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) expressed deep concern over the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), which allows police to obtain emails without a warrant.
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Given the agency’s history of making claims that turn out to be not quite accurate, it’s worth taking the NSA’s claim with a grain of salt. But the NSA’s response to Snowden also has a deeper problem: it wouldn’t have made a difference if Snowden had raised his concerns more forcefully through internal channels.
Remember, the NSA’s position is that it hasn’t done anything wrong. The agency claims that its domestic surveillance programs comply with the law, and that it gets plenty of oversight from both the courts and Congress. The NSA has stuck to this position despite a year of pressure from Congress and the public. Why would it have been any more receptive to the concerns of a lowly contractor?
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Google is asking its users to “demand real surveillance reform” after last week’s House vote on a compromise bill to curb U.S. spying.
Late Thursday, the company took to Twitter asking followers to “join us in asking the Senate to fix the USA Freedom Act,” which passed the House last week.
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As we’ve mentioned, the USA Freedom Act — which had been the “good” bill to reform some of the NSA’s domestic spying activities — was completely watered down right before it passed the House. Basically the entire civil liberties community pulled their support for the bill at the last minute once they saw the changes that the White House demanded (even after the bill had already been watered down). What got a little less attention was that many in the tech industry had also dropped their support for the bill, despite earlier supporting it.
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#A TOP hotel executive doesn’t believe the Bahamas’ tourism industry will be affected by revelations that the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) may be recording all cell phone calls in the country.
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On that occasion, McCarthy was citing the Internal Revenue Service abuses of his time “in which privacy, due process, equal protection of the law, and the principal of innocence until proven guilty are not protected, and actions traditionally disapproved in the United States” are violated by Washington agencies.
If the maverick-minded McCarthy was on the scene in our own time, he would no doubt also include the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens as representing a similar danger.
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The CIA’s non-profit venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has been pumping millions of dollars into technology startups since its launch in 2000, meaning it’s not the least bit unusual for major vendors to have acquired and assimilated one of these CIA-nurtured seedlings.
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China says that the US has spied on Chinese companies, research institutes and mobile phone users, and has also highlighted the role of high-tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft in supporting US intelligence, in a government report published on 26 May and in its news media.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released an April 2013 email exchange between then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency’s Office of General Counsel.
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The FBI spied on Nelson Mandela on his historic visit to the US months after his release from prison, newly released files have revealed.
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Joe Nachio, the former chief of Denver-based Qwest Communications who was convicted on more than a dozen counts of insider trading and sent to prison for nearly five years, says the National Security Agency first blackballed his company, then federal authorities refused to allow him to explain his side when he was on trial.
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During a live webcast on NBCNews.com immediately following Wednesday’s 10 p.m. ET airing of his interview with Edward Snowden, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams wondered why the National Security Agency was not more receptive to Snowden’s claims of unconstitutional spying: “Knowing that in war powers times…the Bush administration use of war powers with Bush and Cheney, isn’t the general counsel at the NSA a little bit on guard for a perversion, as Snowden put it?” [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2014/05/29/nbcs-williams-shouldnt-nsa-be-guard-perversion-surveillance-after-bush#ixzz33I3WOdVm
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The NSA is thought to deploy the TAO unit for specific hard-to-get targets — for example, to hack systems, tap cellular phone networks, or intercept routers and servers at shipping ports — in order to implant them with surveillance devices.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald and the co-authors of last week’s article in The Intercept wrote about the latest US National Security Agency spy operation to be leaked, they alleged that the NSA has been collecting the contents seemingly of all cell phone calls dialed or received in two nations: the Bahamas, and an unnamed “country X.” After scolding The Intercept for withholding the name of that second country, WikiLeaks alleged on Friday that the other subject of the previously unreported NSA program was Afghanistan.
“WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan,” editor-in-chief Julian Assange wrote. “This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs.”
According to WikiLeaks, there may be much more to the story. Also last week, the anti-secrecy group tweeted that Jared Cohen — the 32-year-old current director of Google Ideas and a former US State Department advisor — has a history that connects him to a program that may have put Afghan signals intelligence, or SIGINT, into the hands of US investigators.
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The leaked documents state that The Bahamas is a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements.”
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Soon after that the Snowden leaks were revealed on June 9 2013. While there may have not been a causation, there probably is a strong correlation, because people realised that the NSA are not-something-to-be-afraid-of, harmful, incompetent, and useless. While the Snowden revelations are probably actual, many of them are likely the deluded products of people with Manias, Schizophrenia or Clinical depression, which I believe most people at the NSA have developed due to the inherently secret, selfish, and dishonest, nature of their work there (see “Publish or Perish” = “Life or Death”). So it’s hard to know what is factual and what is a delusion without the NSA being placed under scrutiny and forced to publish their findings for the world at large (not just the USA).
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NSA spies need jobs, too. And that is why many covert programs could be hiding in plain sight.
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ACLU technologist searches Linkedin profiles and finds a treasure trove of information on classified programs
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Research, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to mark the one year anniversary of Edward Snowdon revealing the activities of UK and US intelligence agencies, showed 85% believe it is “fairly important”, “very important” or “essential” to keep browsing records private. Only 12% believe it is not important, the survey conducted by Ipsos Mori showed.
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After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden’s earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he never actually raised these issues. Snowden quickly responded, noting that this is not the only email, that he raised the issue more directly with his supervisors… and, most importantly, that none of this really matters.
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Stewart Baker is still defending the NSA, but his latest piece advancing the agency’s cause deploys a particularly disingenuous argument. He feels the American Bar Association acted hypocritically when it sent a letter to the NSA asking it to respect attorney-client privilege.
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Civil Rights
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The following letter was sent to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire; former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans von Sponeck; current UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard Falk; and over 100 scholars.
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The evolution of immigration and border control policy in Greece and its interdependence with European funding suggests an agenda which has been decided above national legislatures with strong coordination between European political actors and economic interests, while ignoring the human suffering it produces.
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As thousands took to the streets this weekend to protest the civil and military dictatorship – which left a legacy of some of the most sadistic and brutal repression against political prisoners seen in Latin America – the military police have unleashed a new war on the poor of Brazil, and the State is preparing to enforce new “anti-terrorism” laws which raise legitimate fears that they will bring back the practices of the fascist dictatorship. (Note: On March 22nd, Brazilian fascists called for protests under the slogan “march for family.” They were a failure, much like the white man march in North America. In some places, groups of six or less people participated.)
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Military police violently cracked down on a teachers protest using tear gas and batons in front of the State Department of Education building, on Wednesday afternoon. The confrontation happened after a teacher used a marker. to write “Education Strike” in the wall. Teachers had walked the Avenida Presidente Vargas to the location after another demonstration in front of the administrative building of the town hall, where police also used tear gas to remove teachers that closed the route.
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In what is being touted as a victory for First Amendment rights, the First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of people to record police officers in public. This is nothing more than a reaffirmation of a right citizens already possessed, something that can hardly be considered a victory.
The problem is that, despite this being made clear on multiple occasions, people are still being arrested for recording police officers. Sometimes it’s a bad (and outdated) wiretapping law that gets abused. Sometimes it’s other, unrelated laws that are stretched to fit the circumstances, which means those recording officers are hit with charges ranging from interfering with police investigations to criminal mischief, depending on how the interaction goes.
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A bill advancing in Kansas would mandate reporting for miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy, the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to HB 2613 — which was originally intended to update the state’s procedure for issuing birth certificates for stillborn babies — doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department.
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Based on the true story of ‘San Jose Mercury News’ reporter Gary Webb and the fallout from his expose on how the Nicaraguan Contras, with the help of the CIA, smuggled cocaine into California to fund their rebel agenda, this looks like a thriller with brains. There’s even the subtext that comes with a flood of crack into the inner city, and the conspiracy theorizing over the government targeting people of color. Also featuring Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Patrick, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Paz Vega, the trailer is intriguing.
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A defense attorney for a waterboarded prisoner urged an Army judge on Wednesday to not take back a bold order to disclose details of the CIA’s black site program, likening the judge to Watergate’s Judge John Sircia, whose bravery toppled the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.
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One “formative” incident occurred around 2007, when the young technical analyst was working for the CIA under diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Late last night, after many reporters had stopped watching (or in my case, left the city), the House of Representatives delivered a surprise. It passed an amendment delivered by the reliable anti-war-on-drugs Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, one that would prevent the DEA from using funds to break up medical marijuana operations in the states where they’re operating legally.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable — which would combine the two largest cable internet providers in the U.S. into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much — Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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MakerBot is one of the key companies in the low-cost 3D printing market. It was founded in 2009 and based its first model on the completely open RepRap design. However, in 2012, MakerBot moved away from its open source roots, claiming that it needed to make this shift in order to build a long-term business:
We are going to be as open as we possibly can while building a sustainable business. We are going to continue to respect licenses and continue to contribute to the open technology of 3D printing, some of which we initiated. We don’t want to abuse the goodwill and support of our community. We love what we do, we love sharing, and we love what our community creates.
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In a stunning display of madness, makerbot industries files a patent application on a mechanism clearly derived from content created by their users. What’s almost worse is the article they wrote praising the invention, presumably while they were filing the paperwork.
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As Techdirt has been charting, the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations have already encountered far more resistance than was expected when they began last year. This has mostly centered around the controversial corporate sovereignty provisions, but there are also more general concerns about things like deregulation — for example, through a new regulatory council. As well as pushback from expected quarters — civil organizations and NGOs (pdf) — even some European governments are expressing their doubts. And following last week’s elections for the European Parliament, a new obstacle to concluding the agreement has been added: an increased number of European politicians (MEPs) that are skeptical about pan-European projects in general, and TAFTA/TTIP.
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Copyrights
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In April, we wrote about an important court ruling in Spain that found that Pablo Soto’s P2P file sharing software, Blubster, was “perfectly legal”, because the software was “neutral” and a part of “free enterprise within the framework of a market economy.” In that post, we went through the entire history of earlier court rulings that had similarly suggested that file sharing software shouldn’t be blamed for how people used it, and the US’s aggressive pressure that forced Spain to pass multiple new copyright laws to try to reverse such rulings. All of that appeared to be for nothing, as the courts still recognized the silliness of blaming software for how people use it.
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Yesterday, the music labels, under the guise of RIAA spinoff SoundExchange, along with Congressional Reps. George Holding and John Conyers, announced some new legislation and a coordinated PR campaign for what they’re calling “Project72.” The official name of the bill is the “Respecting Senior Performers as Essential Cultural Treasures Act” or the RESPECT Act. There is so much hypocrisy and ridiculousness here that it’s difficult to know where to start. However, in short, the labels fought hard to keep the situation the way it is today, and a very large number of the musicians the RIAA rolled out in “support” of this new law — claiming they just want to get paid by music streaming services — are musicians who got totally screwed over by RIAA labels in the past. How about a little “respect”?
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05.30.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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btrfs (butter filesystem) is something that many of us have been interested in for years. Here is a very recent talk from LinuxCon Japan 2014. There is some Japanese at the beginning of the talk, but fear not, it is in English. The presenter is Marc Merlin… who if I remember correctly used to make really extensive LinuxWorld reports back when LinuxWorld still existed. Anyway, enjoy this btrfs update. Here’s the slide deck PDF that goes along with the talk.
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Graphics Stack
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PathScale, the company behind the EKOPath compiler and other compiler technologies for both CPUs and GPGPU solutions, is looking to hire one or two kernel developers to work on improving the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers… Particularly, to improve the GPGPU/OpenCL compute support in the driver, improve the Hawaii GPU and APU support, and potential optimizations for GPUs with 4GB+ of video memory.
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In a new mailing list thread, Eric Anholt expresses regrets a few years ago when they began sending GLSL IR into their driver rather than using Mesa IR and improving that intermediate representation. Eric is now trying to get the Mesa IR support up to scratch so that it can be sent directly to classic Mesa drivers.
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Benchmarks
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With it looking like LLVM Clang 3.5 might finally have OpenMP support, I tested out Intel’s latest out-of-tree LLVM/Clang OpenMP code to see how the performance compares to GCC for this multi-processing API. Overall, the Clang results increase the level of competition against GCC.
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Applications
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Calibre, a software used for reading, managing, and converting eBooks, has been updated to version 1.39 and brings a few new features, including one for Kindle devices.
Calibre is mainly used for eBook conversion and as an eBook reader, but the application is capable of doing much more. Lately, the developer has been focusing on the editing part of the software and it shows in the release notes.
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QEMU 2.1 should be released two months from today and with it will come ARM architecture improvements and other enhancements.
QEMU 2.1 just passed the mid-point in its development cycle with the release being planned for a 29 July debut. The soft-feature freeze is expected to happen in mid-June, the hard feature freeze at the start of July, and then three release candidates before the official release. The QEMU 2.1 schedule is available via the QEMU Wiki.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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GOG.com is a digital distribution platform that is specialized mostly in old games, but the company that owns it, CD Projekt Red, wants to also extend the support to include Linux. They are now looking for people to help them with Linux ports, although it seems that some of them will be distributed in Wine wrappers.
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Games
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The first thing to note is that I feel like my mind has done a complete turn-around on games being ported to Linux that aren’t “native”. Native ports are great yes that’s true of course, but I doubt we will ever have every developer and publisher on board with that. Publishers & Developers are in it for the money, no matter what they say if they didn’t sell well they would be in trouble and wouldn’t be able to continue, time is also money and time-saving for a tiny platform where they are likely to see ~5% of their sales from will probably look appealing.
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OpenELEC 4.0.3, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has been released and integrates some of the latest proprietary drivers available.
The OpenELEC developers have outed yet another maintenance version of their distribution, but nothing major has changed since the 4.0.2 build. The most important changes are the upgrades for the drivers and for some of the other packages.
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First, it’s now been a month that Linux Game Publishing has been offline. It was on 29 April when they were going to do “be migrating hosts and servers over the next few days” in an effort to improve reliability of their hosting infrastructure, etc. They’ve now been offline for one month with no further communication with their main web-site resolving, etc. The state of their Internet-based DRM solution for their recent titles is not clear and LGP hasn’t responded to any requests for comments, including Facebook comments by their customers earlier this month.
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I’m willing to bet you have a dilapidated HP, Gateway, or Dell laptop gathering dust in a closet somewhere. Or perhaps like me you have a MacBook Air that you tote around to conventions or use at home for work, writing, and browsing the web. Maybe an Ubuntu or Linux Mint box is more your speed. What if you could resurrect those aging notebooks and put them to use playing the newest PC games? Or inject your Mac and Linux machines with the ability to play all those Windows PC games they only dream of? You can do precisely that with a new feature from Valve’s Steam software and these instructions.
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The Steam developers usually make a number of intermediary releases before a stable and a large version of the application are launched. The current update is just one of these versions and, even if it’s a Beta, some users might notice improvements.
Valve takes its time when it comes to improving the Steam client and its updates take care of just a few things. This way, it is easy to spot a problem if something goes wrong after an update for the software.
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Painkiller Hell & Damnation, a remake and a sequel for the immensely popular Painkiller made by People Can Fly in 2004, has been available on the Linux platform for quite some time and now the fans get to buy it with an 80% discount.
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Epic Games has shared their “first play” (albeit rather short and basic) footage of the new Unreal Tournament game that’s in early stages of development with the community.
Epic Games shared the news earlier this month that there’s going to be a new Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4, will be free, and will have native Linux support. Epic is pushing Unreal Engine 4 for Linux gamers to the extent they’re also after Phoronix Test Suite support, etc.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Now with System Settings this is a “way into the future” job – because we are working on the “bit-by-bit” production model AND lets be frank here, the devs are more or less working 24/7 getting the first version of Plasma Next out the door.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The 3.13.x branch of GNOME is strictly for development and it will eventually evolve into the stable 3.14, but that’s a long way ahead. Until then, the developers free to implement changes and new features.
The previous version in this branch brought some very interesting changes and the developers removed Windows and Twitter support from the software, among other changes.
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Mutter, a window and compositing manager that displays and manages your desktop via OpenGL, has reached version 3.13.2.
Owen Taylor has announced that Mutter 3.13.2 has been released, repairing several problems and bringing a few new features, and some of them are pretty interesting, to say the least.
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The latest development version of the GNOME desktop in the road to GNOME 3.14 is now available.
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I spent last weekend in Beijing attending GNOME Asia 2014; yeah, long trip from Europe just for 3 days, but it was totally worth it. The worst part of it was of course fighting jet lag when I arrived, and fighting it again 3 days later when I came back to Spain
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There are hundreds and hundreds of Linux distributions available at this point in time. Most users stick with the major Linux distributions. But what is a major Linux distribution?
Off the top of my head I can think of Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Zorin, Elementary, Mageia, Slackware, Gentoo and Puppy. Then there are the Ubuntu spin-offs such as Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Gnomebuntu and Edubuntu
Behind all these distributions there are a host of other distributions that you may have heard of but not yet tried. Peppermint, Manjaro, Point Linux, Crunchbang, Kali, Bodhi, Knoppix, SLAX, SolydXK, Antix, Chakra, OS4, Korora, KWheezy and SparkyLinux. I could go on and on.
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The Clonezilla team released a new development version for their Linux distro, but this is not a very large update and it only integrates a small number updates and changes.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of May 27, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Earlier this month, when Red Hat was busy delivering a flurry of OpenStack-related announcements, news also came from the company that it is collaborating to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack. Red Hat is forming alliances aimed at delivering a carrier-grade telecommunications offering based on Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), and OpenStack.
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Fedora
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Last week I shared a concept for the Fedora.next logos with you, and I received quite a lot of feedback. Thank you for that. Smile The feedback I received mostly clustered along these lines in some form or another:
The server logomark doesn’t read as a server to everyone – it’s too rounded.
The workstation logomark looks too much like a flip phone to read as a laptop.
Okay. I thought I might take that feedback and fart around with the designs some more, and record a bit of a stream of consciousness of what the heck I did so you can follow along and see where it’s coming from. I opened up the SVG source of the original designs in Inkscape and poked around a bit.
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Fedora 21 when released late in 2014 will effectively retire support for a lot of old graphics card drivers.
Going back to last year have been plans to drop support for really old GPUs from Fedora 21. It’s been a few months since then and these really old X.Org drivers are still set to be slaughtered from the Fedora repository.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“We are pleased to offer the first ARM 64-bit Server-on-a-Chip production silicon with full certification for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, including all the relevant server workloads and tools to allow commercial hyperscale deployments on X-Gene,” Applied Micro’s vice-president Gaurav Singh said in a statement. “The X-Gene plus Ubuntu offering means enterprises can now capture substantial TCO savings for their scale-out datacenters.”
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Canonical wants to make it as easy to manage Ubuntu-powered clouds from your smartphone as from a traditional PC. That’s the goal behind a new mobile-friendly interface for browsing open source Juju charms that Canonical’s design team outlined recently.
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Presumably, Google’s new prototype still runs Linux, like its earlier, Ubuntu-based autonomous Prius.
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Google has experimented in the past with its self-driving cars by modifying production cars from automakers. Now Google plans to build its own cars from scratch.
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An “emergency cleanup interface” has been added to the Mir server for trying to better recover the system in case of problems.
Alexandros Frantzis and Alan Griffiths of Canonical added the EmergencyCleanup interface on Wednesday. What this new Mir display server interface does is allow handlers to be defined that will be called in case of Mir hitting fatal errors. The hope is that if these handlers are called if Mir is going to crash or run into other serious problems, they’ll be able to return the system to a usable state in order to provide a clean user experience.
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Flavours and Variants
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This tutorial shows how you can set up a Xubuntu 14.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e.that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Xubuntu uses the lightweight XFCE desktop environment.
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Elementary OS “Isis,” the next iteration of the famous operating system that managed to capture everyone’s attention in just a couple of years, now has a development version available for download.
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An open-spec COM that runs OpenWRT Linux on a MIPS-based Ralink RT5350 SoC has won its Indiegogo funding. The $20, IoT-focused “VoCore” measures 25 x 25mm.
How low can you go? Tiny computer-on-modules (COMs) for Internet of Things (IoT) applications are popping up everywhere, with recent, Linux-ready entries including Intel’s Atom or Quark-based Edison, Ingenic’s MIPS/Xburst-based Newton, Acme Systems’s ARM9/SAM9G25 based Arrietta G25, and SolidRun’s quad-core i.MX6-based MicroSOM. Now, an unnamed Chinese startup has raised over six times its $6,000 Indiegogo funding goal for what could be the smallest, cheapest Linux COM yet.
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The chip maker wants its In-Vehicle Solutions to be the foundational technology that drives the development of autonomous cars.
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Intel announced a Linux- and Atom-based hardware/software platform called Intel In-Vehicle Solutions for assisted driving and eventually self-driving cars.
Intel says its Internet of Things Group achieved revenue of $482 million in the first quarter, up 32 percent year-over-year, “driven by strong demand for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.” While some of that appears to be Windows-based, Linux is the chief platform going forward in its current line-up of Tizen Linux based IVI reference systems. Linux is also the platform driving the newly announced Intel In-Vehicle Solutions (IIVS), which initially combines IVI with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) features. IIVS will eventually migrate to semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, says Intel.
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Phones
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Android
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Codenamed Moorefield, Intel’s latest 64-bit chip is expected to make a high-profile appearance at the upcoming Computex conference.
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Intel made a strong pitch to Android developers at AnDevCon in Boston on Thursday, underlining the company’s determination to play a larger role in the mobile market.
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This week Samsung is drawing a lot of buzz with its announcement of the Samsung Digital Health Initiative, which will be based on open hardware platforms and open software architecture. The initiative has several arms, but one primary area of focus will be on delivering very smart wearable devices that go well beyond the capabilities of wearable health devices such as Fitbit. In fact, Samsung officials are touting wearable devices that monitor blood pressure, deliver electrocardiogram (ECG) readings, and more.
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Samsung has announced open hardware and software platforms that will enable developers and researchers to create innovative wearables and digital health algorithms.
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If publishers tune out at the mention of “open source” approaches to publishing, it’s largely out of habit. For many, the idea of making content freely and publicly available is akin to surrendering the central asset of their businesses. But open source digital technologies are encouraging some to reconsider, according to experts who spoke in New York yesterday afternoon at the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) at Book Expo America.
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With a grant from Intel, LSU CCT is being asked to develop open-source software focusing on simulation of flows through microscopes, such as those found in rocks involved in oil and gas extraction, by extending OpenFOAM, a popular open-source simulation software, according to the release.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome 37 Dev, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been released and is now available for testing.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The solution builds off HP’s larger efforts in the cloud, including the $1 billion being invested in R&D.
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BSD
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The developers of GhostBSD didn’t waste any time and released yet another development version, although they are now out of the Alpha stage. Maybe we won’t get as many Beta releases so that the final version is not delayed.
According to the changelog, cpio has been replaced with rsync for copying files during the installation, the kernel is now writable on the live DVD, which solves graphic card kernel loading for Intel and ATI, and the base of the distribution, FreeBSD10.0-RELEASE, has been updated to version 10.0-RELEASE-p3.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.
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Public Services/Government
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Cities and states around the country such as San Francisco, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire have passed bills to require municipalities to use open source software when possible. Why not a tech hub like New York City?
On Thursday, Council Member Ben Kallos will introduce the Free and Open Source Software Act that, if passed by the City Council, would bring the requirement to New York. The law would require the City to look first to open source software before purchasing proprietary software. In addition, Kallos, chair of the Council’s government operations committee, will introduce a Civic Commons bill to create a central site to store all of the open source software the City uses which could promote sharing among cities.
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Openness/Sharing
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Groundbreaking comics writer Alan Moore has teamed with a group of fellow creators to create a digital comic reading and creation platform.
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NanGate, Inc. – a provider of design-specific standard cell library IP and EDA tools for layout automation – announced that it has released the first edition of a new 15nm open cell library (OCL). NanGate developed the library IP based on North Carolina State University’s FreePDK 15nm open-source, non-manufacturable process. Challenges such as designing with FinFET transistors, metal double patterning, advanced interconnect layers and metal gate restrictions are represented in the new PDK.
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Open Data
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Technology enables us to understand today what risks may come tomorrow. The World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) works with governments, communities and other actors to bring together technology and information to help them understand and reduce natural disaster risks.
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Open Hardware
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3D printing is not yet a mainstream business activity, but the technology has progressed to the point where users can print three-dimensional objects and manufacture their own prototypes and replacement parts with relative ease. The open source community is advancing 3D printing technology by conducting experiments that could take it to the next level.
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Intel will have a open-source robot available for consumers by the end of the year, the company announced today during Re/Code’s tech conference.
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Programming
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The latest feature release Git v2.0.0 is now available at the usual places.
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The Hip Hop Virtual Machine (hhvm) makes PHP faster by providing Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation and it’s now something being baked into the PHP next gen branch.
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Health/Nutrition
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Even though the state of Oregon enacted a law to override the ability of localities to regulate their own food systems, local ballot measures to ban GMO crops passed overwhelmingly in Jackson and Josephine Counties on May 20, according to news reports. “We fought the most powerful and influential chemical companies in the world and we won,” Elise Higley, a local farmer with the anti-GMO group Our Family Farms Coalition, told The Oregonian. The Progressive magazine tells the backstory below and reveals that the preemption measure shares language with an ALEC model bill.
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That’s right. If you don’t buy into everything told you, it’s bad for your health. This is the stuff of dreams for anyone who wants you to buy into everything they say. I’m currently writing about the City of London Police so I’ll pass this link onto them, I’m sure they can use it. The researchers, who amongst the many things they fail to grasp (from the report I read) go on to say:
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Security
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The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving software security. OWASP works on the principles of open source software, particularly the idea that the community is the force of creation and contribution. The unique aspect here is that OWASP is not software, rather a set of guidelines created by the community to help developers plug security holes in their code.
Security has become a very important aspect of software development lately, but not everyone is aware of ways to write secure code. You may think, “my team of developers is very experienced/skilled/efficient, they can write 100% secure code,” but if you follow the news you are aware that even bigshot websites are regularly brought down or have their user data compromised. Your website should be well-prepared to avoid such attacks by following these guidelines by OWASP.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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TransCanada will have to meet two extra safety conditions if it gets the go-ahead to build the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, due to concerns from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that defects could occur during construction.
PHMSA slipped in the two conditions towards the end of the appendices of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement, released this January. They dictate that TransCanada hires a third-party contractor chosen by PHMSA to monitor Keystone XL’s construction and report any faulty construction techniques back to the agency. In addition, TransCanada will be required to adopt a quality management program to make sure that Keystone XL is “built to the highest standards by both Keystone personnel and its many contractors.”
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Finance
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It is so deeply embedded, so seamlessly rooted and integrated into what we think of as ‘our self’, that when expressed oftentimes it is (intentionally) mistaken for something else entirely. Our indoctrination begins at birth in tiny little ways, mostly personal in nature, with our parents and care givers the initial delivery system. From day one out of the womb we are conditioned via adoring smiles and Coochie Coochie Coo’s that we are exceptional, one of a kind and King of the house. A few minutes of screaming has everyone running to stem the tears and change the pee pants. And it is all downhill from here.
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The collapse of the monetary system awaits the world in the near future, says financial expert James Rickards. Russia and China’s desire to rid the US dollar of its global reserve currency status is an early sign of the “increasingly inevitable” crisis.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s campaign is reportedly negotiating a settlement with prosecutors in the long-running “John Doe” criminal campaign finance probe — and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which for months has attacked prosecutors and portrayed the investigation as baseless, is livid.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Are you aware that smart devices can collect information about your personal activities? If not, you are one of the 53% of British internet users that were unaware that smart devices such as smart TVs, fitness devices and in car-navigation systems can collect data.
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Sometimes you have to wonder about people who hold government positions and the absolutely ludicrous statements they make. Following Ed Snowden’s big NBC interview, NBC apparently asked former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to respond to Snowden’s pretty convincing claims that all the hand-wringing about “harms” he caused have no basis in fact. In the interview, Snowden points out, accurately, that no one has yet been able to show a single individual harmed by the revelations. McFaul then makes what may be the single dumbest statement we’ve heard to date on this whole debate, arguing that the “harm” is that other countries now trust us less — and that this is somehow Snowden’s fault, rather than, you know, the fault of the NSA which is doing the surveillance…
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A near-complete failure as Secretary of State (if you are not sure, read this), Kerry is apparently relegated within the Obama administration to the role of mumbling bully-boy statements, faux-machismo rantings whose intended audience and purpose are very, very unclear. Did Kerry think he might persuade Snowden to take up the challenge and fly back to the U.S.? Maybe meet Kerry in the Octagon mano-a-mano? No, Kerry sounded much more like Grandpa Simpson than America’s Senior Diplomat. – See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/29/kerry-tells-snowden-to-man-up-and-come-home/#sthash.PUdzNxZj.dpuf
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The Cabinet Office has started an early pre-consultation process looking at removing barriers to sharing or linking different databases across government departments. The rationale is that this can help Government “design and implement evidence based policy, for example to tackle social mobility, assist economic growth and prevent crime”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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iracy is wrong, piracy is theft. That’s that we are told. I personally refuse to watch the trash from Hollywood or your mainstream music et al, mainly because I think its manufactured nonsense aimed at markets either too lazy or too slow witted to find entertainment in more engaging mediums (such as reading, listening to the radio…you heard of those?)
Now despite Piracy NOT being theft (if applied to Sec 1 of the Theft Act in the UK, which for me clearly defines what theft is), today we are looking at some claims made by the City of London police and finding out exactly what they are doing to combat the threat they claim of “piracy”.
This is not an article on if you agree with infringement of copyright or not. I support CC and FOSS – I have no care or interest in the industries which make these multi-million pound movies, nor the movies themselves.
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City of London Police – Why won’t you name the sites you claim to have closed down? – I believe I know the answer and its because they are not closed at all and just some word play by people who either don’t understand the concepts they are talking about or are intentionally looking to mislead. – Is there any other reason? Are my opinions incorrect? Please by all means give your reasons.
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