03.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Hey Linux gamers, got some good news for the AMD users . It’s pretty common knowledge Nvidia users get some good drivers at the trade-off of binary blob drivers (or not, depending on your ethics) and that AMD are often left in the dust, but how can open source drivers change that?
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The announcement came over the Steam Community Boards, where it was announced that the Family Sharing feature is now available to the general public. Through this feature, a single user can share his/her entire Steam Library with up to five family members over ten different devices. Once the members are authorized, they can play any or all of the game through their own accounts. The achievements, saves and other related records achieved by the gamer will be tied to the gamer’s individual account using cloud saves.
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Something to note is that it doesn’t show the lesser represented distro’s, I for example use Manjaro which isn’t shown.
So, to look back on January Linux was actually on 1.34%, not 1.11%!
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According to the latest figures published by Valve for their “Steam Hardware Survey”, they put the percent of Linux gamers on Steam at 1.30%.
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So Linux has a lot of games now, with plenty more still to come this year as it’s early days yet, but I have decided to list a few you really need to keep an eye on. Since we post so much news nowadays I feel that it is a good time to reflect on what we have still yet to come, so you don’t get lost in a sea of Linux games.
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I have tested the game and it runs really well on Manjaro, it’s very odd, but the premise is really funny. I love how it all looks like status updates on a social networking site.
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After a number of years of remaining woefully behind other platforms, Linux is starting to be a gaming platform to take seriously. Late last year, I covered comments from Lars Gustavsson, a creative director for EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), the Electronic Arts studio that does the Battlefield series, on the topic of Linux games. He had told Polygon that DICE would love to delve into Linux games, and that what Linux really needs is a “killer game.” Now, as 2014 is underway, Linux gamers actually have a lot of good choices.
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My feeling is that the answer is clearly no, and frankly it’s very refreshing for Linux gamers to have different options at all. I remember the days when it was very hard to find games for Linux and I’d never want to go back to that. Ever. It was a miserable time if you used Linux and wanted to play games.
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Shadowrun Returns today receives its first full-length campaign expansion with Shadowrun: Dragonfall from developer Harebrained Schemes. A 12+ hour campaign set in the city of Berlin awaits with new features.
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Today, a beta version of Portal 2, one of the most successful game titles poduced by Valve and generally one of the most successful computer games, has been released for Linux. While the first Portal has been available on Linux for a year now, Valve was working on other titles for Linux, like Left 4 Dead 2, Dota 2 or the new game consoles “Steam machines”, before releasing Portal 2 for Linux.
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Cricket Audio allows app developers to quickly add sound to their apps with just a few lines of code. It can play sounds directly from memory with low latency, or stream them from storage media, and is designed specifically for mobile games, with highly optimized code and low, predictable memory usage. It also works on Windows, OS X, and now Linux, so it can be integrated into authoring tools.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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It was only a bit over a week ago that I wrote an article on the Birdie Twitter application. Well, now the Birdie team is scrapping the current codebase and looks to be rebooting the application as Birdie 2.0.
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Very much inspired by my interview with Bryan Behrenshausen, I’ve been spending a lot more time working with Markdown. Day-to-day, at work and at home, I usually work with either HTML or word processed documents. I’m fast with HTML and proficient with word processors, and I rarely need to convert one to the other, but I liked the idea of simplifying my process and using Markdown for everything, with pandoc to convert it.
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In last article, we have discussed about WildFly-8 (New enhanced version on Jboss AS). We have gone through the new functionalities and features added/upgraded to this version. Today, in this post we are going to discuss about the CLI management using GUI and how to manage the Server using GUI version on CLI management.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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03.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: This weekend’s headlines about foreign policy, surveillance, and aggression
China
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A year ago, Mandiant, since acquired by FireEye, issued a long report called “APT1″ that accused China’s People’s Liberation Army of launching cyber-espionage attacks against 141 companies in 20 industries through a group known as “PLA Unit 61398″ operating mainly from Shanghai.
Mass surveillance in US/UK
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Angwin goes to great lengths to do just that. One of the unthinkable things she did to keep her safe?
Tin foil. Seriously.
Angwin spent a day with her phone wrapped in it. The good news is the tinfoil disabled it.
“The bad news is the phone is disabled and people can’t get a hold of you,” she says. “And people look at you like you’re crazy.”
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Serafini and fellow Washington County Republican Del. Neil Parrott were reminded of that earlier this month when they signed on as co-sponsors of a measure called the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which, if enacted, could stop the National Security Agency from operating in the state by, among other things, cutting off utility services to the superspy agency.
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The NSA has refused to detail exactly how much access to secret Yahoo webcam surveillance that snapped photos of millions of unwitting video chatters, including those involved in adult activities, as demands from privacy regulators for more transparency in monitoring increase in volume. Allegations earlier this week that a clandestine UK scheme run by GCHQ tapped into millions of Yahoo webcam streams and recorded numerous still images to create a vast virtual “mugshot” book of potential terrorists, with technical assistance from the US’ NSA in setting up the system, has reawakened criticism of the federal agency after moves by President Obama to try to dampen down what have been seen as overly intrusive methods.
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The Guardian reports that GCHQ, a British analog to the National Security Agency, collected and stored images from Yahoo webcam streams through a program called “Optic Nerve.” According to the report, the agency targeted “millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing,” including citizens of both the United States and the United Kingdom, with the program.
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The latest top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) may have peered into the lives of millions of internet users who were not suspected of wrongdoing. The surveillance program codenamed “Optic Nerve” compiled still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and stored them in the GCHQ’s databases with help from the NSA. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency reportedly amassed webcam images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts worldwide. According to the documents, between 3 and 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam images contained what the GCHQ called “undesirable nudity.” The program was reportedly also used for experiments in “automated facial recognition” as well as to monitor terrorism suspects. We speak with James Ball, one of the reporters who broke the story. He is the special projects editor for Guardian U.S.
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Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) slammed the National Security Agency after reports that its surveillance program capture images from users’ webcams.
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Tony Gosling: This has got nothing to do with counterterrorism, has it? Because this is just yet another great data troll and there are all sorts of reasons why it is illegal. Apparently this sort of thing has to be sanctioned by the Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary at the highest levels, and in the US it has to be sanctioned through the secret FISA court, but there are very good reasons why the people that have committed this actually should be or are criminals. I’m talking about those who authorized it at government level, in GCHQ and the individual operators that have been collecting this data. I mean all of these things we’ve heard about spyware being put on viruses, put on our computers, our computers being stopped on the way to our homes to have this spyware, this kind of thing put on it, we also have denial of service attacks that is taking out websites of campaign groups and that sort of thing by GCHQ and by the NSA. But this is actually the most creepy so far. Using webcams, it’s like an intruder into your living room and it’s not just happening to people who counter terrorism, there is everybody they are after here.
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To date, most opposition to Fourth Amendment Protection Act provisions that would ultimately shut off electricity and water to NSA facilities supplied by state entities has come from those claiming it will never work, and others who defend the “national security” mission of the spy agency. Few have actually challenged the legality of state action.
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I’m not one to fall into an Orwellian funk about Big Brother government, but spectacular advances in technology ought to concern anyone who values privacy. Whether it’s the NSA global spying scandal or the likelihood of unmanned drones patrolling the skies over your idyllic middle-class neighborhood, it’s all getting a little scary. Whether it’s an array of police cameras in downtown Fargo, or private sector monitoring/collecting of your buying habits, or recording sound and picture of folks walking through a mall, or the fact that anyone with a cellphone can be tracked and identified – the technologies deployed already are far beyond the frightening screens in George Orwell’s “1984.”
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Recently it was announced that the prestigious George Polk Award for National Security Reporting would be given to the four journalists — Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman — most active in reporting about the content of the NSA documents leaked by Snowden. The award, named after a CBS News correspondent killed in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece, is intended to honor journalists who “heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day.”
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Everyone from Germany’s Angela Merkel to Utah’s Tea Party wants to know what is going on in the 200,000-square-foot complex of Walmart-esque boxes squatting on the hillside due west of Point of the Mountain. Of course, this being the $1.5 million beating heart of a spy agency, we aren’t meant to know what’s out there—to paraphrase the Roach Motel slogan: Vast amounts of information go in, but none comes out. If it weren’t for Edward Snowden, we wouldn’t know much at all. But the tantalizing bits—including that NSA monitors terrorists’ porn browsing, Internet gamers, and a few employees’ ex-lovers—boggles the imagination.
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Yet America basically has a secret police in the form of the NSA. It is hypocritical to claim that we are the land of the free when we are being constantly watched by the government. America needs to either accept that we are not really free or the NSA need to massively change their practices. We have the Constitution for a reason, to guide our government and to protect America’s citizens.
RSA
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Stephen Colbert is not terribly worried about the NSA reading his emails.
“I don’t necessarily want people reading my emails but I’m not a spy, I don’t run a crime syndicate,” he said at the RSA computer security conference on Friday. “I’ve got things I don’t want people to know but I didn’t really go running for cover for a new way to encrypt.”
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It’s clear that Coviello has either not kept up with what’s been going on, is in denial or deliberately attempting to mislead.
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The NSA paid RSA $10 million to influence the default method of encryption used in a popular RSA product, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed.
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The Trustycon folks have uploaded over seven hours’ worth of talks from their event, an alternative to the RSA security conference founded by speakers who quit over RSA’s collusion with the NSA. I’ve just watched Ed Felten’s talk on “Redesigning NSA Programs to Protect Privacy” (starts at 6:32:33), an absolutely brilliant talk that blends a lucid discussion of statistics with practical computer science with crimefighting, all within a framework of respect for privacy, liberty and the US Bill of Rights.
Tor/IM
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Worried about Facebook’s takeover of Whatsapp? The Tor Project is prepping an anonymous instant messaging client that’s tied to its free, Deep Web-friendly browser.
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First of all Telegram is free and open-source, and you can grab the source from here. Well known security protocols are open-source and this gives the possibility for communities of cryptographers, hackers and public audience to test their actual security. Using two layers of secure encryption with 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange. It’s impossible to brute force a RSA 2048 encryption key with all the computers available on the universe.
Ukraine
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Russia’s parliament has approved President Putin’s request for the use of force inside neighboring Ukraine, as the latest neocon-approved “regime change” spins out of control and threatens to inflict grave damage on international relations, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
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Russian senate endorse Putin’s request to use armed forces as Russian forces tighten their grip on Crimea and pro-Russian demonstrations take place in eastern and southern Ukraine.
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The EU and US have carried out a classic coup d’état in Ukraine using ultra-right forces as human material, anti-war activist Brian Becker told RT. And cementing that victory with an IMF aid package would place Ukraine on a Greek path into Europe.
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This morning, I see that some people are quite abuzz about a new Pando article ”revealing” that the foundation of Pierre Omidyar, the publisher of First Look Media which publishes The Intercept, gave several hundred thousand dollars to a Ukraininan “pro-democracy” organization opposed to the ruling regime. This, apparently, is some sort of scandal that must be immediately addressed not only by Omidyar, but also by every journalist who works at First Look. That several whole hours elapsed since the article was published on late Friday afternoon without my commenting is, for some, indicative of disturbing stonewalling.
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Putin, of course, is a total hypocrite. There is no doubt that the populations of Dagestan and Chehcnya had a genuine and settled desire to secede from Russia, and they have suffered Putin’s genocidal policies in consequence. Putin is not acting from a belief in self-determination, but from naked Russian nationalism. That is what is so amusing about the deluded left wingers supporting him against the nationalists of Kiev.
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The National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan’s propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration’s policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections.
Drones (extrajudicial killings)
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Khan almost did not make it the UK. Shortly before he was to travel to Europe he was taken from his home in Rawalpindi. He said 15 people including some dressed as police took him and held him for nine days, torturing him during the detention.
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This extrajudicial killing program should make every American queasy. Based on largely secret legal standards and entirely secret evidence, our government has killed thousands of people. At least several hundred were killed far from any battlefield. Four of the dead are Americans. The current case involves an al-Qaeda member known as Abdullah al-Shami, who was born in the United States and is now in Pakistan. Astonishingly, President Obama’s Justice Department has said the courts have no role in deciding whether the killing of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield is lawful.
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Were you surprised the 2014 New Mexico legislative session dragged to a finish without one word about killing drones?
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A UN counter-terrorism expert has published the second report of his year-long investigation into drone strikes, highlighting 30 strikes where civilians are reported to have been killed.
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EU legislation banning the use of drones won’t diminish the number of drone attacks, it will just be much more selective in terms of where they can be used, former Pentagon official Michael Maloof told RT.
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Jamaat e Islami (JI) chief Munawar Hasan said European Parliament’s condemnation of civilian killings in drone attacks hit Pakistani rulers hard since they badly failed in stopping civilian massacre.
Militarism
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While talking about the regime change program of U.S. foreign Policy he says, The US should encourage such change through the force of its own democratic example, not through force of arms or covert actions to encourage coups d’etat as it is doing today in Venezuela. And, by the way, that US example has been tarnished enormously by such actions as torture and abuse.”
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How President Obama can end the war on terror, once and for all.
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Former CIA acting Director Mike Morell might be recalled for testimony to determine if he misled Congress and doctored the White House response to a terrorist attack to ensure President Obama’s re-election.
The administration’s tangled web of Benghazi lies might be unraveling some more. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has told Fox News that Morell, a former deputy director and twice acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will likely be recalled to testify.
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This is the Washington merry-go-round, of course, no matter who controls the White House or Congress. According to the reform group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “70 percent of the 108 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired between 2009 and 2011 took jobs with defense contractors or consultants. In at least a few cases, these retirees have continued to advise the Department of Defense – all while on the payroll of the defense industry.”
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If there were an Oscar for Best Hidden Agenda, it would go to Jack Ryan: The Shadow Recruit (dir. Kenneth Branagh). At a time when regulators and citizens try to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 recession and the CIA accountable for torture, Jack Ryan turns Wall Street into a victim and the CIA into a model husband. It does so with all the slick im/plausibility of a thriller—and it uses the Bible to boost its case.
Civil Rights
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My six-year-old son was suspended as a danger to others. His crime? A disability you could find in any classroom
Greenwald et al.
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Clearly, there’s an officially sanctioned, if not supported, backlash underway to cast doubt on the those who are disseminating the information that Eward Snowden and other whistleblowers are exposing to the global public.
What better way to respond to the evidence of government overreach and criminality in the spying by the NSA and other agencies than to try to change the subject by smearing the people who are funding the reporting on it to us.
This latest round of the media battle should not be surprising. In fact, it’s all too predictable.
In the latest round, Lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, the point person/interpreter for the majority of the Snowden disclosures, came under attack by indirection with a high profile smear on Pierre Omidyar, the E-Bay billionaire funding his new venture, First Look Media.
Leading the charge publicly is one Patrick Ames, who writes for Pando News, a rival news agency funded by another Silicon Valley tech moneyman. He has gone after Greenwald before charging that he is profiting by selling state secrets.
Snowden et al.
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The main thing The Snowden Operation wants us to know is that “this affair has Kremlin fingerprints on it. They may be faint and smudged, but they are there.” Yes, Lucas acknowledges, it’s possible the Russians aren’t involved, “but not likely.” The naive might be fooled into thinking all was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface and Snowden was simply an NSA employee who reached out to journalists on his own. But sophisticated observers like Lucas, with “30 years of looking at Soviet and then Russian intelligence and propaganda operations,” see the truth. Maybe Snowden was recruited by the Russians to leak NSA documents and knew it was them doing the recruiting; maybe he was recruited by them but they fooled him into thinking they were someone more sympathetic; or maybe the Russians somehow “brokered an introduction” between Snowden and others who would encourage and publicize his leaks (i.e., journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and hacker Jacob Appelbaum) without any of them being aware of the hidden Kremlin hand.
Assange
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Julian Assange’s prolonged stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy has cost the Metropolitan Police £5.3million, in the 18 months since he entered the building in Knightsbridge.
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Assange, who rarely agrees to interviews, will talk about the spread of surveillance, advantages and abuses of the digital age and the future of democracy. This is one of more than 800 daytime programming sessions at the 2014 SXSW Interactive Festival.
NSA Policy
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As part of my ongoing focus on Executive Order 12333, I’ve been reviewing how the Bush Administration changed the EO when, shortly after the passage of the FISA Amendments Act, on July 30, 2008, they rolled out a new version of the order, with little consultation with Congress. Here’s the original version Ronald Reagan issued in 1981, here’s the EO making the changes, here’s how the new and improved version from 2008 reads with the changes.
While the most significant changes in the EO were — and were billed to be — the elaboration of the increased role for the Director of National Intelligence (who was then revolving door Booz executive Mike McConnell), there are actually several changes that affected NSA.
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Bruce Schneier is a legendary figure in the security community, well-known for his expertise in cryptography and more recently for his insight into the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA). Schneier currently serves as the CTO of incident response management vendor Co3 Systems.
FBI
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Earlier this week, Bryan Seely, a network engineer and one-time Marine, played me recordings of two phone calls (embedded below.) The calls were placed by unwitting citizens to the FBI office in San Francisco and to the Secret Service in Washington, D.C. Neither the callers nor the FBI or Secret Service personnel who answered the phone realized that Seely was secretly recording them. He used Google Maps to do it.
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03.01.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past 24 hours about British and US surveillance, assassination, and outside intervention in East Europe
NSA/GCHQ
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Nothing To Hide is an “anti-stealth game,” in which you must carry cameras and spy gear to live in a world of self-surveillance and self-censorship. A world where you’re made to be your own watchdog. Released for The Day We Fight Back, the game is now seeking crowdfunding to complete the open source game—10% of what’s raised will first go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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Psssst! Wanna come in on a private satellite with me? They’re available, and they cost about $2m a year to run, so it would need an awful lot of us to club together via Kickstarter or some such.George Clooney’s got one. He trains it between Sudan and South Sudan, keeping a particular eye on the Hague-wanted president Omar al-Bashir, and uses the footage to draw attention to human rights violations. But in the wake of news that the Optic Nerve programme targeted and retained the webcam images of 1.8m UK internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, I’d like you to consider pointing ours somewhere pointed, such as the NSA or GCHQ. Just their car parks would do.
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THE MOST INTERESTING DEVICE shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week was the secure Blackphone developed by Silent Circle and Geeksphone.
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“Whatever the level of cryptography you’re using, the NSA can probably break into your home network, install keyloggers and grab whatever they want — passwords, private PGP keys, screenshots, etc.,” said Cyril Soler, a developer on the RetroShare project. “This is always easier than breaking the encryption.” Their ability to do that is probably facilitated by backdoors.
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Levison was prohibited from discussing any details of the case until last October, when the court unsealed a portion of the documents. The unsealed records reveal that the FBI was demanding access to Lavabit’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) keys, which would essentially allow the agency access to all messages on Lavabit’s server. While the FBI was ostensibly targeting only a single user, Levison was unwilling to sacrifice the privacy of his other 400,000+ users.
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This year’s RSA Conference began with controversy. Even before Chairman Art Coviello took the stage to deliver his opening keynote, protesters unfurled banners on the Moscone Center reminding the world of RSA’s alleged complicity in enabling the NSA to access data that was believed to be secure.
However, after an interview with Coviello, we are no closer to any meaningful information as he does a skilful job of obfuscating and avoiding questions regarding the NSA.
Webcams
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Three senators condemn UK spy agency’s ‘breathtaking lack of respect’ over interception of Yahoo users’ webcam images
Microsoft
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G.C.H.Q. was apparently also interested in tapping into Microsoft’s Kinect.
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The Kinect for Xbox 360 was once considered for its potential use as a mass surveillance tool by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), according to documents published by The Guardian.
The GCHQ is the British equivalent to the United States’ NSA.
The information comes from documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They document a program entitled “Optic Nerve” that collected images of users through their webcams, including users of Yahoo chats between 2008 and 2010.
Messaging
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The instant messenger is still in the early planning stages, but Tor’s developers seem to be preparing to turn it around quickly. The messenger will be built on Instantbird, an existing open-source messenger, and development will largely involve adding in Off-the-Record Messaging encryption, making it send its messages over Tor, and stripping it of some automated logging and reporting features. Tor hopes to have its first step of work on the messaging app completed by the end of March, but it doesn’t draw a timeline for the project out from there.
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Tor, the team behind the world’s leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland.
The Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) is set to work with the open-source InstantBird messenger client in experimental builds released to the public by March 31, 2014. The developers aim to build in encrypted off-the-record chatting and then bundle the client with the general Tor Launcher in the following months.
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Sutton displays precisely the mind-set of the security state, that led GCHQ to intercept the webcam chats of 1.4 million completely random British people, in the hope of finding Islamic terrorists. (They didn’t find any terrorists, but they did look at over 100,000 people masturbating). Sutton states that Begg must be a terrorist because ”a convicted Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) supporter identified as ‘D’ ” had used Begg’s bookshop. And he calls me “conspiratorial”! The poor man must see terrorists everywhere. The fact that Moazzam Begg is now detained again, had been detained for years, has had everything belonging to him searched microscopically, and nothing has ever been found to justify a criminal charge of any kind, means nothing to witchfinder Sutton. That anti-Muslim bigot is plainly convinced of Moazzam Begg’s guilt, though as he has not been charged, of what is unsure.
Simon Phipps on Spying
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Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp gains them almost half a billion users worth of telephone data
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Maybe there’s more to the Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp than just the centralised consolidation of users and user information that Simon denounced in his previous InfoWorld article . Perhaps this particular addition to their portfolio is Facebook’s move towards becoming the first truly global telco!
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Knowing we could be watched, as Jeremy Bentham observed, changes our behaviour; specifically, it chills our creativity. This in turn affects innovation and hence the economy. More directly, businesses (like RSA) are harmed by the disclosure of their for-profit collusion.
ORG
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Asking for comments and feedback on the code is a positive move, but the survey is not balanced to capture a variety of opinions. For example it asks whether the code explains the benefits of anonymisation, but not whether it explains the risks. And it doesn’t.
Apple
[First, watch AOL promoting the fiction that iMessage is secure. It’s not alone.]
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If you are an iPhone owner, you may have noticed that a minor security update to the iOS software that runs you device was “pushed” to all users by Apple last Friday. The original explanation from Apple was that an attacker “with a privileged network position” could capture or modify data.
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According to slide 6 in the leaked PowerPoint deck on NSA’s PRISM program, Apple was “added” in October 2012.
These three facts prove nothing; it’s purely circumstantial. But the shoe fits.
Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of code to the file. Conspiratorially, one could suppose the NSA planted the bug, through an employee mole, perhaps. Innocuously, the Occam’s Razor explanation would be that this was an inadvertent error on the part of an Apple engineer. It looks like the sort of bug that could result from a merge gone bad, duplicating the goto fail; line.
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Twice now that Apple’s bypassed Snow Leopard when it patched newer editions
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The critical iOS vulnerability that Apple patched last week is an excellent example. Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code: a second “goto fail;” statement. Since that statement isn’t a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate.
Alexander
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General Keith Alexander, the soon-to-be departed chief of the NSA, admitted Thursday in front of a congressional committee that the massive intelligence agency may be open to extracting less, or more targeted metadata from communication companies.
Classified documents leaked last summer by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the intelligence agency currently compels at least three major telephone providers – Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T – to turn over call information on millions of Americans. Among that information, known as metadata, is the duration of the call, the time the call was made, who the phone call was to, and where it originated.
Ukraine and Intervention
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“Yats is the guy,” said Obama’s potty-mouthed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, in a recorded and widely disseminated discussion with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine earlier this year. She was referring to Arseni Yatsenyuk, the former foreign and economics minister who was confirmed as the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine today.
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The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.
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Yanukovych is now in Russia and is expected to hold a news conference today. Meanwhile, the United States is rejecting claims that the change in power in Ukraine constitutes a coup. On Thursday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Yanukovych had “abdicated his responsibilities” and “undermined his legitimacy” by fleeing Kiev. Carney outlined U.S. plans to work with the new government.
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But the secretive agency is no newcomer to American combat zones. In Vietnam, a war without battle lines, it played a behind-the-scenes role in advancing American interests.
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Soon, intrepid journalists get wind of the operation and file Freedom of Information Act requests for more information. A CIA lawyer — operating under the cover name Walt Logan — thinks up a novel way to keep the mission secret without telling an all-out lie: refuse to confirm or deny whether records about the Glomar Explorer’s mission exist. One journalist sues over this confusing non-response, and a battle over government secrecy follows in court.
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There are limited circumstances in which a Glomar response may be necessary to protect veritable government secrets, but as I’ve written before in The New York Times (with Jameel Jaffer) and in the NYU Law Review, it has been deployed far beyond acceptable bounds. Perhaps most disturbing is the way the government uses Glomar to facilitate selective and misleading disclosures. Government officials often “leak” information to the press that paints controversial programs in a positive light on the condition that the press withholds their names. But when asked to officially release records under FOIA, those officials clam up and hide behind the Glomar response. The result is an absurd double standard, and our democracy suffers for it.
Civil Rights
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The interrogators told him he was under interrogation for publishing a picture of Jerusalem City Council Head, Nir Barkat, describing him as the “mayor of occupied Jerusalem”.
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Months after their conduct was discovered, two police officers were disciplined for making a game of stealing signs from homeless people in Midland, Texas — and many believe the cops’ punishment was not harsh enough to fit the offense.
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Moazzam Begg, a native-born British citizen of Pakistani descent, spent three years incarcerated in the most notorious detention camps created in the post-9/11 “War on Terror”: all without ever being charged with any crime.
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Britain’s citizenship deprivation processes may help obscure the Obama Administration’s willingness to kill and kidnap Britons.
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Five years into his presidency, it’s clear Obama failed to keep promises he claimed were at the heart of his approach to governance. We expected better.
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Idaho’s governor has signed a bill into law that makes it illegal for undercover investigators and whistleblowers to expose animal cruelty on factory farms and slaughterhouses.
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The Whistler, the new whistleblower support network in the UK, recently held an international pre-launch in London.
The Whistler has been set up by Gavin MacFadyen, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and Eileen Chubb of Compassion in Care.
Both, through their work, realise the heavy price that all whistleblowers from every sector have to pay, not just professionally, but also socially, psychologically and also potentially legally. And they want to help.
Drones
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Pakistani anti-drone activist Karim Khan was abducted February 5, just before he was due to travel to Europe to speak out about U.S. drone strikes. He joins us to describe how he was held for nine days. During that time he says he was repeatedly tortured and beaten. In 2009, a U.S. drone killed Khan’s brother and son. He joins us from London, where he traveled to to meet with British lawmakers to raise concerns about the U.S. drone program. “They attacked our mosques, they attacked our schools, they attacked our schoolchildren, they attacked our teachers,” Khan says. “So everything is completely destroyed by these drone strikes.” We also speak with Khan’s lawyer, Shahzad Akbar. “This is what the human face of the victim is, and it is important that the American people are told about who these people are,” Akbar says. “They are being targeted in the name of national security, [but] what we see on the ground is that it is not really serving the national security interests of anyone.”
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02.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest (past 24 hours) stories about eroding human rights (exploiting transitions to digital), especially privacy rights
GCHQ
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GCHQ documents say between 3-11 percent of Yahoo webcam chats contain ‘undesirable’ nudity.
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The government is spying on Yahoo users via their webcams and X-box, according to a report based on leaked Eric Snowden documents. Both the American and British governments are now accused of spying on citizens in their own home, sans either a warrant or just cause.
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• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
UK
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Techdirt followed the the saga of the hacker Gary McKinnon, whom the US authorities wished to extradite from the UK to face charges of causing damage to military computers, for some years before the UK Home Secretary blocked his extradition, and the case against him in the UK was dropped. That was a great result for McKinnon after a 10-year fight to avoid extradition, but it meant that the key issues that his situation raised were never addressed.
Reform/Legal
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“Once You Give Up Your Rights, You Can Never Get Them Back. Once You Turn On That Police State, You Can Never Turn It Off.”
Richard Clarke is one of the four White House panelists on NSA spying, and the former top counter-terror czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Local Action
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While the NSA datacenter and its activities are in the national spotlight, local authority remains divided on how to treat it.
Algorithms
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Eavesdropping by algorithm is still eavesdropping, whether a human looks at your data or not. Real reform can’t abide by the spy dictionary anymore
Alexander
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In one of his final Capitol Hill appearances, Gen. Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency’s director, on Thursday called for a stronger strategy to deter cyberattacks, saying the line that would prompt a U.S. response against an adversary “does not yet exist.”
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Alexander says NSA could accept a change where agency would only be allowed to collect phone data related to terrorism
‘Metadata’
Amazon/CIA
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When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.
Civil Rights
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If President Barack Obama gets his way, five American citizens will have become victims of announced “targeted assassinations” by the military and CIA. Coupled with disturbing statements by United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, it is evident that the principle of the rule of law has lost force in the past few decades, especially after 9/11.
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It was enshrined in the American, British and French Revolutions as sacred, and is an essential precept of liberalism.
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*Eliminate the National Surveillance Agency, the NSA; completely stop the enormous spying on the American people. Take the other 12 U.S. intelligence agencies and combine their functions into one. We have the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security to monitor imminent or longer term dangers to this country.
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Think of us as having two presidents. One, a fellow named Barack Obama, cuts a distinctly Clark Kent-ish figure. In presiding over domestic policy, he is regularly thwarted in his desires by the Republicans in Congress and couldn’t until recently get his most basic choices for government positions or the judiciary through the Senate. For the most minimal look of effectiveness, he has to rely on relatively small gestures by executive order. In the recent history of the American presidency, he is a remarkably powerless figure presiding over what everyone who is a media anyone claims is a riven, paralyzed, even broken government structure, one in which the Republicans are intent on ensuring that a Democratic president can do nothing until they take the White House (which is almost guaranteed to be never). What this president wants, almost by definition, he can’t have. He is, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge wrote recently, a man who’s lost the plot line to his own story and has been relegated to the position of onlooker-in-chief.
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There is one law for their terrorists and another for ours. “Theirs” kill a soldier in Woolwich and get slammed up for life. They get a verbal lynching from the red-tops, with Rot in Jail headlines and screams the rope would be too good for them, the filth and scum. “Our” terrorists get royal pardons and “letters of assurance”, even if, as may be the case, they slaughter four soldiers and eight horses in cold blood in Hyde Park. That is how it must seem to many people.
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The Untied States is the world’s biggest violator of human rights of non-American persons and has been strongly condemned for conducting surveillance and prisoner torture around the globe, a report on US human rights said Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013 was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council, or the Cabinet, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013 issued by the US State Department on Thursday.
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China has hit back at the US over the human rights debate alleging the “world judge of human rights” has serious question marks hanging over its own record.
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Washington has long “made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks” on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions again in its just-released reports, the Chinese report says.
“However, the US carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” it adds.
Chinese ally Russia has also repeatedly said the United States has no right to claim a mantle of moral leadership. Moscow has criticized Washington sharply over human rights, pointing to secret CIA jails abroad and treatment of inmates at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and elsewhere.
Drones
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Mr. Shami, a militant who American officials say is living in the barren mountains of northwestern Pakistan, is at the center of a debate inside the government over whether President Obama should once again take the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of an American citizen overseas.
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European Union Members of Parliament condemned the use of drones in targeted killings in a vote of 534 to 49. The vote proposing a ban referred to the drone strikes as “unlawful.”
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Activists of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, led by cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, had blocked the route from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar for the past three months in a protest over U.S. drone strikes.
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Increased European research on unmanned aircraft is making the European Parliament nervous.
Military
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Proposed cuts to defence spending would shrink US army to smallest size in 74 years
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An influential U.S. senator says the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack was so fraught with inaccuracies and misleading testimony in the weeks preceding the 2012 presidential election that it warrants a new and thorough investigation by a joint Senate committee.
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The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.
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Hunt will be giving advice to startups in his new role at the San Francisco-based investment firm as they seek out profitable deals from the federal government. He told VentureBeat in an interview, “I’m taking my understanding of the intelligence space and scouting out the opportunities.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Recent news about hardware that can be modified and it permissive in that regard
SkyNet
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At the former Wired editor’s start-up, 3D Robotics, open-source robots take to the skies
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In the meantime, he’s hard at work on a new project called SkyNet Firmware, which will run on the open source Arduino circuit boards, devices you can use to build all sorts of computerized gadgets. “The idea is that you can load SkyNet Firmware on any Arduino compatible device or board,” he says. “The Arduino connects to SkyNet and just waits for commands.” This would let you attach almost anything to SkyNet.
3D Printers
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At the forefront of the 3D printing boom for consumers is MakerBot, whose Linux-based Replicator printers sell for between $1,300 and $3,000 and are small enough to sit on your desktop. Their MakerWare design software runs on any platform and the Thingiverse online community allows more than 13,000 users to download or upload designs in an open source, collaborative model for do-it-yourself manufacturing, according to a sponsored post in The Atlantic.
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So far, in short, I can describe 3D printing as: Building an object, by depositing layers, and creating every layer by drawing it with melted plastic. The key to understanding 3D printing, and thus learning how to do it better, is to think about the objects as a stack of layers. Then, consider how the layers will look like as they are being stacked.
Charles Babcock’s Series of Articles
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References to Linux come up naturally because it is one of the most successful, sustained, and adopted open-source software projects. New releases of the Linux kernel now appear every 70 days. Each contains up to 10,000 updates and patches, a rate of change that equals 7.14 an hour. Linux’s fame rests not on the fact that it’s frequently modified. Rather, it’s frequently modified and also respected as having a long-term future in the enterprise datacenter. The way things are shaping up, it also very likely has a permanent place in cloud architectures.
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Facebook, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and other leading IT users think the open-source movement is ready to shake up the hardware industry the way Linux did in software.
Misc.
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Intel announced a Developer Program for IoT, which will offer 5,000 Arduino-compatible Galileo SBC-based IoT development kits, plus hackathons with prizes.
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AS you may know, just few weeks ago OSHWA published the results from 2013 Open Hardware Community survey. You can find original datasheets and everything here. Despite raw data is good, I thought it was good to spend some time looking at the data trying to gather more insights, when possible, still keeping in mind that the survey samples a very limited and polarized (OSHWA centric) chunk of the community. But we need to start from something in a way.
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02.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Portal 2 is now available to Linux users – in beta form. Valve has recently released a public beta for the latest version of its bestselling sequel, which you can opt-in to via the Portal 2 properties in your Steam Library. Valve is getting pretty keen on this Linux business and welcomes your bug reports via Github.
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MegaGlest is a 3D real-time strategy game, completely free and open-source, taking place on a wide range of maps and including seven different factions. MegaGlest is a fork of Glest, which stopped being developed a few years ago.
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Zigfrak is a single player space-based action RPG, featuring missions, exploration, and crafting. It is also now DRM free on FireFlower Games, on other stores it uses a one-time activation key, so I hope this version comes to other stores too.
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The survival game Rust from the dudes at Facepunch has been updated today, featuring a whole bunch of new kit.
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Humble Indie Bundle 11 adds another three games plus Valve announces the release of the Portal 2 beta for Linux!
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Reven recently announced the team has reached its Kickstarter funding goal, bringing some more awesome 2D platformer goodness to the Linux platform. Varia games also plans on bringing the title to OS X, as well as the Wii U. Monthly updates are planned to be broadcast on the popular gaming video platform, Twitch.tv. A public demo and eta keys should show up in the next few months.
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Leadwerks has come a very long way since the initial Kickstarter campaign, there is now a 3rd beta available for certain backers.
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WThe Humble Indie Bundle 11 is here!
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Stencyl is an interesting toolkit that enables you to create games without traditional programming, and they have just released the big 3.0.
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The overview includes only games which are completely free, with a permissive license for both the code and their content. I could not include here games like Urban Terror or Warsow, since their assets are not free, nor Steam games.
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Digital Tribes got in touch with us recently to get the word out about QBEH-1: The Atlas Cube the prequel to QBEH a game which sadly has no Linux version, but this one will.
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Standing for TINT Is Not Tetris, that’s exactly what it is. A terminal-based tetris clone with highscore saving and 9 levels. Among the tetris clones for Linux, TINT is one of my favorites. Use J to move pieces left, L to move them right, K to rotate and SPACE to accelerate. Press Q to quit. On Ubuntu at least, there seems to be a problem when saving highscores due to permissions not allowing it (Error creating /var/games/tint.scores). You can fix it by doing something like this: sudo touch /var/games/tint.scores && sudo chown $USER:$USER /var/games/tint.scores.
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