05.14.14
Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Windows, Android, Mavericks, iOS, these are just some of the world’s most popular operating systems, and they all have at least one thing in common: They’re all not made in China. Tired of using foreign created software to power their computers, China is looking to promote their own domestically created desktop operating system.
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Countries that have made a move towards FLOSS and GNU/Linux are many. This is happening whether or not sycophants of M$ say GNU/Linux won’t work. This is happening because GNU/Linux works for real people doing real things. The difference is that M$ doesn’t get to bundle its OS with everything and there are alternatives to Intel. Further, the world is sick and tired of the weakness of that other OS.
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Desktop
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The folks who sell security software are seeing similar results and use GNU/Linux themselves and may even be giving up on defending that other OS against malware. Instead they may supply tools for rapid detection and response.
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Considering that security suites aren’t commonly used with Linux on the desktop, this is a legitimate question and worthy of being answered in depth. In this article, I’ll look at how malware affects the Linux community, what vulnerabilities often get ignored and what you should do about it.
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Server
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There is money to be made in the cloud, even in an era where the Amazon and Google are in a race to the bottom for pricing. That’s the message coming from Rackspace’s management during the company’s first quarter 2014 earnings call.
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IBM has opened its mainframe Linux and Cloud Innovation Center in Nairobi that will seek to provide the government, private sector institutions and universities with extended big data, analytics and cloud computing through the IBM zEnterprise.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Besides AMD’s R9 290 “Hawaii” open-source support being broken and still not working right even after the hardware has been available to consumers for a half-year, with the Linux 3.15 kernel there’s also problems right now for those with newer AMD Radeon GPUs.
In particular, AMD Radeon GPU hangs have been quite common on the release candidates thus far of Linux 3.15. For the past few weeks I have been running into hangs when running demanding OpenGL processes on a system with various Radeon HD 7000 / Rx 200 series graphics cards. Fortunately, a few days ago there’s been some upstream notice and work around the issue.
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I’ve just pushed to upstream mesa support for occlusion query, which means that freedreno now advertises OpenGL 2.0…
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Benchmarks
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Along a similar theme to Rich Geldreich’s recent post on A Game Developer’s Perspective On Linux Driver Quality, here are some OpenGL sample tests of OpenGL 3.2 through OpenGL 4.4 with many different graphics drivers.
Christophe Riccio has carried out some tests of OpenGL samples at all levels using the NVIDIA 337.61 Beta, AMD Catalyst 14.4 Release Candidate, Intel 10.18.10.3574, Mesa 10.1.1 with Intel hardware, and Mac OS X 10.9.2 with its OpenGL stack. These tests aren’t Linux-specific but in the case of the Intel tests and also the NVIDIA driver support being about the same between Windows and Linux, the results are rather interesting.
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Applications
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Popcorn Time, an open source Netflix-style torrent streaming application for Linux, Windows and Mac which is quite popular these days, was updated to version 0.3 beta recently, bringing some major improvements such as TV series support, new user interface, user settings, bookmarks and more.
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If you use more than one computer, be it multiple desktop PCs, mobile devices, laptops, or remote servers, you are probably using some form of synchronization to transfer data between devices.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Yesterday marked the first release of Tesseract, the open-source game forked from the Cube 2: Sauerbraten code-base two years ago and since then has just been worked on by a handful of open-source developers. After trying out this inaugural Tesseract version, it’s quite a nice small game with decent OpenGL visual capabilities and okay textures with its in-game assets being comparable roughly to Xonotic or Unvanquished.
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Phoenix Online Publishing is terrified but darkly compelled to announce that The Last Door: Collector’s Edition will be coming to Steam, GOG, and other major online retailers for PC, Mac and Linux on May 20th, 2014, as well as the Phoenix Online Store. A multiple Best Games of the Year award-winner, this low-res, high-suspense point-and-click adventure, hailed as “a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft,” will feature all-new puzzles, scenes, and stories, as well as enhanced graphics and remastered sound.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasma Next has been built to eventually replace the current KDE Applications and Platform, which seems to have run its course. The project is still being maintained and new versions will still be released, but the new Plasma project is the future.
To make things more manageable for the developers, the project has been separated in a few smaller ones that in the end will come together in a single, bigger product. This is not only a change of name, but a true evolution of KDE.
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I have some posts to write about Cantor but first I would like to request a help to KDE packagers of several Linux distros around the world.
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The Kate guys released a new feature in KDE 4.13 release: an improved code completion for all languages supported by KTextEditor. It use the same XML file to syntax highlighting from each language to provide this new code completion.
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.13 series. This release contains only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Style fixes to Music 3.13.1 in Add to Playlists dialog were added to Music 3.12.2 to be consistent with other apps using list boxes. The bug for the notifications not showing up if media art is not found was also fixed.
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These days it seems like there’s a Linux distro for every kind of user, including those who need robust audio and visual applications. Linux Insider looks at AV Linux and finds that it’s a great tool for content creation. AV Linux comes bundled with a huge selection of audio and visual software.
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After releasing the Mini ISO about 2 weeks ago, +Antoni has released PinguyOS 14.04 (full) recently, an Ubuntu (14.04) remaster that ships with many popular applications and tweaks.
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Joli OS is being discontinued.That the latest news about Joli OS, a desktop distribution that has since been replaced with a browser-based platform called Jolicloud. Both Joli OS and Jolicloud are published by a French company that goes by the name Jolicloud.
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The Clonezilla developers released a new development version for their Linux distro, but this a very small update and it was only released for the same of a single package, drbl, which has been updated to version 2.8.24-drbl1
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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US-based software company Red Hat Inc. will open an office in Jakarta as the open-source software provider sees a big market potential for its products.
Damien Wong, a senior director with Red Hat who is responsible for the Southeast Asian market, said that Red Hat was confident in setting up its business in Indonesia because the company saw huge opportunities for business development.
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Red Hat announces an OpenStack partnership with NetApp as well as a community initiative centered around its ManageIQ cloud management technology.
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This week’s OpenStack Summit conference is proving to be a showcase for many announcements of tools that can enhance and extend cloud computing deployments. Mirantis has delivered an online database and aggregation site for vendors and applications in the OpenStack ecosystem.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has a number of interesting services running and most of them are known to users, but others don’t usually pop up in conversations. This is just the case with errors.ubuntu.com, a tracker that shows what the most common errors found in Ubuntu systems are
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Canonical is now offering what Shuttleworth called “Chuck Norrris Grade” private clouds. This means that Canonical will offer fully managed, OpenStack private clouds with carrier service service level agreements (SLA)s.
Canonical is adding private cloud hosting to its business model because as Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s SVP of Worldwide Sales & Business Development, explained, smaller companies have a great deal of trouble holding on to OpenStack architectures. “It’s not uncommon for a company to go through three architects in six months because the demand is so high for OpenStack experts. So to help our customers get up to speed on OpenStack, we decided to offer hosted private cloud services.”
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In another demo, Canonical demonstrates the world’s first 64-bit ARM server running OpenStack.
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Ubuntu has always been about breaking new ground. We broke the ground with the desktop back in 2004, we have broken the ground with cloud orchestration across multiple clouds and providers, and we are building a powerful, innovative mobile and desktop platform that is breaking ground with convergence.
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An Ubuntu Touch emulator is one of the few things that Canonical was missing, and now, with the help of Ubuntu developer Ricardo Salveti de Araujo, users are able to test the latest images released by the team before deciding whether to install the operating system on the phone itself.
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Canonical is getting into the hardware business – albeit in a very limited way – to help customers who aren’t ready to build out their own clusters start experimenting with private clouds based on Ubuntu and OpenStack.
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Olimex has entered the computer-on-module market with three Linux- and Android-ready COMs, based on Allwinner’s A13 and A20 SoCs, and on TI’s AM3352.
In addition to selling oLinuXino branded open source single board computers based on Allwinner SoCs, such as the Allwinner A20-based A20-OLinuXino-Micro SBC, Bulgaria-based Olimex is now getting into computer-on-modules. Its first three COMs include.
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As usual with CompuLab, much of this I/O is customizable in terms of the numbers of interfaces provided. For example, the COM provides one or two MIPI-CSI camera ports. The CM-QS600 is supported with documentation and ready-to-run software packages for both Linux and Android, says CompuLab.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Following a flurry of leaks last week, the G3 is once again in the spotlight. This time we’re looking at a spy shot showing the back of the black and white versions, and what appears to be the top of the golden version.
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Ahead of the expected summertime release of LG’s new G Watch, their Android Wear-powered smartwatch, LG is building some hype by giving us a little glamour video of the watch.
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Android
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The Moto E isn’t the sort of phone you dream about or sketch concepts of in your spare time. It’s made simply and of simple materials; it’s neither extremely thin nor especially light. It’s just a regular smartphone. What’s different about the E, however, is its price: $129 without a contract. Nobody’s going to fantasize about this phone because almost everyone who wants one should be able to afford it.
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Google is being tight-lipped about when the 64-bit version of Android will be released, but Linux development group Linaro has built a version of the open-source operating system so mobile applications can be written and tested by manufacturers and developers rushing to catch up with Apple.
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Panasonic, a leading provider of business telephone systems1, announced today the KX-UTG200B and KX-UTG300B (Session Initiated Protocol) SIP phones, the latest additions to its lineup of advanced UT Series SIP-based telephones. Designed to enhance communications and lower operating expenses, the new SIP endpoints provide businesses an affordable and user-friendly SIP telephony solution with plug and play simplicity and flexible configuration options.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google developers have released a new build of their Chrome browser, 36.0.1976.2, and this is quite a hefty update, full of various changes and improvements. Even so, it’s not recommended that you switch to the new version, if you already are running on of the two other branches, Stable or Beta.
Developers usually make the big changes in the Development branch and most of those modifications trickle down into the Beta, and then finally into the Stable. It may take a while for all the features to be implemented for the majority of users, but this is the safest way to do it.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Splice Machine’s transactional SQL database for Hadoop has now become available as a public beta. Splice Machine offers its own database which is relational, but which is tailored to take advantage of the scalability of Hadoop.
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Sometimes it’s best to go with what you know. For countless developers, database managers, analysts, and others who need to store data in a traditional relational database system, PostGreSQL is that system. But as the demands on databases grow, so too must the software which underlie them.
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Databases
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CMS
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The Australian government is looking to build a unified content management system (CMS) based on the open source Drupal software to power the 1,200 websites used across the government, according to the Australian Department of Finance.
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Business
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At the DevOps Summit in Amsterdam Harm Boertien presented how OSS can help to embed a DevOps culture. He explained how Schuberg Philis shares software/cookbooks inside and outside of the company and showed how this is beneficial for them and brings benefits to the industry as a whole.
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Funding
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If you fancy owning and building your very own open source laptop you will be pleased to know that the crowd funding campaign for the Novena open source laptop has been successful in raising over $300,000.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.9, which was officially released in late April, brings many improvements to the de facto standard Linux compiler stack. Debian and Ubuntu developers are now working on landing this annually-updated compiler stack for their Linux distributions.
The defaults are already pointing to the GCC 4.9 components for GDC, GCC Go, GCC Java, and Gnat (Aada) front-ends on all architectures while the GCC 4.9 default for C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ front-end handling is a few weeks out. The Fortran support is also in the process of moving to GCC 4.9. When these changes land within the Debian archive, they’ll be picked up within Ubuntu Linux, well in time for Ubuntu 14.10.
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There’s been a lot of new hardware to become supported by Coreboot lately while the newest addition is the handling of the Lenovo Thinkpad T520.
The Sandy Bridge T520 is now supported by Coreboot after last month there was T530 Coreboot support. The T520 is now supported with Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs and Intel BD82X6X Southbridge.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Lawrence Lessig will recieve a Lifetime Achievement Webby Award for co-founding Creative Commons and “standing up for collaboration.” This year also marks the 25th anniversary of the Web, making the timing of an award for a man thought of by many as “a true hero of the open, collaborative Web” more than fitting.
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Happened to me more than once. In my attempt to treat myself with something nice from Amazon, I occasionally end up with the wrong product. Something that’s not exactly what I had in mind when hitting the “add to basket” button. Something that didn’t match my expectations or simply of inferior quality by my standards. It’s times like these I find myself contemplating whether I should leave a negative review or simply not bother. I usually go for the latter one. But had I known what an impact that decision can have, I might have gone the opposite way.
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Here’s a great way to start your Tuesday: During a House Judiciary Committee meeting last week, Rep. Joe Garcia (D-FL) picked his ear, looked at the wax on his finger, and then ate it.
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Science
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When the audio of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling a female friend not to “bring black people” to his team’s games hit the internet, the condemnations were immediate. It was clear to all that Sterling was a racist, and the punishment was swift: The NBA banned him for life. It was, you might say, a pretty straightforward case.
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Health/Nutrition
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The World Health Organization has designated the spread of polio in Asia, Africa and the Middle East a global public health emergency requiring a coordinated “international response.” Three countries pose the greatest risk of further spreading the paralyzing virus: Pakistan, Cameroon and Syria. In an unusual step, the WHO recommended all residents of those countries, of all ages, to be vaccinated before traveling abroad. The organization also said another seven countries – Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria and Somalia – should “encourage” all their would-be travelers to get vaccinated. Until recently, polio had been nearly eradicated thanks to a 25-year campaign that vaccinated billions of children. In Pakistan, the increase in polio is being linked to a secret CIA ploy used in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. With the help of a Pakistani doctor, the CIA set up a fake vaccination campaign in the city of Abbottabad in an effort to get DNA from the bin Laden family. The Taliban subsequently announced a ban on immunization efforts and launched a string of deadly attacks on medical workers. We are joined by two guests: Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English newspaper, who has been covering the rise of polio in Pakistan since the bin Laden raid; and one of Pakistan’s leading polio experts, Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta.
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Champions of organic food brought the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) meeting to a halt on Tuesday as they raised their voices against what they see as the takeover of the organic standards by the corporate food industry.
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Against the decaying skyline here, a one-of-a-kind engineering project is rising near the remains of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a new report on antibiotic resistance (ABR). It details resistance to antibacterial drugs in different parts of the world, along with resistance data on specific pathogens such as the resistance of E. coli bacteria to third-generation cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones. The report outlines the health and economic burden due to antibiotic resistance and looks specifically at antibiotic resistance in food-producing animals and the food chain.
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Security
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The link-shortening service Bitly announced late last week that it’s ramping up its development of two-factor authentication following a compromise that leaked user information on Thursday.
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Allegations that the NSA installed surveillance tools in U.S.-made network equipment, if true, could mean enterprises have more to worry about than just government spying.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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There is a plausible argument that can be made that, by the West working internationally to actively dismantle current states that do not work in the interest of the U.S., and with the domestic collapse of democratic principles and practices within the government in the U.S. (e.g. NSA spying on U.S. citizens and on England, Germany, and France; the recent Supreme Court rulings removing as many bars as they can to the power of money in the electoral process, such as in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [2010] and also McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission [2014]), with various peoples’ response to the nation-state breakdown in Africa, the Mideast, and Europe, from Libya to Egypt to Ukraine, combined with the fact of globalization (resulting in economic interdependency of states), there are indications that all of these U.S. intrusions into other nation-states are bringing in their wake the reduction of the primacy of the nation-state, if not its collapse altogether.
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Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world
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Local leader in Donetsk says that if vote for independence wins, all Ukraine soldiers in region will be considered “illegal occupiers”
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The incompetent US Department of State spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, who was hired because of her history as a Democratic Party campaigner and not because of any understanding of international relations or foreign affairs, described the referenda in the easternmost oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk (Lugansk) as a replay of Russia’s “Crimea playbook.” She was using the same talking points as her boss, US Secretary of State John Kerry.
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While this government props up big business and delves into our private lives, there is a tradition of individualism on the left waiting to be reclaimed
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…this government props up big business and delves into our private lives, there is a tradition of individualism on the left waiting to be reclaimed
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The youngest son of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, has been appointed head of legal affairs at Ukraine’s largest private gas producer — a move he said would benefit Ukrainians and the country’s economy.
In a statement published Monday on its website, Burisma Holdings announced Hunter Biden would join its board of directors and head the company’s legal unit.
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Kidnapping of girls and trafficking of girls to Syria has also been reported from Mali, invaded by France and NATO members in 2013 as well as from Egypt and Libya invaded by NATO and NATO-led Al-Qaeda “rebels” in 2011. Since 2014 the kidnapping of girls has begun spreading into Europe, with the “disappearance” of two Austrian – Bosnian girls being the best known incident.
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Israel is the world’s largest exporter of drones and drone technology.
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The strikes, which occurred early morning, reportedly killed at least two suspected militants.
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On May 13, the Center for Effective Government joined other open government organizations in urging Attorney General Eric Holder not to appeal the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York Times Co. v. Department of Justice. In April, the Second Circuit ruled that the government must disclose the legal analysis justifying the government’s drone-based targeted killing program, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Times.
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“If we don’t inject a moral and ethical discussion into this, we won’t control warfare,” said Jody Williams, who won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign for a land mine ban treaty.
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It is impossible not to gain the impression that the criteria for being awarded prestigious honors for services to “peace”, “humanity” or “distinguished public service” is a candidate who is duplicitous, vicious, stone hearted and above all prepared to kill, plan killings or rejoice in killing on an industrial scale as brutally as can be devised.
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Consider that just in the past few days, a Federal Aviation Administration official revealed that in March a US Airways passenger jet nearly collided with a small-unmanned aircraft that looked similar to an F-4 Phantom jet and was flying above 2,000 feet over Florida. These details and the fact that the drone was described as “camouflaged” suggest that it was not a civilian drone.
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The Senate confirmation process of Harvard Law School professor David J. Barron ’89 continues to provoke controversy as a vocal group of senators from both the left and right call for the public release of memos, which Barron allegedly wrote during his time as a lawyer for the Justice Department. Those memos established the legal justification for the Obama administration’s controversial drone policy.
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Essentially confessing to mass murder and multiple other crimes, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former boss of both the NSA and the CIA, admitted that the Obama administration has been murdering people around the world based solely on the so-called metadata collected by U.S. intelligence agencies. The controversial insider’s remarks confirmed growing fears and warnings by critics of the out-of-control federal government that, despite efforts to downplay its unconstitutional spying and assassination programs, Americans have much to be concerned about.
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“We had the last consulate to have a flag. There was an assassination attempt against the British Ambassador, and our facility had been attacked in a couple of lesser fashions,” DesJarlais said. “Why was our ambassador there meeting with the Turkish ambassador? The rumor was the guns were going though Benghazi, through Turkey into Syria. That is the missing big piece to this puzzle. Why was there no military help?”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The National Climate Assessment is the definitive statement of current and future impacts of carbon pollution on the United States. And the picture it paints is stark: Inaction will devastate much of the arable land of the nation’s breadbasket — and ruin a livable climate for most Americans.
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In a little-publicised speech last Saturday, Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews confirmed that tonight’s federal budget will include draconian attacks on young people, especially those who are unemployed or disabled. Andrews announced that the Liberal-National government will enforce a system of “Earn or Learn”—extending measures that were introduced by the previous Labor government.
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New Zealand’s court of appeal has refused refugee status to a family from Kiribati, a Pacific island which is quickly sinking beneath the sea
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Finance
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Somebody figured out, once again, how to build a machine that can quantify the life of an African-American man and make money off him. They figured out how to use the value of his body to fuel their machine. They learned how to drive its engine, and how to turn a profit. They call it prison privatization. I call it mining black gold, and I have watched black gold be mined from the streets of my community every day.
I make my home in Tennessee — and for too long, so has the Corrections Corporation of America. To a company like CCA, our country’s oldest and biggest for-profit prison corporation, each young black man that goes into the prison machine represents more than $20,000 a year. To CCA, a company that profits off of human bodies, mass incarceration equals mass profits. While their profits soar, we suffer.
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Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency released its report on the expected costs of implementing the state’s alternative to the Common Core and found they could be as high as $125 million.
The reason for the high cost begins with the initial switch and development of the new standards, costing $26 million. This comes after the state already spent $6 million to adhere to the Common Core before Governor Mike Pence (R) signed the legislation rejecting the federal standards in March.
The rest of the costs come from retraining programs for the state’s teachers, which could be as high as $2,000 a teacher. However, if adequate online resource are secured, as Fordham Institute notes, the costs could fall to $500 a teacher. This means the final price tag could range from $32.5 million to $125 million.
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Party cites HMRC figures showing bottom 90% of taxpayers share less post-tax income but top 300,000 have more
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Calls for crackdown as investigation finds huge Indonesian corporations evading tax through network of secret shell companies in British Virgin Islands and other tax havens
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Students who claim that economics courses fail to explain the 2008 crash are gaining support from British business. Here, two Cambridge academics agree it’s time for a change
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As universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is being imposed by force.
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Britain’s self-employed army can no longer be ignored. For the first time in the country’s modern history, a significant proportion of the labour market (one in seven) has no boss. According to official figures, the number of registered self-employed workers has risen by more than 600,000 since 2010 – an unprecedented increase of around 15 per cent that shows few signs of subsiding.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In the wake of a federal court’s recent ruling halting a state criminal investigation into spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and other candidates, misinformation about the investigation and court rulings has run rampant.
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Censorship
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Open Rights Group believes that today’s ruling by the European Court of Justice could pose a threat to free speech online. The Court ruled that an internet search provider ‘is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal data which appear on web pages published by third parties’.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the 10-year jail sentence given on Wednesday to a Hong Kong publisher preparing to release a book critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
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Privacy
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Michael Kirk: There was an agency in the United States of America that had spied on and got its fingers slapped for doing it in the 1970s. The great bright white line at the agency, which was unbelievably powerful in its ability to surviel, eavesdrop, and wiretap, was never turn those eyes and ears towards Americans. And the people who worked there believed it. And then, this thing called 9/11 happened and (…) faster than you could imagine, the rules were changed. The lines were blurred, and the government, the National Security Agency, turned all of that power on the American people, and the people who did the turning, the scientists (…) witnessed it and many many of them worried about it, and talked to us.
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Concerned about weaknesses in USA Freedom Act, Zoe Lofgren and colleagues pushing to prevent NSA from weakening online encryption with new amendment
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The IETF has taken the next small step down the long, long road of protecting user traffic from spooks, snoops and attackers, setting down the basic architectural principle that new protocols should resist monitoring.
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The New York Times and the Justice Department are under fire for bowing to the National Security Agency and either hiding (the Times) or misinforming (DOJ) the public about crucial pieces of the NSA’s secret spying programs.
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Part of that story is highlighted on PRI’s ‘The World’ radio show today. After 9/11, the National Security Agency wanted new ways to spy on electronic interactions in the US. “The Program, as it was called, spied on telephones, Internet connections, metadata from emails and almost every form of electronic communication.”
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Facebook’s messaging application doesn’t support encryption, but an open-source chat program, Cryptocat, has made it possible to chat with friends there over an encrypted connection.
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Like many people in this modern world, I struggle with the tension between the conveniences offered by the latest technology and the loss of privacy that comes with them.
Nowhere is this devil’s bargain more evident than in the blossoming field of so-called contextual computing.
When I picked up my phone earlier this week, it told me — without a single tap on my part — that my estimated commute time was 51 minutes and that I had a lunch scheduled with a friend. The friend’s Facebook photo showed up next to the appointment.
The phone also showed my other appointments that day and a customized feed of news and weather, and it gave me the flight status of an approaching trip.
Sadly, it did not bring me coffee.
My phone is trying to anticipate my needs based on what it knows about me — the context of my life. And what it knows seems like almost everything.
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Conservative ministers are pushing for the security services to be given new powers to spy on people’s internet use amid claims they might have saved Drummer Lee Rigby
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Privacy International files legal complaint that accuses GCHQ of installing malware on millions of devices without their owners’ permission.
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The civil rights group Privacy International has today launched the groundbreaking legal challenge at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London, claiming that GCHQ’s alleged use of such spying techniques is “incompatible with democratic principles and human rights standards”.
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UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been sued by Rights group Privacy International on Tuesday, demanding an end to surveillance programs deemed to be “incompatible with democratic principles and human rights standards.”
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The makers of a mobile phone app that allows users to chat to each other and then destroy the messages have confirmed the sale of the business to Yahoo.
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Say you wanted to send an email more secure than any message that had ever been transmitted in human history, a message with absolutely no chance of being intercepted. How would you do it?
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The recent revelation by former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden that metadata is used for targeting killings shocked many including fellow US intelligence operatives, Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst and fellow at the Washington-based Center for International Policy, told RIA Novosti Tuesday.
“It was shocking to hear that confirmed at such a high level,” Goodman said, adding that Hayden’s smug manner had made the comments even worse.
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Documents from a U.S. agency had revealed that Australia has sought the help of the Americans to increase surveillance on suspected terrorists. According to The Guardian, Australia’s intelligence agency needed the help of the U.S. spy agency to monitor Australians suspected of having ties with extremists.
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New documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden show New Zealand’s GCSB closely enmeshed with some of the most controversial parts of the United States’ spying apparatus.
The documents were released with journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place To Hide, which tells the story of Snowden’s National Security Agency disclosures and what they mean.
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The NSA is the powerhouse agency for code breaking, and while such activities are beyond my capacity, others quickly figured out the simple letter substitution code. It reads, “Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each month to explore careers essential to protect in [SIC] your nation.” I’ll forgive them the failed grammar at the end given that they did have to code the whole thing.
It’s both a sign of how hard agencies are working to try to land talent, a broader issue in general for the government and government contractors especially in the face of the bad publicity surrounding the Edward Snowden disclosures, and the evolving landscape of modern intelligence work. It used to be that a well-placed professor would recommend you to a recruiter, and a guy dressed like Dick Tracy would show up to take your temperature.
I’m flattered, CIA, that you are interested. Really, it’s nice to be wanted. But admittedly I’m a bit squeamish. I prefer to work in a dying profession (journalism) as opposed to one which involves people dying.
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The National Security Agency paid Canada to help develop its surveillance capabilities, according to documents published by Glenn Greenwald in a new book.
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American journalist Glenn Greenwald is accusing the U.S. National Security Agency of breaking into tech hardware to install surveillance bugs before the products are shipped to unsuspecting global customers, in a new book about the NSA’s mass surveillance practices.
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GQ has a lengthy interview this week with the journalist who helped engineer Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in advance of his book No Place to Hide. In true Greenwald fashion, he doesn’t hold back: he rips the The New York Times for acting like the government is on its editorial board, trashes Hillary Clinton as “banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion” and blasts Tim Russert, the late dean of Sunday political talks shows.
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Civil Rights
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Future American historians will marvel at how long the CIA engaged in such utter unconstitutional lawlessness as the torture of its captives and drone-plane executions of alleged terrorists – including U.S. citizens – without trials, using “kill lists” provided by President Barack Obama (“Obama’s kill list – All males near drone strike sites are terrorists,” rt.com, May 30, 2012).
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It is now accepted that the war on terror has generated an extensive repertoire of its very own terror. Drone strikes resulting in extrajudicial killings, rendition and torture – zones of exception like Guantanamo Bay come to mind, as does Britain’s complicity in extraordinary rendition and torture.
Then there are the normalised, everyday forms of terror operational in Britain that rarely register as state-sanctioned violence because they are understood to keep us safe. This includes MI5 and police raids without charge, compulsory schedule 7 detention and questioning and stop and search of communities made suspect.
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Should your government be able to take away your citizenship? In the United Kingdom, the government has had the legal authority to revoke naturalized Britons’ citizenship since 1918. But, until the terrorist bombings on the London transport system in 2005, this power was rarely exercised. Since then, the government has revoked the citizenship of 42 people, including 20 cases in 2013. British Home Secretary Theresa May has said that citizenship is “a privilege, not a right.”Most of the 42 held dual nationality. Mohamed Sakr, however, did not. His parents came to the United Kingdom from Egypt, but he was not an Egyptian citizen. Therefore, by stripping him of citizenship, the British government made him stateless.
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Senior ministers Tzipi Livni and Yitzhak Aharonovitch condemn ‘price-tag’ attacks as author Amos Oz calls militants neo-Nazis
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The most sacred document wherein the U.S. celebrates its Fourth of July holiday, the Declaration of Independence, is known for having some of the most revolutionary words in history in regards to the equality of men who at the time had been forever accustomed to having caste-like systems whether it be Empires, noblemen and serfs, or a monarchy rule the American colonialists lived under.
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Shipwreck found off coast of Haiti thought to be one of the most significant underwater discoveries in history
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Noam Chomsky is a world renowned academic best known not only for his pioneering work in linguistics but also for his ongoing work as a public intellectual in which he has addressed a number of important social issues that include and often connect oppressive foreign and domestic policies – a fact well illustrated in his numerous path breaking books.(1) In fact, Chomsky’s oeuvre includes too many exceptionally important books to single out any one of them from his extraordinary and voluminous archive of work. Moreover, as political interventions, his many books often reflect both a decisive contribution and an engagement with a number of issues that have and continue to dominate a series of specific historical moments over the course of 50 years. His political interventions have been historically specific while continually building on the power relations he has engaged critically. For instance, his initial ideas about the responsibility of intellectuals cannot be separated from his early criticisms of the Vietnam War and the complicity of intellectuals in brokering and legitimating that horrendous act of military intervention.(2) Hence, it becomes difficult to compare his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, coauthored with Edward S. Herman, with his 2002 bestseller, 9/11. Yet, what all of these texts share is a luminous theoretical, political, and forensic analysis of the functioning of the current global power structure, new and old modes of oppressive authority, and the ways in which neoliberal economic and social policies have produced more savage forms of global domination and corporate sovereignty.
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“Governments around the world are two-faced on torture – prohibiting it in law, but facilitating it in practice” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, as he launched Stop Torture, Amnesty International’s latest global campaign to combat widespread torture and other ill-treatment in the modern world.
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Two reasons: Firstly Estonia is regularly held up as a model of e-government and e-voting that many countries, including the UK, wish to emulate. Secondly, after years of e-voting being off the UK agenda (thanks in part to ORG’s previous work in this area), the chair of the Electoral Commission recently put the idea of e-voting for British elections back in play.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Yesterday, sources told the New York Times that the FCC wants to allow internet service providers to jack rates for higher speed delivery of certain content like online video, which will likely create a tiered system: those who can pay to deliver their content in the fast lane, and those who can’t. In an email, Canadian digital policy expert Professor Michael Geist didn’t mince words: “If the reports are true—the FCC is [vaguely] denying it tonight—it guts net neutrality in the United States.”
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As Geist explained to me, there isn’t “a practical difference between deliberately slowing some traffic and deliberately speeding up other traffic.” To him, the end result is unavoidable: “A two-tier Internet based on payments from content owners that can afford it. That strikes at the heart of net neutrality.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The head of copyright issues in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and Information says that U.S. authorities expelled 34 Saudi students from the United States after they were found using pirated software. Forty other citizens were denied entry into the U.S. on the same grounds, the source claims.
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Today, French anti-piracy agency HADOPI handed the government a long-awaited report on the development of “operational tools” for dealing with online piracy. Several key areas are outlined, including the creation of a new type of takedown notice designed not only to take content offline, but keep it offline for up to six months.
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A year ago, we wrote a whole post looking at the copyright questions raised by Canadian astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield, doing a cover version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” along with an astounding music video in space, as he prepared to return to earth. Hadfield, for months, had been a great ambassador for the space program, using a variety of social media to communicate with folks back on the planet about what his day was like. The “Space Oddity” video just cemented his place as a key figure helping to generate interest in the space program through regular public communications with everyone in a very accessible way.
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The former operator of USAWarez.com and USATorrents.com, who has served more than two years in prison for copyright infringement, has outed several prisons for showing pirated movies to their inmates. One of the prisons mentioned says that the matter is still under investigation.
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05.13.14
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security at 10:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Don’t trust Ars Technica on software issues
Summary: Dubious reporting and abject bias in a Web site that’s known for good reporting on matters of Internet law
THIS MAY not have been pointed out before, but Ars Technica, and especially its writer Dan Goodin, has spent the past year throwing FUD at GNU/Linux on a very regular basis. It’s all about security. That’s their angle. Ars Technica, which offers very poor journalism in some areas, deserves to know where it is going wrong so that it can improve.
Some of Ars Technica‘s staff has got to be very dishonest and biased to do what it sometimes does (not to generalise to all the staff). It doesn’t seem to be the fault of editors, perhaps the selecting (hiring) of writers. Here they have Microsoft Windows, which one of their writers advertises on an almost daily basis with no shame (Microsoft Peter) after another one did this (Microsoft Emil) and that’s not even taking into account the load of paid Microsoft advertising in the site. Ars Technica should know that Windows is a Swiss cheese of an operating system, with massive issues like Conficker and the NSA-developed Stuxnet (Microsoft helps the NSA get back doors in Windows). According to new reports like this one, “PCs running Windows 7 or Windows Vista have a higher chance of being infected with malware than Windows XP computers, according to Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report.”
Vista 7 was advertised as being secure, but it has been a total sham when it comes to security, as we showed in dozens of posts. Vista 7 has NSA back doors, so it’s not surprising that it is not secure. It’s insecure by design. Don’t expect the Microsoft section of Ars Technica to say this. It’s just propagandistic.
Does Ars Technica criticise Microsoft Windows over security? Hardly. One of their writers, Dan Goodin, has seeded a lot of the past year’s hype about GNU/Linux ‘insecurity’, ranging from alarmist reports about GnuTLS [1, 2] to OpenSSL [1, 2, 3. Watch Mr. Goodin making another menacing headline out of a bugfix for code-execution flaw in Linux.
Only Mr. Goodin knows why he’s always picking on GNU/Linux, hardly ever discussing the elephant/s in the room. Our guess is, based on a long pattern of FUD, is that he’s on some kind of Jihad against GNU/Linux and Ars Technica happily facilitates it, just as Ars Technica facilitates utters lies by Microsoft propagandists whom it employed (never mind the paid advertising from Microsoft). It should be noted that even the person who covers FOSS most often at Ars Technica is a ‘former’ Microsoft booster, replacing one who was actually very good (Ryan Paul). Is Ars Technica hiring writers to match the sponsors (advertisers)? █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Mono at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: .NET is proprietary software for Windows, no matter what Microsoft-affiliated liars (and those bamboozled by them) try to say
THIS post will quickly address some lies before they go ‘viral’ in the media, most probably through Microsoft moles who pretend to be journalists (they know who they are).
Miguel de Icaza became almost an integral part of Microsoft when his company, Xamarin, accepted money from somewhat of a Microsoft proxy and then announced a deal/partner with Microsoft. Right now he is advertising Microsoft propaganda about .NET supposedly being ‘cross-platform’ (Mono used to serve a similar type of propaganda), spilling into all sorts of blog posts.
.NET is not Open Source and it is definitely not cross-platform. It is proprietary software for Windows, no matter how many self-serving lies we may hear from a Microsoft-linked Xamarin and turncoats like Miguel de Icaza. █
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Posted in Law, Microsoft at 10:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Nokia’s proxy-like role in Android contributes to yet more privacy violations and disregard for the law
Microsoft’s arrogance and disregard for the law could not be much clearer than this (image copied above for future reference). “Report immediately for piracy. Not even kidding,” said one person in the comments.
Several times in the past we wrote about what Microsoft had planned for Nokia, focusing especially on privacy violations of a high degree [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Perhaps one of the obvious concerns here is not just Microsoft’s flagrant disregard for the law but also its abuses against privacy, which we wrote about many times before. One new article correctly points out that “[u]sing Microsoft products may be unethical for universities” because of privacy, not just because it’s proprietary. To quote:
Universities and researchers all over the world have a problem with Microsoft. It’s not just that the company forces expensive and dated software on customers. Using products like Microsoft’s email service Outlook is potentially in breach of the ethical contracts researchers sign when they promise to safeguard the privacy of their subjects.
The revelations about spying by the United States National Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – have led people everywhere to ask whether their data is secure.
But unlike many others, researchers face serious ethical implications if the answer is ‘no’.
When a researcher wants to carry out a study, s/he has to run it past an ethics review committee. This committee does its best to ensure that scholarly practices protect the privacy and safety of research subjects.
Medical researchers gather sensitive information about our fragile bodies, psychologists about our minds, law scholars about our crimes, sociologists about our private lives.
Microsoft deserves to be shunned from computing for many other reasons, but its inertia and its control over the press keeps masking or censoring judgment of its practices. █
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Posted in IBM, Patents at 10:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Legacy of Obama and monopolistic corporate players
Summary: A look at what happened to the US patent office under Obama and under the leadership of IBM’s pro-software patents mole, David Kappos
THE awful USPTO hardly needs discrediting; it discredits itself. This is the office where almost every silly idea that a small child can come up with becomes a patent. It’s not even a joke, it’s factually the case.
Some people are obviously digusted by such Obama appointees like David Kappos and one of our readers called it “revolving door”, noting the following article that unmasked the real rate of acceptance of patent applications (nearly 19 out of 20 get accepted):
Yes, President Obama’s Patent Office Started Approving Basically All Patent Applications Again
Want to know why there are bad patents? Because there’s no such thing as a true “final rejection” of a patent (i.e., you can always keep refiling and try, try, trying again and again until it’s approved) and because the former head of the Patent Office, David Kappos, saw it as his main challenge to get rid of the giant backlog in getting patents approved. And thus, soon after Kappos took over the USPTO, we noted that patent approval rates started shooting upwards. Over the previous six years or so, the approval rate had been in a gradual decline, with it really starting to drop off around 2004, just as the Supreme Court started hitting back on a bunch of bad patent rulings, and making it clearer that, no, not “everything under the sun” should be patentable. However, Kappos never appeared to view patent quality as important, merely patent quantity and ending the backlog — and thus, the patent office started to take an approve anything mentality.
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Basically, in 2013, the true allowance rate for patent applications was 92% (much higher than the USPTO’s officially reported number of 54%). The discrepancy is because the USPTO’s number counts “rejections” for patents as if the patent was truly rejected, and doesn’t look at how many patents actually make it through the full process.
People should lose their respect for patents granted by the USPTO. These don’t deserve much serious attention when every silly thing becomes a patent. Software developers should waste not even a minute looking into individual software patents. A system so corruptible will, sooner or later, be defeated. Fairness in competition will be greatly harmed by what companies like Microsoft and IBM made out of the USPTO. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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So many times we read here in comments and in articles out in the web that migration to GNU/Linux is hard/impossible because… It is hard/impossible to move a ship from some factory inland to a shipyard but it is routine/easy if only the parts need to be shipped. Stop making migration to GNU/Linux look hard by identifying various problems. No problem prevents migrating a good chunk of IT to FLOSS on GNU/Linux.
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Desktop
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Instead you could try an operating system based on Linux. These are free, come with everything you need for basic computing, and will run great on older hardware. If you’re going to give this a whirl, check out Linux Mint. The MATE edition should run better than XP, in fact.
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And in the last few years, it has been made easier for beginners to use, thanks to its whimsically named New Out of Box Software, or NOOBS, system. This helps you install a few of the various operating systems it runs, which are based on the free Linux.
You might still end up doing some tweaking, but fortunately, the Raspberry Pi site has excellent tutorials for beginners.
Via’s APC Rock ($79) and Paper ($99) are similar systems with a bit more oomph.
When you’re poking around for DIY computers, you might come across the Arduino board. While this is a fantastic system for hobbyists, it won’t work as a computer.
Android computers
Android isn’t just for smartphones and tablets.
There are a few companies making Android “sticks.” These are the size of a USB and plug right into the HDMI port on your TV — similar to a Chromecast or Roku Streaming Stick.
However, these run a full version of Android, which means you can surf the Web, install apps and anything else you’d do on an Android tablet.
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Alan Solomon, creator of Dr Soloman’s Antivirus, has admitted to using Linux to avoid viruses rather than try to combat them on Windows.
His comments come after Symantec’s Brian Dye estimated that antivirus systems do not even catch half of cyber attacks.
Writing of his decision on his blog, Solomon said: “There doesn’t seem to be much malware for Linux. I don’t know why. Some say it’s because Linux’s security is better, some say it’s because fewer people use it. I’m not really bothered.”
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China’s Ministry of Industry and Information of Technology (MIIT) urged Windows XP users in China to switch to domestically made computer operating systems, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday.
“We want users to pay attention to the potential security risk brought by their Windows XP system as Microsoft ceased providing further patch services. At the same time, the ministry will work on developing China’s own computer system and applications based on Linux and we hope that the users will give more support to these domestically made products,” Zhang Feng, chief engineer of MIIT, told CCTV.
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Server
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SME Server 9.0 RC1 is based on CentOS 6.5, just like all the development versions that came before it, and contains a lot of improvements, changes, and new features. This is normal, especially with such a complex Linux distribution.
“SME Server is the leading Linux distribution for small and medium enterprises. SME Server is brought to you by Koozali Foundation, Inc., a non-profit corporation that exists to provide marketing and legal support for SME Server.”
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Linux, ‘dual live’ data centres and a collaborative relationship between development and IT operations have all helped play a role delivering infrastructure stability while driving rapid ongoing growth at Tyro Payments, according to Sascha Hess, the vice-president for operations at the acquiring bank.
In the half year to December 2013, Tyro reported $25.4 million in revenue — a 36 per cent increase in revenue over the previous corresponding period. The processor has been in the BRW Fast 100 for four consecutive years.
Tyro Payments is “basically a software development company with a banking licence and a sales arm”, according to Hess. The company was founded just over a decade ago and is Australia’s only independent EFTPOS provider.
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Setting up Web servers is fairly simple. In fact, it’s so simple that once the server is set up, we often don’t think about it anymore. It wasn’t until I had a very large Web site rollout fail miserably that I started to research a method for load-testing servers before releasing a Web site to production.
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There is no single best Linux distribution for every enterprise’s servers. It all depends on what your company needs.
Today, Linux is more than a free OS to mess around with — it runs core business applications. When comparing the most popular Linux distributions, corporate Linux users care about support throughout the stack, not just an attractive feature set.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 3.14, saying that he was “feeling pretty good about it all”. The new 3.14 kernel includes a number of new features, among them deadline scheduling for real-time tasks. Traditional Linux systems have extended the concept of scheduling priorities to thos special tasks that run in the real-time scheduling classes. Like their non real-time brethren, real-time tasks would then be scheduled according to priority, with the highest receiving time first. Unlike regular tasks, real-time tasks running with the SCHED_FIFO class are actually able to lock up a Linux system by hogging all of the available CPU time at maximum priority, which is one reason why real- time scheduling is a privileged operation.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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You may not have heard about Yokadi. It is a command-line based TODO list manager which I started some years ago and work on with a bunch of fellow contributors.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Bridge, an M.C. Escher-like logic puzzler from developers Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda, will expand its reach on Steam to Mac and Linux next week. The IGF Student Showcase winner will be available on Mac and Linux on May 16 and will be compatible with SteamOS and Steam Machines as well.
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The Unreal Tournament announcement made by Epic Game last week took everyone by surprise, but the Linux community is now showing what it’s capable of. It seems that the Unreal Editor has been ported by someone before Epic got a chance to.
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We only pointed Another Star out a few days ago and it has now pushed out the Linux version! The game caught my attention with its really authentic looking retro visuals, complete with a CRT screen effect.
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4MLinux Game Edition, a special Linux distribution based on Busybox, Dropbear, OpenSSH, and PuTTY, which also features a large collection of games old and new, has just reached version 8.2 Beta and is now available for testing.
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Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament was once a popular multiplayer shooter. It was already forgotten as the time went by and many graphical advances were made. It has been seven years since we were graced by this excellent shooter, and now, it is making its way back to us and it will be needing some help from its loyal fans in order for another sequel to be made.
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Two of Valve’s undisputed classics are making their Android debut today, courtesy of Nvidia’s Shield console: Portal and Half-Life 2. Costing $10 each, the two games were ported by Nvidia, which explains why they’re only playable on the Shield. Still, the job has been done with Valve’s unreserved blessing and a promise by Doug Lombardi that you “can expect the same gameplay” as on the original PC versions. Even if the recreations aren’t perfect, having two of the PC’s greatest titles available on the Shield brings it a lot closer to its promise of being a true mobile console. With a price cut to $199 and a growing library of games and features, Nvidia’s efforts at recreating PC-class gaming on an Android portable are looking increasingly compelling.
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Tesseract is a open-source game project we covered when the project was in its infancy back in early 2012 as a very interesting fork of Cube 2 / Sauerbraten.
Over the past two years Tesseract has been under heavy development. In that time, Tesseract has become much more visually advanced compared to Sauerbraten and has been working on features like OpenGL 3 and Occulus Rift support.
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After being finally released for the Android platform, XCOM: Enemy Unknown finally conquered all distribution platforms. Now it seems Firaxis has turned their attention to colonizing the sub-platforms available for PC users, which is Linux, the last frontier till universal presence. According to a recent edit a few days in the Steam Database, it seems XCOM: Enemy Unknown is all set to move in to Linux, through Steam for Linux.
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A modder who goes by the name Downing has developed a portable version of the game system, which he revealed on his website. It’s powered by batteries and boasts a 7-inch, 720p display. Downing showed off his Ouya Portable in pictures and a video, which you can see below.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The developers of the Slackel KDE are not trying to get the newest packages into the operating system, but to provide a stable experience for all the users, which the most important aspect for any Linux distribution.
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A new cycle and lots of interesting possibilities! Will KF5 and Plasma 5 be supreme? All welcome at the Kubuntu kickoff meeting this european evening and american afternoon at 19:00UTC.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Now is the time for a new update to our stable release, this is 3.12.2.
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If you ever built an Android app, you have definitely used some of the built-in layouts available in the platform—RelativeLayout, LinearLayout, FrameLayout, etc. They are our bread and butter for building Android UIs.
The built-in layouts combined provide a powerful toolbox for implementing complex UIs. But there will still be cases where the design of your app will require you to implement custom layouts.
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The Tracker developer took a very big leap when the GNOME 3.12 branch was release and they decided that it’s the perfect time to ditch the old numbering system, which advanced really hard (the last stable was 0.17.2) and to get to 1.0.
The package was stable to a long time, but it must have created some confusion to have something numbered like that.
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GTK+, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, is now at version 3.12.2.
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Pinguy OS 14.04 Full edition is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), but the developer chose to depart from the base distribution and adopt GNOME 3.10 as the desktop environment, with a few changes.
The developers of Pinguy OS wanted to make something different from what users can find right now, and one of the ways they can achieve that is by implementing an interesting selection of applications.
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CoreOS, a new Linux designed for massive server deployments and using the Docker containerisation system for applications, has been delivered as a beta.
The open source Docker technology runs applications within containers – so they are virtualised and can be moved between systems, but without having to have a virtual machine for every one. It is becoming popular for its ability to move projects between development and operations swiftly.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The last time I wrote about PCLinuxOS I was a bit critical about its Linux kernel version being quite a bit behind most of the other mainstream Linux distributions, so I was pleased to see that they have really caught up with this release. It has kernel 3.12.18, KDE 4.12.3, X.org X server 1.12.4, LibreOffice 4.2.4.2 and Firefox 29.0.1. Those are all quite good, and that Firefox release is really “hot off the press”.
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Today in Linux news Katherine Noyes scoured Linuxdom to find “Linux Pros’ top command line secrets,” if there’s really such a thing argues one blogger. In other news, Jesse Smith reviewed new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Release Candidate and Jamie Watson reviewed quietly released PCLinuxOS 2014.05.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon Linux 14.05, an operating system designed for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance, but don’t want to spend days getting things working properly, is now available for download.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s other major announcement is with eNovance, an OpenStack vendor that builds private clouds for service providers (among others) and manages applications deployed on major public clouds. The companies are collaborating to add telecom and network functions virtualization (NFV) features to OpenStack — something eNovance has specialized in. The idea is to make OpenStack more useful in carrier-grade applications and to create a set of network virtualization features that aren’t dependent on a proprietary solution. (One possible analogy for the latter is how Asterisk provided a solid open source alternative to proprietary PBX systems.
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Dave Jones of Red Hat has announced the latest version of his Linux system call fuzz tester after several months of development.
The Trinity 1.4 fuzz tester release features more targeted fuzzing of VM-related syscalls, other improvements, and support for scaling to larger machines. Trinity should be able to run on systems with many CPU cores now.
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It took a while, but Red Hat has finally open-sourced its ManageIQ cloud management software as part of OpenStack.
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“Too many CIOs are still clueless about how often open source is being used in their own organizations,” said a recent post that labeled open-source as both ‘frightening and fantastic’. A survey of 820 CIOs reported that 62% of respondents think that more than half of purchased software will be open source in five years. If you are a CIO who is looking to migrate to open source, then keep reading. Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and the first billion dollar open source software company. Red Hat uses a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux® and middleware technologies to customers.
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Fedora
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Marcela explains that, like Base Design, Environments and Stacks is not a product in itself. It exists to serve the other products, and it does this through new or improved methods for developing, testing, packaging, and deploying software for the Fedora community.
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Debian Family
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wattOS, a lightweight, energy-saving Linux distribution designed not only to bring your old computer back to life, but also to eat up as little power as possible, is now at version R8.
WattOS is a very light and fast operating system that was initially based on Ubuntu, but the developers have decided to switch to Debian. They didn’t provide any reasons for doing so, but they wouldn’t be the first ones to make this decision.
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For five years the wattOS Linux distribution has been around as being an energy-efficient distribution powered at its core by Ubuntu, but with their new release they have shifted to being powered by Debian.
WattOS R8 was released this morning and they are now running this distribution off Debian Wheezy with some backports plus some components from Debian Jessie was also pulled in.
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“We are very happy to present to you today, straight from LinuxTag conference in Berlin, the first integration of the shiny new desktop environment LXQt into a distribution image. This is clearly labeled as a Dev-Release, so do not trust it, it might kill your kittens, although the developers of LXQt flagged it as being beta status.”
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you ever used a VPN connection in Ubuntu you know that you need to download a package from the official repository called network-manager-openvpn that allows users to import an openVPN file with all the setting and certificates in place.
This particular feature used to work in the early versions of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but right before the launch something was broken in the network-manager-openvpn packages, which crashes the entire network manager during the import.
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The Orange Box is designed to be a “spectacular development platform” for showcasing Ubuntu, MAAS, Juju, Landscape, OpenStack, Hadoop, and other technologies. Canonical’s Orange Box can be a compact cloud, powerful computational machine, or a lightweight cluster
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Flavours and Variants
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Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor based on LXDE and it’s built by a completely different team. They only use Ubuntu as a base, but the rest of the packages and the work that go with it are provided by an independent team.
The latest version of Lubuntu is an LTS release, just like the Ubuntu system that it is based on, which means that it will be supported by the developers for three years, for various packages, and it will receive updates for the Linux kernel for the next five years.
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Parrot unveiled a Bebop Drone running Linux on a dual-core SoC, with a 14-megapixel HD fisheye camera and a WiFi-extending remote with Oculus Rift support.
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Everyone knows at least one guy who uses Linux. I don’t use it myself, but I knew that one guy. He built all his PCs from spart parts, he knew the ins and outs of programming, he was a little bit of an anarchist (ok, more than a little). He fits the bill of the Linux user stereotype– the young hobbyist and hacker.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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According to the source for SamMobile, Samsung is having trouble porting KitKat to its third-generation Galaxy S flagship and has decided to cancel the update for the phone. Things could change in the coming months, but for now, all plans for bringing the update to the Galaxy S III are on hold. It’ll surely displease users of the device, but unless Samsung can find a solution to whatever issues it is facing, the Galaxy S III will probably spend its life on Android 4.3.
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Tizen has created an opportunity for app developers to expand into wearable technologies, says Marmalade Technologies CEO, Harvey Elliott. Hundreds of games have already been added to the Tizen app store since Marmalade began offering SDK support last year for the Linux-based mobile operating system, he said. And this is just the beginning.
Developers who are interested in learning how to port their games and enterprise applications to Tizen on the Marmalade cross-platform development tool can learn all about it at the Tizen Developer Conference, June 2-4 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco. Here Elliott gives us a preview of his talk at the conference and discusses Marmalade’s interest and involvement in Tizen.
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Android
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The upcoming Nvidia Tegra K1 (64-bit) System on a Chip (SoC) featuring Denver GPUs (Tegra 132) has been spotted in the Android source code. The chip is an iteration of the Tegra 124 K1 (32-bit) SoC we reported first about in 2013 which was the first Nvidia Tegra SoC featuring Kepler based GPU cores.
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If Samsung does indeed release a smartphone running Tizen it would be another sign that the company is not entirely happy in its relationship with Google and the amount of cash it can make from Android-powered handsets. As the world’s number one mobe-maker, Samsung is certainly shifting hardware by the container-load. But as Apple, Amazon and Google have shown, sales of apps and content can deliver cash for years after a device is first sold.
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An Android tablet that was advertised as an open device for hackers appears to have gone off the market, quite soon after its release.
The ZaTab ZT2 (seen above) was advertised late last year on the website of the small California company ZaReason, which also sells PCs and laptops loaded with GNU/Linux.
It was listed along with the laptops on the website, but now is no longer featured there. There are, however, specific pages for this tablet and also the first one which the company produced, but one needs to know the URLs to view them.
The page for the ZT2 says the device is now out of stock.
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If you work in an organization that isn’t focused on development, where computer systems are used to support other core business functions, getting management buy-in for the use of open source can be tricky. Here’s how I negotiated with my boss and my team to get them to accept and try open source software.
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When they launched, you’ll recall I was skeptical about the model, not least because of the company’s attitude to open source. The folks over there have continued with their self-confident tone all along, with a “wait until renewal, that’ll show you” attitude and a general disdain for anyone questioning their approach. I and other skeptics were firmly put in our place — but seems we made a decent call of it after all.
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HP (HPQ) has added its name to the list of official backers of OpenDaylight, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) project supported by the Linux Foundation. HP is now a platinum member of the project.
The Linux Foundation, which sponsors OpenDaylight as a collaborative project, is welcoming the addition of HP to the line-up of vendors helping to lead OpenDaylight — which already includes Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft and Red Hat as platinum members — as a sign of industry convergence around OpenDaylight as the SDN platform of choice.
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The language of FLOSS and how you describe FLOSS to people is delivering a shocking change in mindset. Words will be resisted. Seeing the stuff in action, performing impossible feats with ease thanks to a FLOSS licence and doing all that the hardware can do without restriction is a powerful motivator. That’s why you see big images of cars being driven in ads for cars rather than just words. The words may fill in the gaps or finish the deal but performance and price should be the starting point of any conversation about migration to GNU/Linux and FLOSS applications. People resist change. They embrace doing more with less pain and suffering.
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Events
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Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, kicked off the OpenStack Summit with about 4,500 developers, end-users, and executives with a sermon on the gospel of open source software development.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Among others, Firefox OS 1.3 comes with improved graphics, audio and gaming support with WebGL, asm.js and WebAudio being included, the galery app has received a feature that enables the users to sort the picture by month, Dual-SIM support has been added, the apps from the home screen are organized in Smart Collections, being categorized under Social, Games or Music, the Play FM Radio can be listened through the speaker, support for both email notifications and POP3 email accounts has been added, the Camera app has received both auto-focus and flash features, on supported devices, the Music app can be controlled via either the notification tray and the lock screen and support for sharing multiple files at once over Bluetooth connections has been added.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The CoreOS Linux project debuted its first beta release last week. CoreOS aims to deliver a thin operating system that is optimized to deliver Docker containers for virtualized applications. Beyond just being a thin operating system, CoreOS has taken steps to enable and provide high-availability.
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As the OpenStack cloud computing platform marches forward, there are more and more tools and applications arriving that are interoperable with it. With many IT departments either deploying OpenStack or considering doing so, there is a need for a repository that aggregates these enhancement applications and provides information about them.
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There are a lot of different OpenStack cloud technology vendors, training options and compatible drivers, and now there is a place to find them all.
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OpenStack is up against some pretty big odds, taking on the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft to determine the future of cloud computing. And it thinks of itself as the Rebel Alliance up against the Death Star. Or at least one prominent OpenStacker speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta does.
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Databases
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Sahoo chose MySQL as TradeMonster’s database, which might seem an odd choice given the extreme high availability and performance demands. Partly, he says, the decision was based on the fact that “with trading applications, three-fourths of activity is read-only.” More important, however, was the complex caching technology and fault tolerance Sahoo and his team built around the MySQL core (which is replicated using Microsoft SQL Server, one of the few pieces of commercial software in the mix). The back end has been so bulked up that Sahoo says it’s prepared to scale as much as 7,000 percent…
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle announced the beta release of its Solaris 11.2 Unix operating system at an event in late April. Solaris became part of Oracle’s product portfolio with the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. Under Oracle’s leadership, the first major update to Solaris was in November 2011 with Solaris 11. Oracle positioned Solaris 11 from the beginning to be an operating system for the cloud. The Solaris 11.1 update debuted in October 2012 and provided incremental updates to the Unix platform. Now, Oracle is testing out Solaris 11.2 with a beta release that enables users to experience some of the new features. One of the biggest additions to Solaris 11.2 is a complete OpenStack cloud distribution, including compute, storage and networking components. Oracle has also further improved networking in Solaris with the Elastic Virtual Switch, which enables a distributed virtual switching platform. Virtualization gets a boost in Solaris 11.2, with the inclusion of Kernel Zones, which enables a full version of Solaris to run on top of a Solaris container. From an image management perspective, Solaris 11.2 introduces the concept of Unified Archives, which aim to make it easier to archive and create application images. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in Oracle’s Solaris 11.2
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CMS
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The Australian Government is planning a whole-of-government Content Management System (GovCMS) using open source Drupal software hosted on public cloud, Government Chief Technology Officer, John Sheridan announced.
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Funding
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Hewlett-Packard said it plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years to develop and offer cloud-computing products and services.
The company said it will make its OpenStack-based public cloud services available in 20 data centers over the next 18 months.
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BSD
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The main theory is to take the kernel configuration file, skim over it line by line it and see if you have the hardware, which you know by checking your dmesg. Dmesg shows which devices and drivers were loaded.Remember that you do not modify GENERIC, but a copy of it.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Liberty Eiffel is a free eiffel compiler started from SmartEiffel code base. Its goal is to retain from SmartEiffel its rigour; but not its rigidity.
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We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.19
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Well, after play some time with elisp I wrote this package to add a entry called GNUstep to Emacs menu. This entry has three options, two are to make simple App/Tool projects (for beginners). The third is for replace the non English characters to its corresponding code. This is useful for strings and plist files. This three commands can be executed with, respectively: M-x make-app, M-x make-tool y M-x replace-foreign-characters. The image below show the menu:
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In the upcoming Med-Hoc-Net 2014 we will present a paper describing GNUnet’s CADET service (previously known as “mesh”) which allows a GNUnet application to communicate securely with any peer on the network knowing only it’s Peer Identity.
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Public Services/Government
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Open source solutions are used in all parts of the organisation at the Military Prosecutor’s office in the Bulgarian province of Plovdiv. The public administration’s IT staff by default uses the Debian free software distribution, which has found its way to all kinds of computing devices, large and tiny.
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The open government movement has become super-charged over the last year. Largely in part to the people and organizations on the front lines. At the 2013 Code for America Summit held in San Francisco, California, I got a chance to speak with some of the people who are volunteering their time, finding better ways to make government work for us, and bridging the gap for citizens to access and participate in their government.
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Plovdiv is a province in Bulgaria which you may have never heard of. However, something out of the ordinary is going on there, literally exemplifying the limits of open source usage in Government offices. The Military Prosecutor’s office in Plovdiv uses a combined solution of Debian and Ubuntu along with other open source software for all their computing needs.
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Licensing
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This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
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So, in the face of a technical mechanism designed to enforce the author’s beliefs about the copyright status of callers of this function, Oracle deliberately circumvent that technical mechanism by simply re-exporting the same function under a new name. It should be emphasised that calling an EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function does not inherently cause the caller to become a derivative work of the kernel – it only represents the original author’s opinion of whether it would. You’d still need a court case to find out for sure. But if it turns out that the use of ktime_get() does cause a work to become derivative, Oracle would find it fairly difficult to argue that their infringement was accidental.
Of course, as copyright holders of DTrace, Oracle could solve the problem by dual-licensing DTrace under the GPL as well as the CDDL. The fact that they haven’t implies that they think there’s enough value in keeping it under an incompatible license to risk losing a copyright infringement suit. This might be just the kind of recklessness that Oracle accused Google of back in their last case.
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Openness/Sharing
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If Bitcoin can open source the financial system, then it definitely should.
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Programming
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I went to a terrific workshop last week on identifying bird songs. We listened to recordings of songs from some of the trickier local species, and discussed the differences and how to remember them. I’m not a serious birder — I don’t do lists or Big Days or anything like that, and I dislike getting up at 6am just because the birds do — but I do try to identify birds (as well as mammals, reptiles, rocks, geographic features, and pretty much anything else I see while hiking or just sitting in the yard) and I’ve always had trouble remembering their songs.
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We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.3, which targets version 2.7.6 of the Python language. This release updates the stdlib from 2.7.3, jumping directly to 2.7.6.
This release also contains several bugfixes and performance improvements, many generated by real users finding corner cases our TDD methods missed. CFFI has made it easier than ever to use existing C code with both cpython and PyPy, easing the transition for packages like cryptography, Pillow (Python Imaging Library [Fork]), a basic port of pygame-cffi, and others.
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Standards/Consortia
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Here’s a brain dump of the things that sometimes drive me crazy about OpenGL. (Note these are strictly my own opinions, not those of Valve or my coworkers. I’m also in a ranty-type mood today after grappling with OpenGL for several years now..) My major motivation to posting this: the GL API needs a reboot because IMO Mantle/D3D12 are going to most likely eat it for lunch soon, so we should start talking and thinking about this stuff now.
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As companies become more comfortable collaborating through open source projects, some predict they’ll replace some of the slower-moving standards bodies.
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Bletchley Park, the home of British wartime codebreaking, opens on Monday with new lawns and a new visitor centre for the 150,000 people who come each year to explore the historic site.
The visitor centre is part of an £8m lottery grant won by the Bletchley Park Trust in 2011, which secured the future of the site and helped to restore the decaying huts in which many of the codebreakers worked.
But it also opens with some six foot-high fences – separating two museums which each claim the legacy of Bletchley – which have been described as a Berlin Wall and symbolise an ugly, long-running dispute with Bletchley Park’s neighbour, the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).
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Amazon’s secret campaign to discourage customers from buying books by Hachette, one of the big New York publishers, burst into the open on Friday.
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition
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Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the widespread population loss of honeybees, may have been caused by the use of neonicotinoids, according to a new study out of Harvard University.
Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine. They were first developed for agricultural use in the 1980′s by petroleum giant Shell. The pesticides were refined by Bayer the following decade.
Two of these chemicals are now believed to be the cause of CCD, according to the new study from the School of Public Health at the university. This study replicated their own research performed in 2012.
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Biologist Timothy Mousseau has been studying the lasting effects of radiation on the flora and fauna of Chernobyl, Ukraine.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Ernst clarifies her statement by saying Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003.
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Today, in response to George W. Bush’s arrival in Toronto, Canada, for a fundraiser with Bill Clinton, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Centre for International Justice issued the following statement:
“By allowing Bush to enter its territory, Canada is undermining the UN Convention Against Torture, which was adopted to ensure there are no safe havens for torturers. Canada is already under review by a UN committee for failing to take action when Bush visited in 2011. During that visit, four men brought forward claims of torture against Bush for the treatment they endured while detained at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan. Canadian law criminalizes torture wherever it occurs and Canada’s obligations under the Convention Against Torture make it clear that if a known torturer sets foot in the country, the government must investigate and prosecute if appropriate. Evidence of Bush’s role in authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo, and CIA black sites has been in the public record for years and Bush himself has admitted to his involvement. Canada is flouting the law by turning a blind eye to Bush’s visit.”
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When a massacre happens the horrors of the atrocities tend to distract the public’s attention from the details of how it came to be in the first place. This is known to provocateurs, be they in Kiev, Moscow or in Langley Virginia. Langley is the home base of the Central Intelligence Agency, of course. The CIA director visited Kiev, confirmed by the White House on April 15th, and “dozens” of CIA agents are reported to be in Ukraine “advising” the unelected coup regime as I type this.
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For the second time in a week, Ukrainian anti-regime protesters holed up in a building were killed by fires set by pro-regime attackers with ties to newly formed neo-Nazi security forces, reports Robert Parry.
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United States is, today, backing a fascist regime in Ukraine whose army is shooting people based upon their nationality…
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An article published at the Global Research website echoes the charge from the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which said that nearly 400 U.S. mercenaries are working with coup authorities to suppress the opposition in the eastern region of the country.
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The Twilight Zone of American Political Life Where Almost Every Word of News Isn’t What It Seems
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The current events in Ukraine, where the Nazi-admirers play not the smallest role, are just a part of the trend,that for the moment remains with no adequate reaction. For example the Kherson governor, appointed by Kiev, addressing the veterans on the May 9, called Hitler a “liberator.”
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The writer and Israel Prize laureate Amoz Oz said on Friday that those responsible for hate crimes against Arabs and Christians are “Hebrew neo-Nazis.”
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I was however saddened by the audience booing of the two young Russian girls. That was really nasty and unfair. They were scarcely more than children, for goodness sake. Putin is not their fault. That booing was an exhibition of racism; nothing else you can call it. If people wanted to make a point, they could have screamed for the Ukrainian girl – they didn’t have to boo the young Russians.
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Protest started today at the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The intention of protesters is to hold the plenum of all plenum’s (assembly), hundreds of people from all around Bosnia came to parliament today, some of them having marched on foot for 2 days covering around 120 kilometers on the journey.
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Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone
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It’s rare to hear a government official speak in contrite tones; rarer still if that official represents the National Security Agency. Recently, however, Anne Neuberger, a special assistant to former NSA Director Keith Alexander, did just that.
A year of revelations, courtesy of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, prepared the way. Since last June, the world has learned that the agency collects information on almost all U.S. domestic phone calls, spies on Internet activity – courtesy of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and Facebook – taps fiber optic cables and other key Internet infrastructure, uses digital dirty tricks to undermine worldwide computer security, breaks its own internal privacy rules, and as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept revealed earlier this year, is using “complex analysis of electronic surveillance… as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.” And that’s only the beginning.
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On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner proposal to amend the USA Freedom Act, the domestic metadata collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) of millions of Americans, passed unanimously by a vote of 32-0, in the House Judiciary Committee.
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Soon after a U.S. military drone killed about a dozen people on a remote road in central Yemen on Dec. 12, a disturbing narrative emerged.
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Attacks are indiscriminate. Mostly noncombatant civilians are killed. A 2012 “Living Under Drones” report explained.
Stanford University’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (SU) and New York University School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic (NYU) jointly prepared it.
Credible firsthand documentation was compiled. It “present(ed) (clear) evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of” Obama’s drone-strike policy.
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The experts gathering at the UN will be discussing a possible killer robots moratorium or ban. Professor Sharkey, a member and co-founder of the Campaign Against Killer Robots and chairman of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, pointed out that Killer autonomous robots “cannot be guaranteed to “predictably comply with international law.” He also told the BBC: “Nations aren’t talking to each other about this, which poses a big risk to humanity.”
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The drone destroyed the car in which they were travelling in the Wadi Abida district of the province, which is east of the capital Sanaa
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I BELIEVE that killing an American citizen without a trial is an extraordinary concept and deserves serious debate. I can’t imagine appointing someone to the federal bench, one level below the Supreme Court, without fully understanding that person’s views concerning the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.
But President Obama is seeking to do just that. He has nominated David J. Barron, a Harvard law professor and a former acting assistant attorney general, to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
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Soon after a U.S. military drone killed about a dozen people on a remote road in central Yemen Dec. 12, a disturbing story emerged.
Witnesses and tribal leaders said the four Hellfire missiles had hit a convoy headed to a wedding, and the Yemeni government paid compensation to some of the victims’ families. After an investigation, Human Rights Watch charged that “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.”
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Samiullah Khan Afridi, lawyer for Dr Shakil Afridi who helped the US find Osama bin Laden, said he wouldn’t represent him any longer after facing threats from militants, a foreign news channel reported on Monday.
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The US also turned to the Saudi regime to enlist the support of wealthy individuals as bankers to the Islamist counterrevolution. Cooley calls this “the creeping privatisation of the jihad” for which bin Laden became the foremost symbol. His organisation, al-Qa’ida (the base), was set up in 1985 under the tutelage of Saudi military intelligence, the Istikhabarat. As an unofficial ambassador of the Saudi regime, Hiro recounts how “bin Laden had by now initiated a scheme of recruiting volunteers from the Arab world to join the anti-Soviet jihad, an enterprise in which he had the active backing of the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki. This programme was then extended to the non-Arab Muslim world. By the time the Afghan mujadeddin captured Kabul in 1992, an estimated 35,000 Islamists from 43 countries had participated in the jihad, nearly two-thirds of them from Arab states, with the Saudi kingdom contributing 15,000 – according to Saudi foreign minister, Saud al Faisal – followed by Yemen, Algeria and Egypt”. In this way, the future leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia (responsible for the Bali bombing in October 2002), the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines and GIA in Algeria, all received training as guests of the CIA with bin Laden as their tour guide.
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What happened next is still not entirely clear, but a pair of Yemenis stormed into the barbershop, identifying themselves as police, and were immediately killed by the Americans.
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The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been recruiting Muslims to act as informants and eavesdrop on Muslim cafes, restaurants, barber shops, gyms and mosques since 9/11.
According to The New York Times, former and present NYPD officials say that the NYPD’s Citywide Debriefing Team has conducted hundreds of interviews with Muslims in New York City.
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Clift slammed the House Republican select committee effort, but she insisted that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens wasn’t a casualty of the attack directly, but instead a victim of smoke inhalation during the terrorist attack on not a diplomatic outpost, but one that was functioning as a CIA outpost.
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The CIA compound in Benghazi, along with the half-dozen or so related warehouses, were central into not just arming, but creating a rebel force to oust Assad much like what was planned a half-century ago in Cuba, but for much different reasons. Much like Cuba, anti-Assad rebels could never exist without outside help, both in arms and training. Benghazi also has many elements of Iran-Contra, where weapons were diverted then just as today. Much like Watergate, there is a sanctioned cover-up at the very highest levels of our government. And the now infamous finger-wagging denial of a president to an entire nation has been replaced by a ceremonious bow to a Saudi king, where we appear to be less deserving of a face-to-face denial. Instead, we are the recipients of another anatomical display of contempt—the posterior of a servant bowing deep to his master.
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Just kidding, and Mr. Kristof is just spouting liberal gibberish. I say kill all the extremists or use at least enough force so they give up. Mr. Kristof, the Post-Gazette and you liberals out there, that is the answer, not books. Not books and not President Barack Obama telling Muslims we love them — nor Hillary Clinton pleading that we had nothing to do with the anti-Islam video.
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A US drone strike has destroyed a car traveling in the southeastern Maarib Province on Yemen today, killing six people, all of whom the Yemeni government dubbed “al-Qaeda” suspects.
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Americans talk of drones in terms of terrorist targets and civilian casualties. But to the people who live in the strike zone, it’s become a part of their poetry.
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Their intent: to create images of the victims of Washington’s drone wars that could be seen from the sky. Smaller images have, in fact, been placed on rooftops in Waziristan. Their target audience: drone pilots like Bryant, Haas, and Lopez who, searching for targets to kill, might just see the face of the child of one of their previous victims.
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Is overwhelming national military power a reliable source of influence in world affairs?
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Last April, 63 Yemenis were reportedly killed in US drone strikes allegedly targeting al-Qaeda. No credible verification of that claim is available, and none of the victims have been identified. “Signature” drone strikes don’t require identification, we are told. It could take months, if not years, before rights groups shed light on the April killings, which are a continuation of a protracted drone war.
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You might think the president who joked about his authority to kill the Jonas Brothers with a drone strike if they got too close to his daughters might have an actual ability to “reach out” and, if not save the abducted girls, rain a little hellfire upon their captors. After all, during Obama’s presidency, he’s authorized roughly 400 drone strikes that have killed an estimated 2,700 to 4,100 people.
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British liaison staff are embedded with US forces in the Horn of Africa, the Ministry of Defence has revealed, as concern grows about redeployment of the UK squadron of 10 armed Reaper drones.
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A group of Nobel Peace Prize laureates are adding their names to a growing international effort to ban “fully autonomous weapons” or killer robots.
Signatories, which include activist Jody Williams, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former South African President F.W. de Klerk, warn robotic machines are “already taking the place of soldiers on the battlefield,” and are concerned that “leaving the killing to machines might make going to war easier and shift the burden of armed conflict onto civilians.”
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But the informal meeting will not culminate in binding policy, meaning that the future use of deadly automatic machines is still to some extent open.
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While he was an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Barron wrote at least two legal memos justifying the execution without trial of a U.S. citizen abroad. Now Obama is refusing to share that legal argument with the American people.
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U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) writing in an op-ed for Sunday’s New York Times, questioned the Obama administration’s actions of “appointing someone to the federal bench … without fully understanding that person’s views concerning the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.”
Last September, President Obama nominated the candidate in question, Harvard Professor David J. Barron, for Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Barron previously served as the acting assistant attorney general of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice, and Paul has serious concerns that, while serving in that capacity, he wrote “at least two legal memos justifying the execution without a trial of an American citizen abroad.”
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On Sunday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul published a New York Times op-ed Sunday calling for the release of controversial memos on drone strikes, which are authored by former Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) David Barron. For once, Rand has bipartisan support on this one, including — surprise! — from the ACLU. As the Senate prepares to vote on whether or not to approve Barron, controversy has erupted over Barron’s role in crafting the legal framework which enabled the drone strike, without trial, of alleged radical imam and al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki.
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According to Defense One news, every country could have armed drones within the next ten years. Every one. What will that mean for global security?
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It should not be a surprise to anyone to learn that drones are flying across America. Most people, when they hear the word drone, think of something that’s military; something that’s large; a system that’s lethal; something that’s hostile. This is simply not the drone I am talking about. Drones are used by the FBI, local law enforcement, university researchers, amateur photographers, the movie industry, farmers, utility companies and nosy neighbors (or enthusiasts).
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.
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This is a perfect example of a journalist adopting the mentality of a campaign strategist or a political operative. Of course a hard-right stance will go over better with the GOP base. But as a reporter, Karl’s first loyalty should be to the truth–and to explaining to viewers that what is good for Rubio’s political fortunes is bad for the planet.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Despite the current administration’s track record on transparency (completely lousy from nearly every angle), there’s little being done by the majority of the press to work around the roadblocks being set up by the government. While the administration has offered a few half-measures aimed at reining in the NSA in the wake of the leaks, the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) has gone the other way, forbidding employees from speaking to the media about even unclassified information.
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Not only that, but the percentage who justified “badgering unwilling informants” fell to 37.7 percent, down from 52 percent in 2002.
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Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment in 1972, at a time of mounting public concern over pollution, nuclear energy, pesticides, and other technology-induced hazards. OTA was conceived as an in-house think tank that would help Congress fact-check technical claims made by the various expert agencies of the executive branch (such as the EPA and the Department of Defense), while also forecasting coming technological quandaries. A twelve-member board, comprised of six members of Congress from each party, approved each OTA project, to help ensure the agency’s objectivity.
Over the years, OTA produced some 750 reports and assessments on topics ranging from global climate change to the accuracy of polygraphs. The studies were highly regarded for their ability to translate complex science-speak into accessible prose. The reports were made available to the general public as well as Congress, and were often Government Printing Office best sellers. Other countries, including the UK and Germany, copied the U.S. example, establishing their own versions of OTA.
The first rumblings of Congressional discontent emerged in the 1980s, when OTA published reports raising questions about the technological feasibility of the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In a 1985 assessment, OTA concluded that SDI’s goal of protecting the entire U.S. population from a nuclear attack would be “impossible to achieve if the Soviets are determined to deny it to us.” Three years later, another OTA report warned that SDI would stand a significant chance of “catastrophic failure” due to software glitches.
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This is not the first time that Holt has tried to revive the agency, and he says that he’ll keep trying this year, working with colleagues in the Senate. “Funding OTA would be a minimal expense that would pay off many times over by averting foolish or wasteful policies,” he says. “Decisions made in ignorance are costly.”
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Censorship
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Indonesia has been censoring sites that it found to be contrary to their government’s view of the world
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Lithuanian Minister of Justice Juozas Bernatonis has initiated amendments to the Law on Value Added Tax which would prohibit Lithuania’s Ethics Commission of Journalists and Publishers (LZLEK), which is formed by private entities, to censor the printed press, informs LETA/ELTA.
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A full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday denounced the Korean government’s handling of the ferry disaster last month.
The black-and-white ad was paid for by a group of Korean Americans and appeared on page 19 of the daily under the headline “BRING THE TRUTH TO LIGHT” with the subtitle “Why are Koreans outraged by President Park Geun-hye?”
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People can ask Google to delete sensitive information from its Internet search results, Europe’s top court said on Tuesday.
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Google said the ruling was “disappointing”. “We now need to take time to analyze the implications,” a spokesperson said.
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Once promising the most transparent administration in history, White House reins in free speech of employees
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Chinese authorities have placed outspoken journalist Gao Yu under criminal detention on charges of leaking state secrets amid a widening crackdown on dissidents ahead of the sensitive 25th anniversary of the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square, official media reported Thursday.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told lawyers he met during his sojourn in Hong Kong to put their cell phones in his fridge to thwart any eavesdroppers.
But new research suggests he should have been worried about nearby TVs, too.
Smart tellies with built-in microphones and storage can be turned into bugging devices by malware and used to record conversations, security experts at NCC Group said. And they demonstrated exactly that just down the road from the Infosec Europe conference, held in London.
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Privacy
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A Massachusetts woman faces charges of allegedly using a hidden mobile phone to audio-record her own suspicion-of-disorderly-conduct arrest.
Karen Dziewit, 24 of Chicopee, was allegedly “loud and belligerent” and disturbing her building’s tenants early Sunday when police arrested her, according to local media outlet Mass Live. When police inventoried her purse, they said they found a mobile phone secretly recording the incident, allegedly in violation of state wiretapping regulations. Springfield police told Mass Live that the woman slipped the phone in her purse and activated the recording feature before the arrest.
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There’s a Northwest thread that knits together leadership on civil liberties and birddogging abuses by America’s intelligence community. Idaho Sen. Frank Church led the charge in the 1970s, throwing light on a scofflaw culture.The Church Committee issued 14 reports and brought into focus CIA-sponsored assassinations, black-bag FBI break-ins, and warrantless spying on Americans, a practice that extended back decades.After 9/11, an anything-goes intelligence culture was reignited, with the National Security Agency operating just as Church described the CIA — “a rogue elephant.” Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater was more colorful. “Like a wild jackass,” he said at the time.
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He has been lauded and vilified in equal measure. But did the journalist’s ‘outsider’ status help him land Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations? Why did he nearly miss the story? And how powerless did he feel when his partner was detained at Heathrow? One year after the scoop, we meet him in his jungle paradise in Rio
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This latest viral attack provides criminals and opportunists with a back door into secure websites. But anyone who looks to federal government for an answer is sure to be disappointed; in all the varied ways that different federal departments can phrase the words, they say: “Watch out for yourself.” And that attitude is very much a top-down sentiment.
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In the dystopian future of George Orwell’s “1984,” the government uses an endless state of war to justify food rationing by the Ministry of Plenty, rewriting history by the Ministry of Truth, and brutal interrogation by the Ministry of Love. Recently, President Obama’s Privacy Working Group — a response to the public outcry over the mass collection of telephone data — concluded that the government needed to collect and review more private data. It’s tempting to think, “you couldn’t make this up.” But, of course, Orwell imagined it in detail.
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In response to the NSA spying revelations, the European Parliament passed even stricter privacy rules in March. They still have to be approved by the European Union’s 28 member countries, but they represent the region’s commitment to individual rights.
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We are concerned about the lack of oversight by the intelligence and security committee (ISC) regarding the role and function of the NSA at Menwith Hill and other US bases (MPs condemn oversight of spy agencies, 9 May). There is no mention of this secretive and unaccountable US agency anywhere either in the report by the home affairs select committee or in your report and leader (9 May). On 10 April, Fabian Hamilton MP, in a parliamentary question, asked the defence secretary “whether his department was (a) aware of the nature of and (b) consulted before the start of surveillance being carried out at NSA Menwith Hill?” Mark Francois (minister of state, MoD) answered: “Operations at RAF Menwith Hill have always been, and continue to be, carried out with the knowledge and consent of the UK government.”
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Tech communities like Reddit, Imgur and Boing Boing are teaming up with civil liberties groups in the “Reset The Net” campaign against NSA surveillance. The more than 30 groups are planning a day of protest action on June 5 to mark the anniversary of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA coming to light. The protest is designed along the lines of the protests against the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as PIPA and SOPA.
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The U.S. House of Representatives has before it two bills that are supposed to put some safeguards on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying activities on Americans. But neither plan includes reforms for a controversial section of federal law on which many of the NSA’s most intruding programs are legally based.
The provision in question is part of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act, specifically Section 702.
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The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide
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At a recent debate concerning the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted that metadata is used as the basis for killing people.
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As the one-year anniversary of the publication of the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive and illegal government spying on the American and world population approaches, the campaign of vilification and character assassination against the former National Security Agency contractor is being stepped up.
A particularly filthy example is a column published Saturday in the Wall Street Journal by author Edward Jay Epstein, entitled “Was Snowden’s Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?”
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This Week anchor Martha Raddatz (5/11/14) introduced a lookback at the Edward Snowden/NSA stories by saying, “A year later, Snowden still sparks a raging debate.” But the show sure had a funny way of illustrating that fierce debate–with two guests who both attacked Snowden for revealing the extent of NSA spying.
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The Internet hacktivist group Anonymous is calling for protests against author and civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwald because of his relationship with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
In a release posted to Pastebin, the secretive activist group is calling for members to attend and disrupt scheduled book signings where Greenwald will be promoting his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.
The point of contention between Greenwald and the group stems from his relationship with First Look founder and eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
eBay purchased PayPal in 2002.
Representing the “PayPal 14,” — a group charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after they attempted to disrupt PayPal’s operations in retaliation for PayPal’s refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks — Anonymous stated that the 14 are “struggling to raise more than $80,000 in court-ordered restitution” that must be paid to eBay/PayPal.
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Edward Snowden was “profoundly at peace” with his decision to leak national security documents, and even joked about the consequences, journalist Glenn Greenwald says in a new book.
“I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Snowden joked, referring to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says the book to be released on Tuesday, excerpts of which were published on Monday in The Guardian.
Greenwald, recounting the series of discussions last year in Hong Kong when the former National Security Agency contractor decided to reveal his identity, said Snowden appeared to sleep soundly and was “completely refreshed the next day” despite the tension.
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Globally, cyber security is seen as a critical element of the national security apparatus by nations. The reasons are proliferation of advance and sophisticated cyber attacks, cyber threats with political and social effects, increase in cyber espionages, developments of cyber weapons and its usage for military purposes, attacks against nations by non-state actors, cyber terrorists, hackers etc.
The assets which are under attack are economic plans, defence plans, nuclear codes, energy resource information, political designs, law enforcement details, nation’s cyber space.
Cyber security is now elevated to the pedestal of national security; this development is invoking it in the enemy’s eyes. The problem for the cyber space experts is that the enemy is unidentified and difficult to track due to dynamic characteristics of cyber space i.e. attribution is difficult in cyber space; so it becomes difficult to hold the perpetrators accountable.
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Don’t believe the argument that mass surveillance is only a problem for wrongdoers. Governments have repeatedly spied on anyone who challenges their power, says Glenn Greenwald in an extract from his book about Edward Snowden and the NSA, No Place to Hide
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In the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden found a perfect match. I don’t mean to slight the contributions of Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, the other two journalists who first dug into Snowden’s amazing and unprecedented trove of National Security Agency documents. Poitras was the one who realized Snowden was for real, and Gellman brought experience to the party. But Greenwald is the fighter—the one you want in your corner when the world comes after you. Snowden knew what he was in for, and he chose his cornerman well.
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On June 5, 2013, when UK newspaper The Guardian informed U.S. officials that it was about to publish a report about the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, the government’s response was indignant. Janine Gibson, the paper’s U.S. editor, was “not a serious journalist,” The Guardian “not a serious newspaper,” and “no normal journalistic outlet would publish this quickly without first meeting with us,” unnamed officials told the paper.
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Australia’s intelligence agency asked for more help from its US counterparts to increase surveillance on Australians suspected of involvement in international extremist activities.
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With his book entitled No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State set for release on Tuesday, the GQ website posted an extensive interview with radical-left reporter Glenn Greenwald in which he covers a wide range of topics, ranging from his continuing friendship with Snowden to his strong distaste for the presumptive Democratic candidate in the upcoming 2016 presidential election.
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THE disclosures of Edward Snowden constitute perhaps the most notorious leak in history. America’s National Security Agency was so secretive that for decades even its existence was classified. Insiders joked that its initials stood for “no such agency”. That a 29-year-old contractor was able to steal tens of thousands of classified documents is not only astounding, but also unprecedented. Only recently had it become possible to fit so much material on an inexpensive digital chip.
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Americans haven’t had much good news about their privacy since Edward Snowden launched his soap opera of NSA revelations last June. True, the president, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Patriot Act co-author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner are finally distancing themselves from the most outrageous snooping. But it hasn’t stopped. According to the New York Times, a request from one U.S. phone company to cease sharing its records with the National Security Agency was rebuffed in March by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — the secret federal tribunal that mostly seems to specialize in saying “yes” to surveillance.
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While the U.S. government warned router buyers that the Chinese government might spy on them through networking gear made in China, the U.S. National Security Agency was doing that very thing, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper Monday.
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Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Raytheon BBN Technologies have created a way to make your email correspondence so secure (PDF), that even the NSA would have a hard time getting to it.
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As revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance have poured out over the last year, we’ve all been told that we have to encrypt our communications to keep them safe from prying eyes. The trouble is, crypto programs are still too hard for normal people to use.
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President Barack Obama promised his administration would be the most transparent ever. His actions go counter to any such claim. He has prosecuted whistle-blowers and failed to provide information on the drone program, among other actions. After all the secrecy about NSA mass surveillance programs and the revelations of Edward Snowden, critics of Obama are scornful of his transparency claims.
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Glenn Greenwald defended Edward Snowden on Monday, saying the NSA leaker “sacrificed his entire life” to bring more transparency about U.S. intelligence. He also recalled Snowden joking about ending up in prison.
Greenwald, the journalist whose work in The Guardian published a series of reports based on Snowden’s leaks, praised his humor during an interview with NBC’s “Today” show host Matt Lauer.
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In an excerpt from his upcoming book about the NSA leaks published on Monday, Greenwald recounted the harried schemes he and filmmaker Laura Poitras used to protect Snowden, who disclosed the government’s controversial surveillance practices.
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According to NSA expert and former Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide, the NSA has intercepted servers and routers from U.S. manufacturers in the delivery process in order to install tracking gear.
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Brandon Bryant, a 28-year-old US airman, whose squadron has been credited with 1,626 kills, was among the first to be openly critical of the impact of remote tracking and targeting, of, that is, robot war. Bryant was a “sensor operator,” which meant that he operated the cameras on the drone aircraft as part of a three-person team that included a pilot and an intelligence analyst.
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Brandon Bryant, a 28-year-old U.S. airman, whose squadron has been credited with 1,626 kills, was among the first to be openly critical of the impact of remote tracking and targeting, of, that is, robot war. Bryant was a “sensor operator,” which meant that he operated the cameras on the drone aircraft as part of a three-person team that included a pilot and an intelligence analyst.
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Tamm claims he tried to blow the whistle on the subject, working with New York Times reporter James Risen to make the story public. But Risen’s editors decided to run the story by the government. They wanted to get the governmnet’s take, before the Times revealed “The Program.” Kirk says top White House officials made three arguments to Times editors, in trying to convince them not to run the story.
1. It’s completely legal.
2. It’s a vulnerable secret. If you reveal it, hundreds of thousands of Americans may die in a future attack.
3. It’s working. You wouldn’t believe the threats we’re stopping.
Former Editor Bill Keller spiked the story, outraging Risen.
Years later, we see the impacts of the reveal. We’re continuing to debate the merits of domestic spying. Kirk says the government has yet to prove any of the three arguments it gave to Keller. And he says it causes some to question the program’s validity. But the spying program continues.
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The Android version of the app works using Open Garden’s own mesh networking technology,
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Britain should create a new body to oversee its intelligence agencies to reassure the public after revelations from ex-US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the former head of the British foreign intelligence service said on Monday.
Documents leaked by Snowden exposed the vast scale of surveillance carried out by Britain’s intelligence agencies and their close collaboration with America’s National Security Agency, sparking a public debate about how they operate.
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Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business News could have uncovered the latest activist hedge fund investing strategy, all as Herbalife Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) claims to have discovered bugs in its Los Angeles headquarters.
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Encrypt the data you transmit. The Snowden revelations have revealed that U.S. and British spy agencies are grabbing as much unencrypted data as they can find as it passes over the Internet. Encrypting your data in transit can protect it against spy agencies, as well as commercial data gatherers.
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Congress is advancing bills to reform surveillance at the National Security Agency but the Obama administration has put into place a new policy that forbids intelligence employees from mentioning news reports about government leaks.
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The U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropped on Japan’s government and hacked online networks to spy on its policies and activities, according to a new book by journalist Glenn Greenwald.
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Glenn Greenwald is trying to lose fifteen pounds. “Um, it’s been a little crazy these past nine months,” he says. “And I will eat French fries or potato chips if they’re in front of me.” On his porch, perched on a jungle mountaintop in Rio, the morning is fresh. Greenwald, in board shorts and a collared short-sleeve shirt, has done his daily hour’s worth of yoga and attached himself to one of his five laptops as his dozen dogs yap and wag to begin the day’s circus in his monkey-and-macaw paradise.
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Since the very first Snowden leak a year ago, one of the more common refrains from defenders of the program is “but it’s just metadata, not actual content, so what’s the big deal?” Beyond the fact that other programs do collect content, we’ve pointed out time and time again that the “just metadata, don’t worry” argument only makes sense if you don’t know what metadata reveals. Anyone with any knowledge of the subject knows that metadata reveals a ton of private info. Furthermore, we’ve even pointed out that the NSA regularly uses “just metadata” to pick targets for drone assassinations. As one person called it: “death by unreliable metadata.”
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Former NSA agent Edward Snowden is expected to be asked by the German NSA-leak investigations committee, set up by the German parliament, to meet its officials to testify before the committee in the Russian Embassy in Switzerland.
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Secret agencies and the media have a long history of association and this relationship continues and will keep on continuing. The two champions of democracy, the US and the UK, are known for their elaborate vast secret systems of secret agencies, CIA and MI6 and MI5, and we all know the influence both have on their politics and governance.
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The aftermath of WikiLeaks raises a very difficult question. What should government do after leaks? Can government officials acknowledge the facts that leaks expose? Or must they pretend that the information remains secret? New government guidelines appear to explicitly force officials to play “let’s pretend.” Late last week, Steven Aftergood and Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on new rules from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The guidelines explicitly forbid government officials with classified access from publicly citing information that has been leaked or made public through anonymous sources. Intelligence and transparency analysts were alarmed by this and other apparent changes. Even after ODNI sought to clarify the guidelines, a follow-up story confirms an explicit ban on citing leaked information, which did not exist in prior versions.
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Local and international telcos and network providers in New Zealand are now required to comply with strict and complex new communications interception and security legislation.
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The budget is not enough – Germany’s new spy headquarters is costing hundreds of millions of euros more than expected – and it’s late.
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Civil Rights
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Campaign set up by London-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad attracts more than 130,000 likes on social media site
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Halal meat is on every menu; sharia law is taking over; the niqab is undermining the nation. Ever noticed how often the same old stories keep appearing about Muslims in Britain? Here’s the truth about these and other media myths
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Ask Rhiannon Broschard of Chicago, who was “separated” from her employer after public schools closed because it was so cold, it was dangerous for kids to be outside. Broschard knew that she couldn’t leave her special-needs son home alone and called in to say she couldn’t come into work. Her manager was sympathetic. But the next day, a company representative phoned to let her know she’d been fired for “abusing” their attendance policy. Others had come in; why hadn’t she?
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The Republican Congress continues to keep busy. For years, most of their efforts have focused on depriving citizens of health care, mainly because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was enacted by the Democrats, led by Satan incarnate, Barack Obama. ‘Repeal and Replace’ was a euphemism for ‘Repeal’, and it was said that this issue would certainly cause Mr. Obama to lose his reelection bid, and Democrats to be swept out of the Senate in 2012.
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The United States has appealed an order from a military judge at the US jail in Guantanamo that they turn over information on secret CIA interrogation centers.
In a 26-page document dated April 23 but only just declassified, top military prosecutor Mark Martins asked the judge to re-evaluate his order from April 14.
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Other carefully documented accounts of psychologist involvement in the abuse and torture of prisoners at places like Guantanamo, Bagram, and CIA black sites have emerged repeatedly for nearly a decade. But the comprehensive, multi-year Senate investigation is likely to provide the most detailed account to date of how psychologists abandoned their fundamental do-no-harm ethics and participated in the horrific excesses of the “war on terror.” In the past, the American Psychological Association (APA) – the world’s largest organization of psychologists – has responded to similar revelations with silence, denials, unactionable platitudes, and assertions that the APA has always been steadfast in its opposition to torture. Such responses, however, conceal a distressing and unwelcome truth: that U.S. torture programs took root and grew in a climate made more hospitable by the APA leadership’s support of our government’s counter-terrorism strategy despite its bring-it-on, gloves-off, anything-goes tactics.
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The New York City Police Department is running a program that recruits jailed Muslim immigrants to act as informants. According to The New York Times, a unit known as the “Citywide Debriefing Team” confronts mostly Muslim suspects after they are arrested for minor infractions. The immigrants have been asked to spy on cafes, restaurants and mosques as part of counterterrorism operations. Some have reported feeling intimidated by the encounters. The debriefing team appears to be formally separate from the controversial NYPD spying unit targeting Muslims disbanded just last month.
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The latest Frankenstein’s monster of New York “counterterror” policing policy brings together two of the most problematic practices enacted by the NYPD in recent years: the unconstitutional targeting of the city’s Muslim communities, and the focus on the most minor of infractions as grounds for interrogation and arrest.
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Governments are failing to live up to their commitments to stamp out state-sanctioned torture, according to London-based Amnesty International.
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The proposed price of an exclusive new prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rose by $20 million in a year because designers added meeting rooms and a medical clinic for 15 former CIA captives, including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a military spokesman saidMonday.
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The proposed price of an exclusive new prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rose by $20 million in a year because designers added meeting rooms and a medical clinic for 15 former CIA captives, including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a military spokesman said Monday.
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An FBI inquiry that disrupted criminal proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and generated fears of government spying is not expected to result in charges, law enforcement officials said.
Investigators said last month that they had opened a preliminary inquiry involving the possible disclosure of classified information at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. A defense lawyer told the military court that the FBI had questioned a member of a defense team, raising concerns that the probe was interfering with their ability to defend their clients.
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What was special is that the whole scene was photographed and broadcast. Army orders forbid soldiers to behave like this when photographers are present, and especially to threaten the cameramen. Painful experience has taught the army that such clips, if broadcast abroad, can seriously undermine Israeli propaganda (officially called “explaining”).
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Megaupload’s legal team has asked the federal court of Virginia to freeze the cases filed by the movie and music industries last month. According to Dotcom’s lawyers, this is needed pending the criminal case against the defendants, in order to protect their Fifth Amendment rights.
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After uploading part of a JFK speech to YouTube, a TorrentFreak reader had a surprise when a music distribution company filed a complaint, claiming full monetization rights on the clip. Why would they do that to material in the public domain ? With the company involved refusing to respond, TF took a closer look.
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Almost five years ago, the Swedish Pirate Party blew people away worldwide when it received more than 7% of the vote in the European elections, giving it one seat, and the option for another if the Lisbon Treaty was approved. Now it’s time for another election, and there are Pirates standing just about everywhere it seems.
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05.11.14
Posted in Search at 1:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![Duck Duck Go](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/scaled_full_3b91c837e5450dc8a648.png)
Image by Will Hill
Summary: Another warning about Duck Duck Go, the so-called ‘search engine’ which actually relays results from Microsoft on top of Amazon-hosted servers
THE search engine that people routinely use is a very big deal. It’s a big decision. People tend to throw around clues about medical conditions they are having, technical issues, names of people they are stalking, political views and so much more. Now we are getting yet more proof that people’s searching habits may also, in fact, lead to their assassination or character assassination some day in the future, even decades from now. Leaderships change over time and so do rules or regulations (this is often referred to as “turnkey tyranny”). Just look what Japan and Germany did 75 years ago, killing (executing) millions of people based on broad profiling. Read about Sook Ching (肃清) for example.
Giant octopus grasping the Earth (with its teeth on top of North America, implying perhaps domestic spying and more) is a logo that recently came from the NSA itself, as hard as it may be to believe (seen at the top right, unaltered). We already know, based on Snowden’s heroic actions, that the NSA is very much connected to the CIA’s drones strikes and US citizens are among the targets. We post many links about these issues because they’re enormously important.
Sadly, many people believe the false promise of privacy at Duck Duck Go. The illusion of privacy is worse than no privacy at all because it gives people a false sense of security that leads them to doing what they otherwise would not.
Now that some FOSS sites foolishly promote Duck Duck Go (or affiliated services) we wish to remind readers that for several clear reasons Duck Duck Go is a sham when it comes to privacy. We have already explained why. We wrote about this several times before and Will Hill put together some of the arguments against Duck Duck Go.
Michael Hayden (former head of both the CIA and the NSA, who laid the ground for much of the existing policy) says that “we kill people based on metadata”. This means all sorts of things. They are using people’s search phrases and other shallow things (perhaps browsing habits, not just phonecall records) as long as these are compact to store and analyse (data-mine). As storage gets cheaper and resources for computation grow (thanks to an Amazon deal), the more they collect from more people. Dossiers gathered by automated profiling are used to predict or assess people’s thoughts, even when they might be studying/researching things (e.g. looking up Hitler-related stuff for curiosity, not for support). This can also be used to justify murder of civilians by drones after they are killed (justification by alignment of so-called ‘evidence’ after the act).
Hayden’s remarks were noted in our latest daily links and are now going quite viral on the Internet. The same correlation that says drone assassinations are driven by ‘metadata’ was noted some months ago in The Intercept, based on a source other than Hayden, so even though Hayden is a pathological liar, herein we have some corroboration.
Don’t give the NSA ‘dirt’ with which to paint you a “bad person” worthy of death, smearing, etc. The NSA uses data for espionage, so it needn’t have to do anything with national security, just national interests (meaning corporations’ interests). Every single person has, at one point or another, searched the Web for some phrase that may be interpreted by an outsider as suspicious, especially if context gets removed. Duck Duck Go is a dangerous search engine to be using at the very least because it’s hosted by Amazon, which received $600,000,000 from the CIA to help keep every bit of data (mass surveillance) forever. █
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Posted in Site News at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another milestone to be reached this week and a few words on where we are at
Techrights is now a maturing site with 3 main parts: the Drupal front page (targeting first-time visitors), the blog (WordPress), and the Wiki (MediaWiki). Each of these parts runs a different CMS, for historical reasons and topological reasons (each is optimised for a different purpose). The overall appearance of the site was never changed. This was a conscious decision that preserves consistency and assures integrity of old material.
Some time in the coming week we’ll reach an important milestone. The 18,000th blog post will be published. It took just under 8 years, which probably means that we’ll hit 20,000 well before Techrights turns 10.
Speaking of 10, on June 10th Tux Machines is going to turn 10. My wife and I run that site right now. Thankfully, readership is growing every week.
Let’s hope for many more years of reporting and analysis. █
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