12.03.12
Links 4/12/2012: Tiny PengPod is Coming, More Games Coming to GNU/Linux
Contents
GNU/Linux
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The Next Big OS War Is in Your Dashboard
Competition in automotive technology has long been about who’s got the most horsepower, the best towing capacity or the fastest acceleration. These days, though, it’s all about having the slickest infotainment systems and most-connected cars.
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Desktop
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Kernel Space
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Has Secure Boot for Linux Finally Arrived?
From the ‘Thank You Microsoft for *allowing* Linux on Windows 8 hardware?!’ files:
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30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: John Stultz
This week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile is with John Stultz. Based in in Portlandia, John works for IBM and is on assignment with Linaro. His love affair with Linux began in 1997, and he’s never looked back.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 9.0 vs. Mesa 9.1-devel On Intel Sandy Bridge
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R300 Gallium3D HyperZ Is Finally In Good Shape
Marek Olšák has fixed up the HyperZ support within the R300 Gallium3D driver so that it’s working properly for more applications. R300 HyperZ is finally in a state where he may be looking to enable the feature by default.
HyperZ is the ATI/AMD technology that’s been around going back to the R100 GPU days for boosting the GPU performance and efficiency. HyperZ consists of Z compression for minimizing the Z-Buffer bandwidth, fast Z clear, and a hierarchical Z-Buffer. Benchmarks of HyperZ show that it can certainly improve the OpenGL frame-rate for gaming, but within the open-source Radeon Linux drivers the HyperZ support has been buggy for new and old hardware.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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LCE: Don’t play dice with random numbers
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DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux server best practices
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How to colorize the output of grep
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Understanding File Permissions: What Does “Chmod 777″ Means?
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20 MySQL (Mysqladmin) Commands for Database Administration in Linux
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Working with iptables
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Linux Tips: Fixing Blue YouTube People
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Games
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Humble not so friendly anymore Bundle
Everyone by now should know about Humble Bundle, they used to be a provider of great DRM FREE and cross platform (Linux, Mac and Windows) indie games including games like Osmos, Aquaria,
Psychonauts, World of Goo etc.A lot of people including myself used them as shining examples of how things should be done – cross platform, drm free, buy once get all platforms and even support charity! Now is not the case.
They launched a THQ Bundle which has AAA games (that’s not the issue) the issue is that the games are DRM-bound, tied to one service (Steam), not cross platform and from a developer who even supported some rather shady internet bills.
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OUYA Team Announces Giveaway For Game Devs
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5 New Games Coming To Linux On Steam
Steam Greenlight is the entry point for new games to be released on Steam. Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers can post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution.
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Family Farm Sequel Goodfolks Now Available For Linux
Most Ubuntu users would have heard about Family Farm, its one of the most popular games and possibly one one of the first commercial game to be available on Ubuntu Software Center. The company behind Family Farm, Indie Studio Hammerware, have released its sequel, Goodfolks which is also available on Linux platform.
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ET: Legacy – Reviving The Old FPS
The ET: Legacy project is an open-source initiative that seeks to create a fully-compatible client and server for the award-winning Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
It was in August of 2010 that id Software open-sourced Enemy Territory along with Return To Castle Wolfenstein. In writing yesterday about XReaL and OpenWolf game engines that do have compatibility with Enemy Territory, there were interesting comments within the forums.
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Play Dune 2 in your browser window!
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Desktop Environments
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Rep. Lamar Smith, Who Criticized ‘The Idea Of Human-Made Global Warming,’ Set To Chair House Science Panel
Climate advocates celebrated after winning nearly every Congressional race they targeted during the national elections, including four of the “Flat Earth Five” climate deniers in the House of Representatives. But with the balance of power essentially the same in Washington, many rightly worried that little would change moving into the 113th Congress.
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Senator Inhofe And The Heartland Institute Roll Out Underwhelming Campaign To Slash The EPA
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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Say good morning to GNOME Weather
Giovanni Campagna today released the first version of GNOME Weather (v0.1), a small application similar to Clocks written in Python3. Its current state is very basic, and you can only select a region from a drop-down auto-complete list, and Weather will display the weather of the next 5 days, from yr.no (Norwegian Meteorological Institute).
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Return of the King: GNOME 2 Is Making Its Way Back
“GNOME is a big boy and was the preferred DE for many experienced users, as well as classical GNU/Linux distributions’ default DE,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. “So, there must be a compromise between the developers’ avant-garde ideas and what power users need and want to use.
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Distributions
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New Releases
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Announcement: RapidDisk (rxdsk) 2.6 Stable release
RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. : Red Hat Signs Americas Distribution Agreement with Avnet Embedded
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc., (NYSE: AVT). Avnet Embedded will offer flexible, integrated systems based on Red Hat Embedded Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions to its large base of OEM and independent software vendor (ISV) partners throughout the Americas.
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Fedora
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Fedora ARM Coming To Google Chromebooks
Google Chromebooks are one of the hottest devices in the market. These devices allow you to boot into a cloud oriented environment where you can seamlessly manage all your music, documents and files on the cloud, on the go. The advantages are many. The device boots up fast and works great as long as you have Internet connectivity. You don’t need to fear about hard drive crashes or data loss as it is stored on the cloud and accessible via your Google account from any device.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Dell Ships High-End Ubuntu Laptop for Cloud Developers
The name of Dell’s Project Sputnik may not exactly conjure images of cutting-edge computer technology. But the laptop that the endeavor has launched is certainly no piece of outdated space junk. Targeted at developers and based on Ubuntu Linux, the machine potentially represents a new kind of direction for Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). Will the company, long derided by some open source fans, now fully enter the good graces of the Linux community?
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Canonical Knows Unity is a Drag on Multitasking But Did It Anyway
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Improving The Ubuntu Search Experience With libcolumbus
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These PCs-on-a-stick run Ubuntu Linux
A developer by the name of AndrewDB is currently in the processing of modding Ubuntu Linux so that it runs on inexpensive PCs-on-a-stick powered by Rockchip RK3066 processors.
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Flavours and Variants
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Devices/Embedded
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Phones
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Android
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Open-source Funf platform taps into Android’s huge knowledge about you
You take your smartphone everywhere, so it knows a lot about you: where you are, who you’re with, what you’re listening to, even whether you’re standing or sitting. To make the most of this, Media Lab alumni Nadav Aharony, Cody Sumter and Alan Gardner have developed Funf, an open-source Android platform that simplifies data collection and lets developers create apps that tap into this huge cache.
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ZTE Apache rumored with 8-core processor
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Hands On With the $20 Indian Android Tablet
The cheapest Android tablet I’ve ever seen costs $20, with a $2 per month unlimited data plan, and I’m holding it right now. It might not just change the tablet market. It might change the world.
The Ubislate 7ci, also known as the Aakash2, is the latest gadget from Datawind, a Canadian company that’s spent seven years trying to find the ideal market for some really neat data-optimization technology. On devices like the PocketSurfer and PocketSurfer 2, Datawind showed that it can display desktop Web pages quickly with low-cost devices on super-low-bandwidth networks like 2G GPRS. But it never gained major market traction in the Western world, especially as 3G and 4G networks have spread. -
Nokia May be Planning an Android Smartphone
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Nokia Seeks To Hire Linux Engineer, Sparking Rumors Of Nokia Android Phones
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New job posting suggests Nokia may still be considering Android after all
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Nokia confirms Linux job ad sought talent for HERE Maps projects, not new Android devices
Nokia has been clear in its plans to develop solutions for its HERE Maps service, which has already launched on the App Store (to muted reviews).
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Nokia: We want a Linux expert for HERE Maps not an Android phone
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Fresh rumors from Korea confirms new devices!
According to older rumors the Galaxy S IV would have a full HD AMOLED display, a quad-core cpu,the latest version of android, a 13 megapixel camera and the screen size would be 5.0”
Our insider could not confirm the specifications at this moment! He only knows the new project name called: Project J for the next Galaxy.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Tiny PengPod Thumbs Its Nose At Google With A $120 Tablet
Android/Linux lovers are whooping it up now that a startup called PengPod reached its crowdfunding goal.
PengPod promised to ship affordable 7- and 10-inch tablets if it could raise $49,000 by today.
With a few hours left, PengPod has raised almost $60,000.
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Wishtel to launch tablet running on Linux-based platform for $50
Mumbai-based Wishtel today said it will launch computing devices, tablet PC and net books, starting at $50 later this month.
The company has developed a Linux-based platform PrithV, which will be used for the tablet and net book PCs, it said in a statement.
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Pengpod, The Dual Booting Linux Tablet Sharts Shipping In 2013
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Bodhi Linux Nexus 7 Drive
So I was on the Kernel Panic Ogg cast last night (the episode should be for download later this weekend). While we where discussing a number of things related to Bodhi our ARM port and tablet interface came up. ARM hardware is a very different beast from your normal x86/64bit devices. Meaning even if you have functional kernel drivers for a given device – you still often need a seperate file system images for each device you wish to be easily installable on.
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WishTel launches Linux-based PrithV tablet
WishTel announced the launch of the world’s cheapest Linux-based tablet PC, “PrithV”. Designed and manufactured in India, and priced at US$50, the tablet is designed to serve all the global education needs.
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$100 Android/Linux tablet hits funding goal, ships in January
A $100 tablet that can run both Android and Linux is on the verge of becoming a reality. We wrote about the “PengPod” last month when its creators were seeking $49,000 on a Kickstarter-like site called Indiegogo. The project’s deadline expired last night, with the PengPod getting a healthy $72,707 from more than 500 contributors.
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Free Software/Open Source
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How open source is outliving the hype 13 years later
Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as “SOA,” but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source’s demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being “faux-open source” with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code).
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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Connectors To MySQL Community Via MariaDB
SkySQL and Monty Program release the MariaDB Client Library for C and MariaDB Client Library for Java Applications
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DRBD Redone for Even More Flexibility
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10gen’s MongoDB – An Oracle Slayer?
Oracle had better watch its back. There’s a new(ish) database player on the market that wants to eat its lunch; dinner, breakfast and dessert too, for that matter.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Comment: OpenOffice’s Tale of Two Cities
Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn’t be more different. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this, it’s “go the whole hog or not at all”.
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Openness/Sharing
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How to win data analysis friends and influence the OLAP factor
Open source Business Intelligence and data integration company Pentaho has pushed some additional product releases to SourceForge web-based source code repository this week.
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Programming
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DARPA Project Using LLVM For Better Code Security
A software research project being funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with its Cyber Fast Track program is looking at ways for providing a flexible and integrated security infrastructure by using LLVM for dynamic and static security tasks.
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Leftovers
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Making the web more accessible for people with disabilities
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Dear journalists: grow up
Please stop saying “This is the thin end of the wedge. Once legislation is introduced, it will grow.” You are possibly the best informed and, if not the most powerful, certainly the most vocal lobby in this country. It’s not like additional legislation will slip past you.
Please stop saying “There is already adequate protection in the law.” You know full well this protection is only available to those with money, time, knowhow and connections. I was having a beer with a buddy last night, who used to work in the tabloid press. He tells me that the single deciding factor in running or not running a less than well founded story is usually the subject’s financial ability to sue.
Please stop saying “We are special. We perform a vital public service. We should be protected.” The same applies to doctors, pharma companies, lawyers, police, farmers, the fire service, pilots. They are all, quite rightly, regulated. A badly put together article might leave me dissatisfied. A badly put together gas boiler can leave me dead. The imposition of professional standards in a fact of modern life.
Please stop saying “We have already changed. It will be different this time.” You sound like a recalcitrant abusive alcoholic begging his wife in hospital not to press charges.
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Two examples why we don’t need the draft Communications Data Bill
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Don’t Promise $1 Million For Your Lost Laptop Via YouTube & Twitter If You’re Not Prepared To Pay
The Hollywood Reporter has the somewhat amusing cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t use various social media tools to make promises you can’t back up. Hip hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie apparently lost his laptop recently while on tour in Germany. He then went on YouTube and posted a video offering $20,000 if anyone returned the laptop. He noted that the laptop contained music and videos that he wanted back. Another video was posted later with a message that reads: “In the interest of retrieving invaluable intellectual property contained on his laptop and hard drive, Mr. Leslie has increased the reward offer from $20,000 USD to $1,000,000 USD. He also tweeted the same info directly, saying: “I raised the reward for my intellectual property to $1mm.”
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Science
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Free schools must teach evolution, ministers announce
All free schools will be forced to present evolution as a comprehensive and central tenet of scientific theory, ministers have announced, following lobbying by senior scientists concerned that Christian-run institutions could exploit loopholes in the rules to present creationism as a credible theory.
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Louisiana education case highlights Bobby Jindal’s creationism state
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Health/Nutrition
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WPEA Signed into Law, Protecting Federal Food Safety Employees
Today, the Government Accountability Project’s (GAP) Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is praising President Obama for signing into law the strongest federal whistleblower protections in history. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate earlier this month. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections.
This law’s enactment plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those workers charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers who desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but chose to stay silent for fear that existing whistleblower protections will not effectively shield them from retaliation.
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The Toxic Legacy of Depleted Uranium Weapons
We all should be aware of the dangers posed by the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. The eight countries known to possess nuclear weapons have 10,000 plus nuclear warheads. And, especially post-Fukushima, we now understand firsthand the potential danger of nuclear power plants, many which are aging and highly vulnerable to natural disasters. As of August 2012, 30 countries are operating 435 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. Sixty-six new nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries.
But how many of us know about the current manufacturing and active use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons? DU (Uranium 238) is a radioactive waste by-product of the uranium enrichment process. It results from making fuel for nuclear reactors and the manufacturing of nuclear weapons.
In a frightening adaptation of the “Cradle to Cradle” philosophy in manufacturing, which seeks to use waste in the manufacturing process to create other “useful” products, militaries around the world have come up with the “brilliant” idea of taking DU and making “conventional” weapons with it.
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Meet Monsanto’s number one lobbyist: Barack Obama
During his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama transmitted signals that he understood the GMO issue. Several key anti-GMO activists were impressed. They thought Obama, once in the White House, would listen to their concerns and act on them.
These activists weren’t just reading tea leaves. On the campaign trail, Obama said: “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.”
Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand.
Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037310_Barack_Obama_Monsanto_lobbyist.html#ixzz2Dv0TB5GX
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The Day I Blundered Into The Nuclear Facility
I am at a loss to explain how, even in the 60′s or 70′s, an unsupervised kid was able to walk into anyplace where one could see Cherenkov radiation with their own eyes, at such a short distance. I understand that water is a good radiation shield, and don’t believe that I received any significant radiation exposure. This experience left me, for my lifetime, more sanguine than the average person regarding radiation hazards.
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Your Couch May Be Killing You
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Where oil and gas development goes, health problems often follow.
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Tax the Rich, Take Your Hands Off Medicare: Overwhelming US Majority
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Security
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The Woman Behind CryptoParty
In August, the Australian Parliament passed a new cybercrime bill that increased the powers of law enforcement to require Internet service providers to monitor and store their users’ data.
The country’s privacy advocates were up in arms. One of them was Asher Wolf (a pseudonym), a 32-year-old who had built up a following on Twitter for tweeting news about WikiLeaks and the Occupy movement and who cared deeply about online privacy. A friend of hers, @m1k3y, tweeted that in light of the new legislation, maybe now was the time to have an “install-the-crypto-apps party,” referring to the programs for computers that help protect a user’s privacy. Wolf half-jokingly agreed: “Let’s get together in the backyard with some chips,” she said, “let’s have a CryptoParty.”
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Aerovironment Partners With Swedish Drone Maker
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Israel ‘eyes Azerbaijan for raid on Iran’
Israel’s reported to be planning to use long-range Heron drones to launch pre-emptive strikes on ballistic missiles in Iran from Azerbaijan.
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Gaza: Drones terrorize civilians
However, Israel being the recipient of more than $3 billion in U.S. aid annually, much of it in arms, has given rise to an asymmetric warfare that has gone largely unregulated and unchallenged; a governing principle in which both the U.S. and Israel carry out indiscriminate drone attacks against vaguely identified “militants” or “combatants.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles, referred to as drones, have become the predominant means for carrying out targeted attacks, which U.S. military experts gladly tout as “surgically precise” and effective for “minimizing” collateral damage and civilian casualties.
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Watch the First Flight of Europe’s Killer Drone Prototype
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“Drones are not a security solution”
Progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald details his experiences interviewing the Pakistani victims of U.S. attacks
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Alameda County’s spy drone
We all knew it was coming, but the ACLU has the docs to prove it’s about to start happening here: The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is trying to buy a drone aircraft in part to spy on people.
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US steps up spying on Iran’s nuclear reactor
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US steps up spying over Iran’s N-plants
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US boosts number of spy drone flights over Iran
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US Steps up Spying on Iran Nuke Reactor
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Arrest Of Catholic Anti-War Protester Highlights Progressive Church Opposition To Drone Strikes
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Calif. Senator Padilla Introduces Bill to Regulate Drones in California
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Troubling questions about Obama’s drone warfare
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Restore Reliability and Accountability
President Obama has an opportunity to name a director of the Central Intelligence Agency who will re-establish the C.I.A.’s commitment to objective and balanced intelligence and rebuild the Office of the Inspector General, which has been severely weakened by the Bush and Obama administrations.
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Demilitarize the C.I.A.
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Stick to the Basic Tasks It Was Created For
Please, Mr. President, no macho men, politicians, policy wonks, admirals or generals. The new C.I.A. director should be a seasoned, professional intelligence officer capable of taking the agency in a different direction – back to basics.
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Hunt for bin Laden cuts the CIA clichés
Britain has MI6 super-spy James Bond, who recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first cinematic adventure; the US has the Central Intelligence Agency. Since its inception in 1947 the agency has been the backdrop for dozens of films and television series and, regardless of geopolitical trends, the movies and shows keep coming.
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Drones: 21st century war
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Drone plans mired in ‘privacy issues’
Frustrated commercial drone companies say the Obama administration is falling further and further behind in meeting congressional demands to clear the path for full integration into American airspace by 2015. Billions of dollars of investments as well as commercial applications for drones could be caught up in the delay, they warn.
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Obama Breaks The Golden Rule On Drones
“We could have made sure he turned himself in. If [he] was guilty of any crime, then arrest him, put him on trial.”
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Boffins developing computer cripping drone
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Boeing drone that can cripple electronics
It’s thought the missile could penetrate the bunkers and caves believed to be hiding Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.
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US drones are killing children: Report
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The CIA’s Benghazi Role
Staff consisted of CIA paramilitaries who were working in cooperation with the local militia. The ambassador would not be privy to operational details and would only know in general what the agency was up to. When the ambassador’s party was attacked, the paramilitaries at the CIA base came to the rescue before being driven back into their own compound, where two officers were subsequently killed in a mortar attack.
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Congo’s army accused of rape and looting as M23 rebels win image war
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Tibet Spring
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Oakland officials sued by war veteran who alleges neglect after Occupy arrest
A war veteran who claims he was falsely arrested, beaten, and almost died due to neglect in an Oakland prison has launched legal action against the jail, claiming his pleas for help were ignored.
Kayvan Sabeghi, 33, was arrested during an Occupy rally in Oakland, California, in November last year. Video footage shows him being beaten with batons and he suffered a lacerated spleen which his attorney Dan Siegel says almost killed him after he was left without treatment for 18 hours in prison.
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Cleveland anarchist bomb plot aided and abetted by the FBI
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Suspected cluster bomb attack by regime condemned by rights groups
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Chen Guangcheng’s nephew jailed after snap trial
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Have U.S. Drones Become a ‘Counterinsurgency Air Force’ for Our Allies?
Instead, it has often targeted enemies of allied governments in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan.
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Despite US Refusal to Sign On, Global Landmine Treaty Working
Syria sole country to employ deadly mines in 2012; US among few countries still maintaining right to produce them
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Alleged Iranian nuclear weapon diagram ‘amateurish and wrong’
The latest in a series of leaks purporting to show Iran’s efforts to design a nuclear warhead emerged this week in the form of an Associated Press exclusive about a diagram of the blast dynamics of a bomb said to be three times the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
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Questions Over Obama’s ‘Targeted Killing’ Program Linger After Yemen Drone Strike
Why was he killed when he could have been easily captured? wonder family, neighbors of suspected al-Qaida operative
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Drones kill more innocents in SWA
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50th al-Qaeda leader killed in 338th drone strike
Eight important al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a record number of 122 drone strikes which were carried out by the CIA in Pakistan in 2008.
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Israel to use drones in Azerbaijan for possible Iran strike: report
Israel plans to use unmanned drones it deployed in Azerbaijan to preemptively strike Iranian missile sites in the event of a war, the London-based Sunday Times reported.
The report comes amid mounting speculations that Israel may launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities next year, in which case the latter would retaliate by firing Shahab-3 and other long-range missiles at the Jewish state, while Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Gaza militants would follow suit.
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US drone crashes increasing due to setbacks: Report
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Drone crashes increase at civilian airports
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Governors pushing for local drone test site
The FAA is set to select six unmanned system test sites.
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Anti-drone NYC street artist arrested
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Street artist busted by NYPD for ‘drone’ posters
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Street artist behind satirical NYPD “Drone” posters arrested
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MITCHELL: Obama making up drone rules as he goes
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Breaking: Tibet continues to burn, Tibetan man self-immolates
The wave of fiery protests inside Tibet continues unabated with reports of another self-immolation protest today in Bora region of Sangchu region in eastern Tibet.
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Cablegate
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The Wikileaks, Julian Assange Diplomatic Standoff — Animated
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Whistleblower’s treatment exposes dark side of Obama
OVER the past 2½ years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed late last week, when the 23-year-old US army private, who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, testified at his court martial about the conditions of his detention.
The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures he endured, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced them as ”cruel and inhuman”. President Barack Obama’s State Department spokesman, retired air force colonel P.J. Crowley, resigned after condemning Manning’s treatment. A prison psychologist testified last week that Manning’s conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantanamo Bay. -
Quantico Psychiatrist: Military’s Mistreatment of Pfc. Manning ‘Unprecedented’
The government psychiatrist charged with evaluating Pfc. Bradley Manning during his early detention at the military brig at Quantico told the judge at a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday that his recommendations for the Manning’s treatment were repeatedly ignored by the Marine guard unit responsible for him.
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Two Years of Cablegate and Bradley Manning Still Awaits Trial
Thursday, November 29th, Bradley Manning testified for the first time since his arrest two and a half years ago in Baghdad. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of the first front pages around the world from Cablegate, an archive of 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — messages sent between the State Department and its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world. In collaboration with a network of more than 100 press outlets we revealed the full spectrum of techniques used by the United States to exert itself around the world. The young intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was detained as an alleged source.
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WikiLeaks suspect’s guards describe him crying in jail
FORT MEADE, United States / Maryland: Two of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning’s former prison guards have denied abusing him in custody, and described an incident in which the US Army private suddenly burst into tears.
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Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
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Bradley Manning: Prisoners of conscience
Obama said that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Climate Campaigners Demand UW Divest from Fossil Fuel
This morning, a group of students and alumni delivered over 1,000 signatures to University of Wisconsin Foundation President Mike Knetter demanding that the university divest its holdings from the fossil fuel industry. The activists point to science that shows the industry is slowly cooking the planet and divestment, or “hitting them where is hurts,” as a moral imperative.
As the students gathered on a December day which will top 60 degrees, Elisa Collins Zinda carried her one year-old daughter strapped to her back and talked about why she was there. “I hope my daughter will be able to build a snowman some day,” she said.
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Has the Kyoto protocol made any difference to carbon emissions?
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Contemplating climate change catastrophe at COP 18 in Doha
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This energy bill will fire up the renewables industry
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Climate change is happening now – a carbon price must follow
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Science under pressure as pesticide makers face MPs over bee threat
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BP’s Dispersant Allowed Oil to Penetrate Beaches More Deeply
In an attempt to deal with the 206 million gallons of light crude oil erupting from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, BP unleashed about 2.6 million gallons of Corexit dispersants (Corexit 9500A and Corexit EC9527) in surface waters and at the wellhead on the sea floor. From the beginning the wisdom of that decision was questioned. I wrote extensively about those concerns in “BP’s Deep Secrets.”
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Campaigners sue EPA over carbon emissions
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BP suspended from new US federal contracts over Deepwater disaster
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Amazon deforestation hits record low
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German renewable energy drive brings emissions cuts success
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Japan split on whale hunts, poll shows
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Greenland and Antarctica ‘have lost four trillion tonnes of ice’ in 20 years
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Finance
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Tax paid by some global firms in UK ‘an insult’
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Students Seize Cooper Union Room to Protest Possible Tuition
Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates.
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Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency
Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.
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Morgan Stanley Trader Faces Inquiry on Possible Manipulation
On paper, Glenn Hadden seemed to be the ideal person to run a large bond trading operation at Morgan Stanley when he was hired in early 2011. Mr. Hadden, a former Goldman partner, was one of the most profitable bond traders on Wall Street.
But there was more to his story than just stellar financial results. He had left his previous employer, Goldman Sachs, after questions about his trading activity. And now, Mr. Hadden is under investigation over his trading in Treasury futures while at Goldman, according to a regulatory filing.
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9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare
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Mark Carney’s ‘shock’ appointment means more of the same
Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at the Bank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England’s obsession with inflation targeting and “price stability”. Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured – to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail.
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It’s a Great Time To Be a Banker in America
Matt Yglesias passes along this remarkable chart from Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker showing that 88 percent of all the profit growth in the S&P 500 this year has been concentrated in ten firms in a grand total of two industries: technology and finance. In particular, seven of the ten firms are financial companies. Keep this firmly in mind the next time some Wall Street titan complains yet again that Obama hates banks and is out to destroy them. This is not a sign that Obama has done anything serious to hurt the financial industry; it’s a sign that America’s bankers are comically thin-skinned whiners.
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Shameless Disaster Capitalism: How Companies Are Already Planning to Get Rich Off Superstorm Sandy
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Israel halts Palestinian tax transfer over UN bid
Israel will not transfer tax and tariff funds its collects for the Palestinians this month in response to their successful bid for upgraded UN status, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Sunday.
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Sen. Sanders: Wall Street CEOs are the ‘Faces of Class Warfare’
Incredulous that Wall Street investment bankers and billionaire CEOs have descended on Washington in the midst of ongoing budget talks to tell Americans that they should “lower their expectations” when it comes to the security of their retirement and future health care, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday to call out the audacity of corporate-minded millionaires and billionaires, calling them the new “face of class warfare” in the United States.
“I find it literally beyond comprehension, that we have folks from Wall Street who received huge bailouts from the people of our country—from working families in this country—because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior, which Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.”
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Publicly auditing debts owed to the UK
It seems outrageous that powerful, ruthless “vulture funds” can threaten action which may result in “an end to Argentina’s recovery” and a fresh round of turmoil in the global financial market (Comment, 26 November). Another aspect is the legitimacy of debt incurred by regimes that are not democratically elected. If an individual borrows vast sums of money and spends it on the high life and doesn’t repay it in their lifetime, it is right that creditors can use the law to go after all the funds and assets of the estate. It would not be right if they could use the law to go after the children and grandchildren of the debtor, forcing them to live in penury to pay back money they did not borrow nor benefit from. It seems the same logic applies when vast sums are borrowed by a corrupt dictator and the citizens of the country are forced to pay back the debt.
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Greeks turn to the forests for fuel as winter nears
It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.
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Who Really Crashed the Economy?
In case it’s necessary to remind people, our economy plunged due to the collapse of a Wall Street-fueled housing bubble. The loss of demand from the collapse of the housing bubble both led to a jump in the unemployment rate from which we have still not fully recovered and also the large deficits of the last five years.
Prior to collapse of the bubble, the budget deficits were quite modest. In 2007 the deficit was just 1.7 percent of GDP, a level that can be sustained indefinitely. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficits would remain small for the near future, with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 projected to push the budget into surplus.
The reason that we suddenly got large deficits was the economic downturn, which caused tax revenue to plummet and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance. We also had temporary measures that included tax cuts such as the payroll tax holiday and various spending programs that further raised the deficit.
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Offshore secrets revealed: the shadowy side of a booming industry
A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies
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City of London Corporation: ‘last rotten borough’ faces calls for reform
A campaign to radically reform and open up the secretive workings of the powerful local authority governing the City of London has been launched by a diverse group whose supporters include activists from the Occupy movement, clerics and the Tory MP David Davis.
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McJobs Should Pay, Too: Inside Fast-Food Workers’ Historic Protest For Living Wages
As low-wage service jobs become the new normal for millions of families, we should rethink the balance of power between fast-food workers and their corporations
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10 Corporations That Still Get New Government Contracts, Despite Alleged Misconduct
The EPA surprised quite a few people on Wednesday when it announced sanctions on BP related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP won’t be allowed to get any new government contracts until it cleans up its act, the agency said.
This was announced in a short press release that wasn’t really very specific about what that penalty means in practice. It could bar the company from new contracts for as long as 18 months—and potentially longer, if there are ongoing legal proceedings against the company. And it’s not just BP’s Gulf of Mexico affiliate—this suspension applies to all of BP’s affiliates, barring the company from billions of dollars in potential future contracts.
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MI6 told agent they could not kill al-Qaeda leader
MI6 passed up an opportunity to kill a senior leader of al-Qaeda because lawyers advised them they would be breaking the law, it can be disclosed.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Dutch Parliament To Revoke Blasphemy Law
Insulting God will no longer be a crime in the Netherlands after the Dutch parliament decided to revoke a decades-old blasphemy law from the statute books.
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Syria’s internet cutoff easy to spot
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Privacy
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Access to private net, phone use up by 20% – without warrants
AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.
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The Government is Profiling You
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Mediator Joins Contentious Effort to Add a ‘Do Not Track’ Option to Web Browsing
Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.
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Assange: Google, Facebook run “side projects” for US spooks
…nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”.
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Senate committee takes an important step towards protecting your inbox
In the wake of former CIA Director David Petraeus’ sex scandal—uncovered largely through the disclosure of explicit e-mails between him and his mistress—the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a new amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on Wednesday.
The bill as it stands now (PDF) would require a warrant by law enforcement agencies before they can go digging through e-mail, social networking posts, and other data stored on cloud-based services. If it passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the president, it would mark an important shift in privacy protection for electronic communications. As we’ve reported for some time now, those protections (or lack thereof) are woefully out of date.
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What does your cyber signature say about you?
Changing the behaviour of citizens to reduce the demand placed on public services is now a top priority for both central and local government. From voting or volunteering more, to simply accessing council services online, new habits must be developed to meet the financial challenges the government faces.
With direct human-to-human contact being replaced with human-to-screen interaction, local government websites have a central role to play in delivering that change in behaviour. But behaviour change is fundamentally a soft skilll; you do it with emotions, not excel spreadsheets. So how do you put the human back into that virtual relationship?
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City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs
When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.
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Video: NSA Whistleblower William Binney Explains How All Americans are Under Gov. Surveillance
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Civil Rights
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Chinese women protest at gynaecology checks for civil service jobs
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Senate Passes Indefinite Detention Limitations Amid Various Interpretations of the Statute Language
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Colombian journalist dies after arrest by police
A Colombian journalist, Guillermo Quiroz Delgado, died in a hospital after suffering head injuries while in police custody.
Police claim that he sustained the injuries after falling from a police vehicle. But his family and colleagues believe he was beaten and thrown from the truck.
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Lindsey Graham Wants the Government to Be Able to Lock You Up Forever Without a Trial
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not happy that the government might have to actually convict a suspected terrorist of a crime before locking them up forever and throwing away the key. So he’s working on an amendment to the pending defense bill that would make it clear that if the government thinks you’re a terrorist, it can put you in prison without ever having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you so much as vandalized a dive bar bathroom wall.
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My Formal Abandonment of Race
I don’t want to check that “Caucasian” box. To me, it says “hey, I’m white, go get the other guys”.
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India’s clothing workers: ‘They slap us and call us dogs and donkeys’
Human rights tribunal hears allegations of abuse and low pay against clothing companies that supply high street stores
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Samsung unearths illegal work practices at Chinese suppliers
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Afghan Clerics Want Power To Issue Legally Binding Fatwas
Islamic clerics on Afghanistan’s Ulema Council are the country’s religious authorities, but their opinions on questions of Islamic law are treated as guideposts rather than legally binding decrees.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Internet Isn’t Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To ‘Fix’ It?
We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.
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The Real Threat to Internet Freedom Isn’t the United Nations
This article arises from Future Tense, a joint effort of Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate that looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and for society. On Thursday, Nov. 29, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of Internet governance. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation’s website. The event will also be streamed live.
The Internet is often seen as a place of chaos and disorder, a borderless world in which anonymous trolls roam free and vigilante hackers wreak havoc. But as a crucial United Nations conference on the future of telecommunications looms next week, there are fears governments are secretly maneuvering to restructure and rein in the anarchic Web we have come to know and love, perhaps even ushering in a new era of pervasive surveillance. So just how real is the threat of change and what might it mean?
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Former spy chief says U.S. has had its cyber ’9/11 warning’
The United States faces “the cyber equivalent of the World Trade Center attack” unless urgent action is taken, a former U.S. intelligence chief warns.
John “Mike” McConnell, who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton and then as director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush and President Obama, told the Financial Times (subscription required) that such an attack would cripple the nation’s banking system, power grid, and other essential infrastructure. -
Julian Assange: The Web can create revolutions — or jail revolutionaries
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Tales of the Unexpected: the Communications Data Bill
We await with interest the report from the joint committee on the draft Communications Data Bill, and trust the committee has properly considered the substantial evidence submitted. The debate is hotting up, with Theresa May pitching hard in the Sun.
We are very interested to see if the Committee took a look at the submission by Caspar Bowden on page 102 of the written evidence highlighting the testimony given by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre), in support of the draft Bill. Mr Davies gave an example of a murder case in Lincolnshire in which increased data retention could have helped.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Editorial: NZ must not settle for less than golden deal on TPP
Auckland has seldom hosted a more globally important meeting than the nine days of negotiations that start today on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
The TPP offers the most promising advance of free trade since the failure of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round. Regional free trade treaties are a poor substitute for a global agreement but when they are based on the same principles and open to all countries that can meet their standards, they are the next best thing. -
Copyrights
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How the Hobbit dispute was used to justify curbs to the actors’ union
Guardian readers may have followed the industrial dispute that played out in New Zealand over The Hobbit. This dispute arose because a union of performers (Equity) sought to exercise its members’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain. It was nothing more and nothing less. What played out was an unexpected journey of misrepresentation, led partly by the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers, but particularly by the New Zealand government.
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Congressional group briefly opens up on radical copyright reform, then takes it back
Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as “copyleft” licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law’s protectionist character.
Yet open source licenses (in their current forms) rely on copyright law. Copyright law supplies the bundle of statutory rights that empower the “keep it open” requirement of an open source license. Without copyright law, an author would have to find another legal theory to prevent others from, for example, taking a developer’s code and hiding it behind technological walls. And what do you sue for when someone violates the terms of an open source license? Copyright infringement (among other things).
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PromoBay block
Reports from TorrentFreak that the legitimate website PromoBay.org is being blocked by several UK ISPs highlights some of the problems with website blocking as a strategy and practice.
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