10.12.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Lenovo should certainly supply no-OS PCs for people like me and let the world know what M$ is costing them. No business should get a free ride being able to charge an arbitrary amount without even disclosing the cost to the consumer. It’s not like an OS is not a user-serviceable part. Users can and do change OS. They should not be forced to pay for an OS they don’t use. I told Lenovo that. I hope they’re listening.
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A. Several media players are available for the Linux operating system, so you should not have any trouble finding a program to play the music files salvaged from your old Windows XP machine, which is now unsupported by Microsoft. Many programs cannot play tracks with copy restrictions built in, but if you converted the songs to unprotected MP3 files or another unrestricted format, they should play fine on a Linux system.
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Rather than Web archive files, developers will deploy new applications to the Google Cloud Platform using Docker containers with the application, a Jetty server and a streamlined version of the Linux OS. This approach will also make it possible for Google to offer pre-tested Docker container instances containing specific versions of Jetty, the OS and the Java Development Kit best suited for specific use cases.
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Desktop
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Kano is a device that allows its user to essentially make his or her own computer. The kit comes with a clear plastic case, speaker, keyboard, Wi-Fi dongle, and a Raspberry Pi. For those who are not familiar with Raspberry Pi, it is a $25 computer about the size of a credit card targeted for those that want to build their own computer and save money.
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Kernel Space
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John Linville is a principal engineer at Red Hat and the maintainer for wireless LANs in the Linux kernel. In this video he gives us a guided tour of his home office, including his Fedora and RHEL workstations, his collection of vintage hardware, and a few retro computing projects underway. (For more, see the full series of Linux kernel developer videos.)
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Chris Mason at Facebook sent in his Btrfs pull request on Friday for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
Notable Btrfs file-system changes for Linux 3.18 include cleaning up and improing the RAID recovery/repair support, fsync fixes, and a variety of other fixes and clean-ups. The rest of the changes are really just across the board while there’s around 2,000 lines of new code.
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While we’re just one week in for what’s expected to be a longer than usual merge window, here’s a look at the top work so far for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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One of the main features for the Xen pull request submitted for the Linux 3.18 kernel are pvscsi front-end and back-end drivers. Xen’s pvSCSI yields support to use physical SCSI devices from within a Xen domain. The back-end pvSCSI driver running in the Domain-0 does the majority of the I/O work while the front-end driver running from domU passes the requests to the pvSCSI driver back-end.
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The media pull request was submitted yesterday for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company’s plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland.
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Matt Turner, an Intel OTC developer and long-time open-source graphics contributor, presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux about progress made with their GLSL compiler. Connor Abbott, fresh out of high school who was an Intel intern this summer, presented his work on the new “NIR” intermediate representation.
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Samuel Pitoiset has been working hard to reverse-engineer NVIDIA’s hardware performance counters of their GPU and to allow them to be taken to their full potential under the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.
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Keith Packard of Intel and the X.Org Server maintainer presented at this week’s XDC2014 Bordeaux conference about the state of GLAMOR, accelerating X.Org’s 2D over OpenGL / OpenGL ES in a device-independent manner rather than each hardware driver requiring custom 2D acceleration code-paths.
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When X.Org Foundation board member Martin Peres isn’t busy hacking on the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver, he’s often focusing on software security related work through his studies. One of his recent endeavors in trying to improve Linux security is working on a library for Wayland Security Modules (libWSM) to support security decision making on Wayland-based graphic stacks.
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The new OpenGL ABI does have the interest of other graphics driver developers and also the community as its main benefit is that it can allow for multiple GPU drivers to co-exist on the same system without running into any collisions over the OpenGL libraries, etc. The new ABI is also to promote EGL over GLX and allow multiple drivers to even exist for the same process. This is the first major OpenGL ABI update in more than ten years.
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Peter Hutterer on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors issued an update regarding their state at this year’s XDC2014 Bordeaux conference.
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Libinput is the library that’s been under development for one year now to try to work out a single input library implementation that can be shared by all Wayland compositors and other potential use-cases. Peter Hutterer gave an update on this input stack during this week’s XDC2014 conference in Bordeaux.
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Benchmarks
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The latest Linux graphics benchmarks I ran from the high-end Maxwell GeForce GTX 980 graphics card were some anti-aliasing tests.
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Curious if running Linux games via Steam’s Big Picture Mode causes a performance impact over a conventional desktop session?
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Applications
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In the past, I’ve covered various astronomy packages that help you explore the universe of deep space. But, space starts a lot closer to home. It actually begins a few hundred miles above your head. There are lots of things in orbit right above you. In this article, I look at one of the tools available to help you track the satellites that are whizzing around the Earth: Gpredict.
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Thunderbird is the powerful email client from Mozilla, with support for POP3 for keeping email locally and IMAP for remote storage. In addition, it features chat support, feeds reader and newsgroups. The interface is similar to the one of the newer versions of Firefox.
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Brackets is an open-source editor for web designers, developed by Adobe, with a wealth of features and a huge number of extensions, which can be installed in a few clicks, turning Brackets into a very powerful tool for web developers.
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Since just a few days ago I had a look at the latest SMPlayer release, it’s a good time now to overview yet another movie player written in Qt: QMPlay2.
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Proprietary
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Ubuntu Linux users no longer need to employ arcane workarounds to watch Netflix on their computers.
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Now that Netflix is finally letting people watch their steaming services on Linux, there is a sort of confusion among the Linux users regarding the supported platforms that has to be addressed.
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If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ve probably tried to stream video on Linux systems like Fedora. And as with many for-pay services, your experience varied. As of the latest Google Chrome browser release, though, your troubles are over.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine developers are contemplating a staging-like tree where new changes could be introduced faster before being mainlined inside Wine, but this idea doesn’t catch the fancy of all Wine developers.
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As a continuation of the article earlier about a kernel-like staging tree for Wine, there’s one mailing list post in particular that deserves its own post… It appears for at least the time being that the Direct3D command stream patches have been stalled from being mainlined.
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Games
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Borderlands 2 recently arrived for Linux, even after Gearbox president Randy Pitchford warned Linux users not to get their hopes up. Steam also just hit a milestone of over 700 Linux games available—712 at the moment. A full 18 percent of all the games available on Steam now support Linux and SteamOS! That’s not a bad start when SteamOS—the root cause of Linux’s gaming resurgence—hasn’t even been officially released yet.
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The 90′s Arcade Racer was funded on Kickstarter in February 2013 and a Linux version was promised by its creators. I am really waiting for this game, but somehow it is taking them a lot longer to develop than anticipated. The original release date was set for November 2013, and then they said it would come out this last summer.
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Linux gamers have a very interesting weekend ahead of them, with all kinds of titles getting massive discounts. One of the most interesting collections is called the Classic Explorer Pack and features three great games.
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Another World is one of the iconic games of the ‘90s and it’s been a reference point in gaming for the past 20 years. Now, Linux users can also buy the remastered version and enjoy it with the rest of the world.
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Regular readers may recall PCGamingWiki contributor soeb’s previous high level analyses of Civilization V and XCOM: Enemy Unknown (read here for our previous coverage), which looked at the visuals, performance and end user experiences provided by their Linux ports.
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Valve is currently working on their Steam Machines, which is their console that is powered by their version of Linux called SteamOS.
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A couple of old Sid Meier classics were released on Steam, more precisely Sid Meier’s Colonization, Pirates! Gold Plus and Sid Meier’s Cover Action.
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The pack includes three classic games, all ported to Linux, and the fans of these gems can buy all of them for 11,24€, with a 25% discount. The individual games cost 5.24€ each. The offer will be available until October 16.
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It’s still in early access as well, so it’s not yet feature complete, and it has mixed reviews, so it’s up to you how you feel about that.
It’s done by a different team than the other Shadowrun games, so it will play differently.
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The Hive is a story-driven real-time strategy game with nice and detailed graphics which was launched on Thursday on Steam Early Access for Windows. And it seems like developers Skydome are now working on a Linux version! At least according to what they said in a tweet and on their Steam forum.
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Wargame is a highly acclaimed real-time strategy with modern graphics, single-player and multi-player modes, different nations and a huge amount of units (over 750).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Linux operating systems are present everywhere, not only in the homes of regular people. They are used in all sorts of projects, either for scientific or entertainment purposes. By the looks of it, KDE has been spotted in a short presentation video for the famous Weta Digital studio.
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As you may recall, I recently switched to GitBook.io as my primary publishing platform. Alas, my GitBook.io experiment didn’t last long. Everything worked smoothly until I encountered a rather serious issue: for some reason, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files generated by the service didn’t include any images. I duly submitted a bug report and tried to contact the developers via Twitter, but I got no response.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Using the Raspberry Pi for around the past two years has generally been pretty fantastic. It took us a year or so to stop being surprised by just how much it was able to do in the various projects we saw or made ourselves. One thing that we always struggled with was web browsing though; Midori was slow and laggy and it would take up all the Raspberry Pi’s system resources as well.
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Reviews
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Edition with its abundance of games, choices of emulators and the fact it comes with Steam, PlayOnLinux and Dosbox pre-installed.
The system was stable in the most part but you can’t always guarantee what an emulator is going to do and on the odd occasion my screen resolution changed.
With so many games available the LXDE menu system felt a bit overloaded. Ways around this problem include adding your favourites to the panel at the top or installing either Slingscold for a nicer dash style display or Cairo as a dock.
All in all, SparkyLinux Gameover Edition provided me with the most fun that I have had in ages and it has been a welcome guest during my internet free week.
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ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the latest edition of the bleeding-edge edition of ROSA Desktop, a Linux desktop distribution from ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.
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One the greatest strengths of Mint 17 lies in its revised Update Manager which provides a lot more information than Ubuntu’s package management choices (Synaptic, Aptitude, dpkg, and Apt-Get) do about each update type (regular updates, security updates, backports, and romeo updates) which makes it much easier to maintain systems.
So, if you’re looking for an elegant, high-performance, easy-to-use, highly functional, stable, and maintainable desktop Linux that is a real alternative to Windows and perhaps the most user-friendly distribution available, Linux Mint 17 is probably what you want.
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New Releases
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4MLinux 10.0 Allinone Edition FINAL released.
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The BackBox Team is pleased to announce the updated release of BackBox Linux, the version 4.0!
This release includes features such as Linux Kernel 3.13, EFI mode, Anonymous mode, LVM + Disk encryption installer, privacy additions and armhf Debian packages.
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Like the phoenix rising from the ashes Lunar Linux is back with a vengeance; a lot of overhauling have been done all over the core tools, packages, installer and the ISO-builder. Even though our journey to reach this milestone have been a long one we hope that the changes and quality improvements we’ve made was worth the wait. So what are you waiting for? Go grab a copy of Lunar Linux while it is hot!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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In today’s Linux news are reviews of Cylon Linux and OpenMandriva’s latest. Folks are all abuzz about a Netflix announcement from Canonical and more drones are discovered running Linux. In addition, we have several software stories to share with names like Marble, Epiphany, and Scribus.
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Slackware Family
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Debian Family
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FFmpeg 2.4.2 has kept the “Fresnel” codename and is now the most advanced version out there. The big release of the 2.4.x branch happened a month ago and this is just a maintenance iteration.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu 14.10 development cycle has been rather uneventful and no major features have been implemented. The same cannot be said about the thousands of other packages that are used in the operating system, as most of them have been updated. This is also true for the Linux kernel.
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At this year’s VISION exhibition, Vision Components (hall 1, stand F42) will showcase a new generation of intelligent cameras with innovative hardware and software. Operating with Linux firmware, the systems follow a new processor approach: until now, VC has been using freely programmable DSPs combined with the proprietary VCRT operating system which ensures optimal hardware utilization. Now, the VC Z series employs a new Xilinx hardware module that integrates FPGA logic and a dual core ARM processor. Both elements can be programmed. This design not only minimizes the required space on the board, but also enables a considerable speed boost, if required: since the FPGA can now be used for image processing, this process can be executed up to ten times faster than without FPGA support.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Yesterday we reported that UK online retailer unlocked mobiles had confirmed pre-orders for the Gear S, well today It looks like the momentum isn’t stopping there.
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Android
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After announcing that Android L would support 64-bit hardware way back in June, Google has finally released a 64-bit Android L developer preview emulator image. Curiously, though, it’s a 64-bit image for 64-bit Intel chips (Atom/Bay Trail) and not ARM. With Nvidia’s 64-bit Tegra K1 supposedly just around the corner, but no tools for developers to actually create or prepare 64-bit ARMv8 apps, what exactly is going on?
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“If privacy is important to you, the Blackphone is almost certainly what you’re after in a mobile device. Besides, you don’t have much choice currently. One thing I’m still coming to terms with, however, is the concept of selling peace of mind.
As Edward Snowden continues to leak information about how the NSA and other national government agencies were/are hoovering up every bit of personal data available to them, digital privacy has never been a hotter topic. With people wanting more control over how their data is handled, it was inevitable that products like the Blackphone would appear.”
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Before now, all those robots were controlled with an arcane, outmoded interface. Specifically, by remote operators using a joystick and a separate monitor based on a Linux platform, according to iRobot Technical Director of Defence and Security Orin Hoffman. Operating a mission-critical robot using an interface akin to a disembodied prize claw added stress to an already stressful task.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In this age of technology there has been an ever increasing need for better mobile security, quite simply because we as a society use our mobile smartphones, and devices like tablets more than we use our computers these days. Attempted NSA email tapping and personal information hunting through Google and other sources as well as cyber attacks from hackers and cyber criminals is a big red flag that we need to do absolutely everything we can to protect ourselves from any such attack. Other examples of obvious reasons why better mobile security is needed can be summed up with the recent numerous accounts of leaked images from various cloud accounts and applications like the third party snapchat app from earlier. While nothing can replace the habit of making sure you have a decent password, one way to get better mobile security has been through the use of the Blackphone, a recently released Android based smartphone from Secret Circle which has highly advanced encryption standards to give the user back the control.
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Facebook has open sourced some of its community cookbooks to allow a wider world of software application developers to consider using Facebook’s Chef framework.
Facebook decided to release these findings after designing what it calls (in somewhat grandiose terms) “a new paradigm” that lets a software engineer make any change he/she needs, to any systems he/she owns, via simple data-driven APIs (while also scaling to Facebook’s huge infrastructure and minimizing the size of the team that would have to own the system).
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Pica8 kicked off a busy week in the increasingly competitive software-defined networking space, making moves that officials say will help fuel the adoption of Linux-based OSes on bare-metal switches.
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ONIE has been accepted by the Open Compute Project, and enables businesses to run a range of operating systems—such as Pica8′s PicOS or Cumulus Networks’ operating system—on the same switch hardware. Vendors like Pica8 and Cumulus Networks are championing the use of standards-based operating systems running on low-cost bare-metal switches as an alternative in the software-defined network (SDN) space to more expensive and complex hardware from the likes of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.
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Open Source 2.0 news has a lot in store for users that will surely light up their day!
Tech News World reported that users play major roles in the upgrade of features, functionalities, rewrites and new releases. Open Source 2.0 news alleged that its developers are trying to edge out their competitors’ dominance in the market.
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GitHub‘s Ben Balter urges government contractors to adopt open source products and software development practices to build on operational and cost efficiencies and ensure that information technology systems use mature code and receive continuous maintenance support.
Balter, who works to drive government awareness for GitHub, writes in a guest post published Thursday on FedScoop that contractors can gain operational benefits as well as attract potential customers by open-sourcing software.
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Events
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As I looked around the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing career fair (PDF) floor, I stopped by the Pinterest booth and learned that open source software plays a big role at the company. And even better, Pinterest now plays a big role in the world of open source software, too.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It’s interesting to hear Mozilla taking this stance, because, after a series of kerfuffles with the Internet Advertising Bureau, the company is moving ahead with multiple initiatives that will put ads in front of Firefox browser users, including “directory tiles.”
It was back in August of 2013 that The Internet Advertising Bureau started firing off screed after screed against Mozilla for its plans to block advertising cookies in the Firefox browser by default. The bureau even took out newspaper ads claiming that Mozilla’s claims that it had a right to help users protect their privacy was basically hogwash.
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The specs and hardware of Sony Xperia SP reveal it is smaller but faster in performance than its fellow Android mid-range smartphone from the same label, Sony Xperia C. Both handsets have many similar features that they give their buyers a difficult time in choosing which smartphone to pick for their own.
Xperia SP debuted to conquer the mid-range sphere with loads of technology from its bigger brother Xperia Z, but with a price tag friendly to the budget-conscious buyers. Shortly following Xperia SP with its own set of specs and features to bet, was Xperia C.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mark Voelker is no stranger to the OpenStack community. As a technical leader at Cisco and a co-founder of the Triangle OpenStack Meetup, Mark gets to see OpenStack from a lot of different lenses.
In this interview about his work at Cisco and his upcoming All Things Open talk, Mark shares his thoughts on where OpenStack is and where it’s heading as topics like Big Data and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) continue to emerge in the OpenStack roadmaps for many companies.
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Amazon boasts a broad range of tools for managing an EC2 instance, but partners say third-party and open source tools expand on Amazon’s offerings.
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Funding
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In the rarified world of ‘private data clouds’ a handful of companies dominate. On the open source side, Red Hat acquired Ceph for $175m and Gluster for $136m. Then there was EMC, which acquired ScaleIO for $200m.
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BSD
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In this process they’ve found more success making DragonFlyBSD’s kernel more like Linux than trying to adapt the complex, quick-moving drivers to their code-base. “It makes more sense to change the DragonFly kernel to behave like Linux than trying to constantly keep up and change the drivers to use *BSD-specific APIs. In a way I’m porting DragonFly to the drm drivers and not the drivers to DragonFly.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Guix talk of this summer’s GNU Hackers Meeting is now available on-line.
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Project Releases
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Basically it is a roughly 4 years old project. This is about two thirds the whole history of the Redis project. Yet, it is only today, that I’m releasing a Release Candidate, the first one, of Redis 3.0.0, which is the first version with Cluster support.
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A new release 0.1.0 of the RPushbullet package (interfacing the neat Pushbullet service) landed on CRAN today.
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Openness/Sharing
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In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the the future of Linux, Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) standard, a new Code.org crowdfunding campaign, and more!
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Open Hardware
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Crowdsupply is generally a good place to spot cool open source projects looking for funding: Tah is an Open source, Arduino-compatible Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) platform for use as a beacon, microcontroller, and HID device.
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Health/Nutrition
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In August 2014, CNN was accused of directly participating in the media blackout of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) vaccine fraud.
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Six months into West Africa’s Ebola crisis, the international community is finally heeding calls for substantial intervention in the region.
On Sept. 16, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a multimillion-dollar U.S. response to the spreading contagion. The crisis, which began in March 2014, has killed over 2,600 people, an alarming figure that experts say will rise quickly if the disease is not contained.
Mr. Obama’s announcement came on the heels of growing international impatience with what critics have called the U.S. government’s “infuriatingly” slow response to the outbreak.
Assistance efforts have already stoked controversy, with a noticeable privilege of care being afforded to foreign healthcare workers over Africans.
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Duncan had come to the United States to marry his fiancée. He had contracted the disease in Liberia while helping a pregnant Ebola victim to the hospital. His family has voiced fears he was given inferior treatment because he is an African, not a U.S. national. Duncan, who had no health insurance, was initially sent home from a Dallas hospital, despite telling a nurse he had been to Liberia. New questions are also being raised about his treatment after he was diagnosed. Three other Ebola patients treated in the United States have received blood transfusions from survivors of the disease, but Duncan did not. There have been conflicting reports over whether one of the survivors, Dr. Kent Brantly, has a blood type that matched Duncan’s. Duncan’s fiancée, Louise Troh, was unable to see him before he died, as she was kept in isolation. In a statement, Troh said: “I trust a thorough examination will take place regarding all aspects of his care.”
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Security
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Some Snapchat users are waking up to an unpleasant surprise this morning. A cache nearly 13GB of private Snapchats is now circulating through 4Chan, in a leak the users have dubbed The Snappening. Snapchat has faced security problems before, but this time the fault appears to be with a third-party app used to catalog snaps that would otherwise be deleted. While users assumed the snaps would only be visible to Snapchat HQ and the third-party app, a data breach left them circulating through the open web.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has logged nearly 2,000 hours of drone flights over the continental U.S. on operations unrelated to immigration enforcement since 2011. This means the DHS is spying on Americans with drones, although they are not reporting precisely what they are doing or why.
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In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.S
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38 years ago, on October 6, 1976, Cubana Airlines Flight 455 was downed by terrorists, only now known to be CIA operatives; experts further claim it was not the only case when CIA was sponsoring terrorists.
“The US Government, being consistent with its stated commitment to fight terrorism, should act without double standards against those who, from US soil, have carried out terrorist acts against Cuba,” said Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba to Barbados Lisette Perez, as cited by the Barbados Advocate, during the ceremony of commemorating the victims at the Cubana Monument at Paynes Bay, Barbados.
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Three women who protested the United States’ use of drones are now facing federal charges – and $1,300 each in fines – after being accused of trying to enter the National Security Agency’s protected property in Maryland.
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Barack Obama could have been worse in terms of foreign policy. Now, worse is a silly word to use when you’re talking about life and death. It’s not going to comfort survivors to know that more people died in the last war or Hellfire missile strike than in this one that killed their loved ones.
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The play’s subject matter is not likely to become dated any time soon.
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In May 2013, some 11 years into the War on Terror, President Obama took a break from reviewing target sets and kill lists to deliver a much-anticipated “drone speech” at the National Defense University in Washington DC. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” Obama admonished; “we have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’”
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Five years after a brand-new President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, a substantial majority of his fellow countrymen believe he still doesn’t deserve it and never did.
The former state senator received the prestigious global prize in 2009 after having done little if anything to earn it.
Since then, however, Democrat Obama has ordered two troop surges into Afghanistan, initiated an air war to successfully oust Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, who was then executed by a mob. That country has since fallen into a lawless chaos of feuding militias and terrorist training grounds.
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Yemen has been the target of the US drone programme like Pakistan and Somalia. And in revulsion at the drones, one of the slogans of the Houthis has been: “Death to America”. This strain could be seen across the Arab world and with ISIS breaking new ground and advancing in spite of US aerial bombing, the omens for the US and its allies do not seem promising.
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In continued resistance to escalating U.S. wars, 75 people marched and rallied at the gates of Hancock Air Force Base here on Oct. 5. The marchers came from across the region, including Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Albany, Ithaca, Binghamton and Syracuse itself.
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On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a June 1st 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.
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The government has publicly disapproved of the drone programme while tacitly agreeing to it in private with the US.
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Washington has developed a silent empire, a fourth branch of government alongside the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court: the national security state.
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Henry Kissinger projects the public image of a judicious elder statesman whose sweeping knowledge of history lets him rise above the petty concerns of today, in order to see what is truly in the national interest. Yet as Kissinger once said of Ronald Reagan, his knowledge of history is “tailored to support his firmly held preconceptions.” Instead of expanding his field of vision, Kissinger’s interpretation of the past becomes a set of blinders that prevent him from understanding either his country’s values or its interests. Most importantly, he cannot comprehend how fidelity to those values may advance the national interest.
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US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew up plans to “smash Cuba” with air strikes nearly 40 years ago, government papers obtained by researchers show.
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In 1976, the Times reports, he was so “apoplectic” about Fidel Castro’s sending troops to support Communist insurgents in Angola that he wanted to, “as he said, ‘cobber the pipsqueak,” according to longtime Cuba expert Peter LeoGrande, who has co-authored a book with the relevant documents, newly declassified by the Ford Presidential Library.
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Transparency Reporting
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Having reviewed both sides of the argument comprehensively, it has become very clear to me who is on the right side of history in the clash of ideas and ethics between Google and WikiLeaks that is the main subject addressed in Assange’s 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks (read my review of Assange’s book here). Without a doubt, the ethics and deeds of WikiLeaks offer a far superior value system: one that reflects the public interest best.
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Julian Assange has entered Australia’s surveillance debate dismissing as “absurd” and “meaningless” government assurances that telecommunications interception is limited and subject to strict oversight.
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Finance
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The Washington Post is having some trouble figuring out why more Americans aren’t enthusiastic about the state of the economy, and why they’re not giving Barack Obama and Democratic politicians more credit for turning things around. But it’s not so hard to figure out.
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The EU believes that Luxembourg may have broken the law by giving Amazon special treatment. It may have been that the country offered the company lower tax rates. This isn’t illegal, but making corporate deals that aren’t available for all companies is, reports The New York Times.
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Censorship
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The Conservatives invoke charge of media censorship to justify a copyright law change to benefit political war rooms.
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President Erdogan’s new style of media censorship is less brutal—and much more effective.
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Like clockwork, another news organization is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s hair-trigger take down process to stifle political commentary just when that commentary is most timely. This time it’s Gannett Co. Inc., a massive media conglomerate that owns, among many other publications, the Courier-Journal in Kentucky. The Courier-Journal’s editorial board interviewed a Democratic candidate for Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, and streamed the interview live. That stream included 40 uncomfortable seconds of the candidate trying desperately to avoid admitting she voted for President Obama (the president is none too popular in Kentucky). A critic posted the video clip online—and Gannett promptly took it down.
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Privacy
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Former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Keith Alexander has held investments in a corporation that identifies itself as a “world leader in cloud solutions.” And in a “data gathering and research” firm. And in a company that develops software that improves the quality of images captured by surveillance cameras. And in a radio frequency business that, among other things, manufactures amplifiers for air traffic control, radar, and surveillance.
The NSA once said that if revealed, this information [pdf below] would threaten national security.
The agency refused VICE News’ July request for copies of Alexander’s financial disclosure reports, which he is required to fill out annually under a federal law known as the Ethics and Government Act. The law also states that government agencies are required to release the files upon request.
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The check also revealed that a special tool called MUSCULAR had been deployed by NSA to keep a tab on Google and Yahoo data links. The same is being assisted by a British Agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
To do this, NSA and GCHQ first try to hack their way into the links and try to capture information sent to and fro through the fibre optic cables around the world.
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A drastic curtailment of government surveillance powers is scheduled to occur if the House of Representatives allows a crucial section of the U.S. Patriot Act to expire.
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And we have no recourse. If you resist, you go to jail, maybe not for long, not yet anyway, but jail is jail. Object to TSA and you miss your flight. They know it and use it. The courts do nothing about this. They too are feds.
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New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Monday unveiled change to the government’s oversight of its intelligence agencies, following a long-running controversy over allegations of illegal spying.
Key announced he would take on the new role of Minister for National Security and Intelligence while delegating ministerial responsibility for the country’s two intelligence agencies — the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and the Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) — to Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson.
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The European Commission should disclose documents relating to the U.K.’s mass online surveillance activities, European ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has said.
The draft recommendation follows a complaint made last year by a German journalist, who asked the Commission for access to documents relating to British activities exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents included correspondence between the justice commissioner at the time, Viviane Reding, and the British foreign secretary at the time, William Hague, as well as a letter from Reding’s office to the U.K.’s permanent representative to the E.U., and letters from citizens to the Commission asking for the espionage to be investigated.
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With an uncommon view of history in action, a new documentary captures Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents as it unfolded in a Hong Kong hotel room.
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Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the whistle on the US government’s mass surveillance programs, has been reunited in Russia with his long-time girlfriend, a new documentary shown on Friday revealed.
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Fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has reunited in Russia with his girlfriend, according to a documentary premiered in New York.
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“Citizenfour,” the closest look we’ll ever have at how the largest leak in U.S. government history went down, is about to premier at the New York Film Festival.
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In response, politicians from all over the United States rushed to speak out in favor of cybersecurity laws, using the attack to spread fear in support of their legislation of choice.
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The hackers who stole information from 76 million households and 7 million businesses aren’t the only ones exploiting people in the JP Morgan Chase security breach. Politicians are, too.
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After failing to identify the potentially disastrous Heartbleed bug, the United States Department of Homeland Security has successfully lobbied to have the ability to conduct “regular and proactive scans” of civilian agency systems.
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At the end of the Laura Poitras doc, the famed informant registers shock over another who outranks him
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Citizenfour, new film on spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, shows journalist Greenwald discussing other source
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As Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour premieres in New York tonight, realscreen has learned of another major documentary on Edward Snowden in the works, set to launch in 2015.
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Early this morning, a mysterious statue of Edward Snowden appeared in Union Square Park in New York City, opposite the Abraham Lincoln Statue.
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“I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power,” Comey told CBS News’ Scott Pelley in an interview for “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday. “You cannot trust people in power.
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One of the downsides to the news cycle is that no matter how big or hot a story is, something else inevitably comes along. The advent of ISIS and Ebola, combined with the passing of time, have pushed national security concerns out of the limelight — until, that is, someone at the NSA helps out by reminding us that yes, the agency still exists and yes, it still has some insane policies and restrictions.
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Steven Aftergood of FAS Secrecy News went searching for an answer to an almost-unanswerable conundrum. And he got the most nonanswer-like answer imaginable.
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Earlier this year the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Security Agency seeking a copy of a report it sent to Congress detailing authorized disclosures of classified information to the media. The request was rejected. Why? Because the report is classified.
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A lot of information has been leaked about the government and its various agencies, not the least of which being the NSA. Of course, not all leaks are unauthorized — the government itself will leak its own information at times, the reasons for which are varied and, despite requests otherwise, still secret. A recent Freedom of Information Act request for information about what leaks the government has made was denied due to claims of posing a potential threat to national security.
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To infiltrate foreign networks and gain access to sensitive systems, the NSA has been using the tactics of “physical subversion” – deploying undercover agents in Chinese, German, South Korean and possibly even American companies, The Intercept reports.
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The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
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As a much-anticipated documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden premiers in New York this evening, new revelations are being published simultaneously that expose more information about the NSA’s work to compromise computer networks and devices.
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Europe is taking a long hard look at its data protection laws in the post-Snowden climate. As US public cloud providers face scrutiny over Safe Harbour rules, the EU end users that rely on them are left with some pretty fundamental questions on their future of their cloud services.
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Translated into 16 languages, IFightSurveillance.org highlights images and quotes from activists, business leaders, lawyers and technologists. For instance, initial profiles include Vladan Sobjer, whose organization, SHARE Defense, helps Serbians learn about encryption; Ron Deibert, whose group, the Citizen Lab, analyzes malware and digital threats to vulnerable groups from Bahrain to Iran; and Anne Roth, whose own surveillance by German law enforcement led her to work for better protections for her fellow citizens.
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The EFF has launched a new site dedicated to educating users about how to resist pervasive surveillance online, through the promotion of encryption and other tools and the publication of first-person stories from people around the world who have fought surveillance in various ways.
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Why did Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba fail to record a tip when they paid their cabbies during New York City taxi rides back in 2013? Why was Cooper near a Mediterranean restaurant in Greenwich Village? Why was Alba at a ritzy hotel in Soho?
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Mentioning the idea of separate, closed networks, even for ostensibly noble aims such as protecting privacy or guarding critical infrastructure, is sure to raise the spectre of balkanization ? the hypothetical scenario where the Internet mimics the political upheaval and splintering of the Balkans starting in the 19th Century.
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Part political thriller and part spy novel, Privacy Lost exposes domestic surveillance in a post-9/11 world.
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Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the Internet more anonymous.
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Long before Edward Snowden blew the lid off the government’s widespread Internet snooping, an unknown Bay Area telecommunications company was striking back at an equally secretive but far more common tool in the FBI’s shadowy world of surveillance.
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Congress has quietly begun reviewing every U.S. government intelligence collection program. It’s got the potential to trigger the next big fight between The Hill and Obama’s spies.
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In an interview with CNBC, National Security Agency recruiter Steven LaFountain announced a half-dozen camps around the U.S. where kids as young as 13 have a chance to train with high-level programming experts to learn the fundamentals of preventing cyber attacks and other security breaches.
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Thankfully, legislation to limit the NSA’s power is being considered by Congress. The USA Freedom Act aims to end the collection of American citizens’ metadata and limit such programs as PRISM, the NSA program that collects and stores vast amounts of electronic data on national and international levels. This act would also limit the recording of phone calls to very specific circumstances and allow companies such as Google and Facebook to legally disclose government demands for users’ private data.
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When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit convenes Nov. 4 to hear a challenge to government surveillance, lawyers will make their case to one judge — Senior Judge David Sentelle — who has grappled in recent years with the intersection of individual privacy rights and technology.
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All sorts of law enforcement officials have angrily decried Apple and Google’s decisions, using all sorts of arguments against the idea of default encryption (including that old chestnut, the “think of the children” argument). One former DHS and NSA official even suggested that because China might forbid Apple from selling a device with encryption by default, the US should sink to the same level and forbid Apple from doing so here, in some sort of strange privacy race to the bottom.1 The common thread amongst all of this hysteria is that encryption will put vital evidence outside of the reach of law enforcement.
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A COMEDY CLUB in Barcelona is experimenting with charging punters per laugh using face-recognition technology.
The BBC reported that face-recognition software is being used at the Teatreneu club to track the enjoyment of a show and charge fans the equivalent of 23p per laugh. It would seem the club is literally looking to get the last laugh.
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The firm’s principal cyber-security strategist Jeff Jones was presenting at the IP Expo Europe exhibition in London on Thursday, where he suggested that the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had impacted the Redmond technology giant and the cloud computing market as a whole.
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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) heard on September 24 oral arguments on whether the secret surveillance program known as the System of Operative-Investigative Measures, or SORM, used by Russian law enforcement agencies violates the human right to privacy. The judgment is expected soon, however Russian experts doubt the ECHR will put an end to the controversial program.
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Once again, our annoyance and fear threshold for location-tracking technology is being tested anew.
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It’s right for people to be vigilant about privacy but often well-intentioned writers paint with too broad a brush or don’t bother to get the full story. This particular story focuses on the “conspiratorial” dimension of the beacon installation and fails to understand several important technical limitations of beacons.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has turned the internet into a “giant surveillance platform,” a leading security specialist has said.
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The president’s spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.
The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress — which is also being spied upon — has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was written to ensure. Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet it has failed miserably to do so. But the spying is now so entrenched in government that a sinister and largely unnoticed problem lurks beneath the surface.
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The German Federal Intelligence Agency works closely with the USA, and because of that it may have violated laws. A parliamentary committee has launched an investigation into potential violations of privacy.
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The Big Brother threat frightens Germans more than the terror threat.
According to a recent survey, 67 percent of Germans view surveillance of their Internet activity by foreign secret services as the biggest threat to their freedom.
Control of Internet companies ranked second on the list of threats to freedom, with 61 percent of Germans concerned about these firms sharing their personal data with governments, according to the annual “Freedom Index Germany” survey conducted by the John Stuart Mill Institute and the Allensbach Institute.
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A provision of the “foreign fighters” national security bill currently being considered by Parliament would allow the same department that accidentally published details of thousands of asylum seekers’ identities to collect fingerprint and retina scans of every person entering and leaving Australia without legislative approval…
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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden will speak via video chat from Moscow during the Observer Ideas festival this weekend in London
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Civil Rights
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By law, they’re Israeli colonies, but NPR’s guest calls them ‘neighborhoods’
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More doubts raised over forensics and statements of Burmese pair held for Hannah Witheridge and David Miller killings
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As a vocal critic of religion, it comes as no surprise that Bill finds fault with Islam. Yet to many, Bill’s vociferous support of Sam Harris statement that “Islam is the mother lode of all bad ideas” is deeply troubling.
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It was problematical even before I went. You had the feeling [President Lyndon] Johnson wasn’t telling the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin, but you couldn’t prove it. That the government was corrupt, but you couldn’t prove it. The North Vietnamese weren’t these kind people, like Jane Fonda said. You served the Constitution and if the president said go, that’s what you do. I could have gone to Sweden or Algeria. I just couldn’t have my friends over there doing the fighting.
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The Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban has rightly captured the world’s attention. But what about the invisible child victims of US drones?
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As Malala Yousafzai has told the media, that second when she was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan changed her life, (it is also changing the lives of others too), Malala has become a very marketable western commodity. My issue is not with Malala, I support and respect her wish of education for all, however (and it shames me to say this being British) I doubt she fully realizes the extent to which she is being exploited by her new “mentors” in the UK.
There is an element of risk to all now living in Pakistan since the US led War on Terror brought internal conflict to the region but there is only special treatment for some of those affected. Why not fly out every child harmed by US drones to the west for the most up to date medical care, there are plenty for wellwishers to assist.
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The Nobel Peace Prize is required by Alfred Nobel’s will, which created it, to go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The Nobel Committee insists on awarding the prize to either a leading maker of war or a person who has done some good work in an area other than peace.
The 2014 prize has been awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay, which is not a person but two people, and they have not worked for fraternity between nations or the abolition or reduction of standing armies but for the rights of children. If the peace prize is to be a prize for random good works, then there is no reason not to give it to leading advocates for the rights of children. This is a big step up from giving it to leading makers of war. But then what of the prize for peace and the mission of ending war that Nobel included in his will in fulfillment of a promise to Bertha von Suttner?
Malala Yousafzay became a celebrity in Western media because she was a victim of designated enemies of Western empire. Had she been a victim of the governments of Saudi Arabia or Israel or any other kingdom or dictatorship being used by Western governments, we would not have heard so much about her suffering and her noble work. Were she primarily an advocate for the children being traumatized by drone strikes in Yemen or Pakistan, she’d be virtually unknown to U.S. television audiences.
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Without meaning to, Western supporters of Somali security forces were even arming various militias in the country, Sheikh said. The government was paying its soldiers very little, and irregularly, too. So many of the soldiers trained by the European training mission, EUTM, defected straight to their respective clan’s militia – and some to al-Shabab – taking all their freshly acquired skills with them.
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According to reports, the drone attacked hideouts of militants on the Cancharo Kandoa area of Afghanistan near Pakistan border.
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For Western critics of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is the quintessential resource for documenting his regime’s mass atrocities. But as the United States undertakes direct military involvement in Syria, the monitoring group’s methodical casualty counts and network of local sources have become a double-edged sword for Barack Obama’s administration.
No longer just a PR problem for the Assad regime and radical Syrian rebel groups, the monitoring organization has begun publishing allegations of civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military. And the observatory’s founder, Rami Abdul Rahman, says he’s not going to stop.
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Trash is mostly what Ryan Devereaux serves up in his recent piece on investigative journalist Gary Webb.
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The CIA hires officers who might succeed in the midst of ambiguity — the murk of uncertainty, pressure, and the obligation to act now — but can also affirm the principles we are sworn to serve. For me — a former CIA officer who spent decades trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, who lived with the impossible task of getting it right every time when all choices were fraught with ill consequence — one truth stood out in its simple clarity: Torture is wrong. No hypothetical can gainsay that, and no circumstance can justify making an exception.
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Today would have been John Lennon’s 74th(!) birthday had he not been gunned down on the sidewalk outside of The Dakota in December 1980. Before his death, his political activism and pacifism endeared him to millions, but certainly not to the United States government. Check out this May 1972 FBI memo re: “Security matter dash revolutionary activities” with notes from the deportation hearings the Nixon administration was throwing at him…
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10.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While Munich city council’s decision to replace Microsoft software with open-source alternatives made headlines, it is one of a number of municipalities across Germany to make such a move.
Across Germany at the national and local level authorities are running Linux and open-source software. The German federal employment office has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse, and a number of German ubran areas are using or in the process of switching to open-source software on the desktop, including Isernhagen, Leipzig, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen.
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Server
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Moving to Linux VDI desktops could save you from Windows licensing headaches, but there aren’t many enterprise situations where virtual Linux setups fit. For the most part, Linux VMs only suit a small number of virtual desktop users.
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Today’s Linux feeds brought news of the release of openSUSE 13.2 RC1 and Jiri Eischmann discusses GNOME and Wayland in Fedora 21. Matt Asay says CoreOS is an “existential threat to Linux vendors” and Jack Wallen says Linux users do have reason to be concerned over Adobe’s dropping Linux support. The Linux Voice says “you might be using the wrong Linux distribution” and Linus doesn’t have the time or any interest in Lennart Poettering’s problems.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a new batch of stable kernels: 3.16.5, 3.14.21, and 3.10.57.
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Graphics Stack
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It feels like we’re very close to the Radeon R9 300 series of GPUs, with AMD dropping the price of its Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X GPUs in the last week, but now news is floating around of the Pirate Islands-based architecture, AMD’s next-generation GPU.
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It’s been a while since last hearing anything from Tiago Vignatti out of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center in Brazil but the Wayland-focused developer has recently been working on Ozone-GBM, a new target for this abstraction layer used by Google’s Chrome/Chromium web-browser.
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Applications
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cool-retro-term is free and open source terminal emulator developed by the Italian programmer Filippo Scognamiglio which mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens, It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight.
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Proprietary
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Netflix now runs on Linux without any tweaks or work-around what so ever. I just noticed it when I installed a new Ubuntu system (14.10), with Chrome Beta 39.x and out of curiosity opened Netflix. It worked flawlessly. No agent switcher required anymore
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Ubuntu and Linux users are now able to watch Netflix natively in Google Chrome after the company finally updated their user agent that was inconvenient for so many people.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Unigine Corp has revealed today that Unigine 2.0 has been under development for about one year and with this major revision to their technologically-amazing but seldom adopted engine is OpenGL 4.5 rendering support and other changes.
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Wadjet Eye Games make their first same-day release for Linux with the release of A Golden Wake today. Follow real estate agent Alfie Banks in this retelling of historical events during the Florida land boom in the early 1920s and the following Great Depression.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Cylon runs the classic GNOME 3 desktop on almost any hardware configuration made since 2007, but it is more suited to seasoned Linux users. Newcomers to Linux may not make an easy transition.
Still, Cylon Linux is highly usable out of the box. With its installed software, there’s little need for supplemental installations. The user experience, however, might be less than appealing for those who are not at home with the GNOME 3 desktop.
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Currently, dependencies and applications are installed into directories in /opt, and Listaller contains some logic to make applications find dependencies, and to talk to the package manager to install missing things. This has some drawbacks, like the need to install an application before using it, the need for applications to be relocatable, and application-installations being non-atomic.
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New Releases
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Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal. It just hit version 3.0.5.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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BTRFS is already used on OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta and OpenSUSE 13.2 RC and will be used by default on the OpenSUSE systems, starting with the final version of OpenSUSE 13.2. And since SUSE has assigned three developers for making BTRFS work on their system, Fedora can use the BTRFS optimizations already implemented on OpenSUSE.
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Over at the Fedora Project, we recently released the alpha version of Fedora 21. (And if the rest of this is all tl;dr, no problem – skip right to the pre-release download page, and there you are.)
Looking for a silly code name like in previous years? Sorry to disappoint – this is the first release to be just called by its number. That’s not all we’re doing differently, though. Last year, Fedora reached its 10-year anniversary, and as went into our second decade, we decided to take a step back and reflect on what changes it will take to continue to be a leading Free and Open Source Linux distribution over the next ten years.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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There are many Linux distributions available right now that claim to protect the privacy of their users, but very few actually do it properly. Tails is definitively among the top ones, if not the best. Now, a new version has been made available, but it’s just an RC for an upcoming release…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back in February, Canonical promised that its phone-centric Ubuntu Touch will be making its way to actual retail smartphones later this year. But Canonical promises many things and with the year coming to a close, it seems that that promise might either be delayed or, worse, broken entirely. But behold, a device bearing the likeness of the Meizu MX4 but also bearing within it Ubuntu’s mobile OS has just been spotted, fanning the flames of hope of a still possible Ubuntu phone soon.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
Codenamed “Utopic Unicorn”, 14.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
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The US Air Force has the drones, but now the US Navy has autonomous boats that can steer themselves, patrol a zone, and take a hostile posture, whatever that means. It was just a matter of time until someone thought of having some kind of drones that could guard a fleet on the water. The US Navy was happy to oblige.
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Axiomtek’s eBOX560-880-FL is a compact embedded PC with a choice of Intel Haswell dual-core SoCs, plus temperature, vibration, and IP40 ingress protection.
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The Pi Vessel is said to be made in Germany, but is available from a Dover, Delaware based startup called MSDGroup, one of many companies of the same name, but apparently not one that has a website. The Pi Vessel is available on Kickstarter through Nov. 5 starting at $89 without a Pi or $129 with either a Raspberry Pi Model B or the newer RPi Model B+.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The openSUSE Project has just released openSUSE 13.2 RC1, and the developers are preparing to close the development cycle and get the final version out the door.
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Android
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“Apparently we are in violation of the terms and conditions because we are using the word ‘Android’ in our title rather than ‘For Android’,” he said.
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Three new Lenovo tablets land with (depending on your choice) Windows and Android. The Yoga Tablet 2 Pro also has an in-built pico-projector.
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For much of the past few years it’s been tough to argue why anyone should opt for an Android tablet rather than an iPad. Besides lower prices, there simply haven’t been compelling arguments to go recommend Android tablets over Apple’s iPads, which have a much more robust ecosystem. The Yoga 2 Pro changes that and the Android camp has something to truly get excited about. After watching a video on the Yoga 2 Pro’s display at a private Lenovo briefing last week I’ve been yearning to get one of my own.
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Synaq’s nondescript offices near the Sandton CBD feel laid back and comfortable. A large blackboard near the entrance has scribbles all over it. These offices check all the boxes of a start-up, but this business is far too big, and a few years too old, to fall into the start-up category.
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The good thing about open source projects getting killed off is that there always seems to be another to take its place. Here’s a look at this year’s carnage to date, including some free software and freeware.
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Events
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The Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP) conducted a Cloud Workshop at MIT on September 26. Speakers from industry and academia described their R&D efforts to meet the future needs of cloud computing, spanning the full scope of hardware (servers, storage and networking) and software solutions (operating systems, virtualization, cloud orchestration software, and big data analytics).
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The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.
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In two weeks the All Things Open conference will be taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Penguins from all over will be gathering together to share ideas. And as one of the presenters this year, I started wondering, in what ways can you open source a conference presentation?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox OS is now available on three continents with 12 smartphones offered by 13 operators in 24 countries. As the only truly open mobile operating system, Firefox OS demonstrates the versatility of the Web as a platform, free of the limits and restrictions associated with proprietary mobile operating systems.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack Juno cloud platform is set to become generally available on October 16, bringing with it a long list of new networking capabilities. The new networking features aren’t just limited to the OpenStack Neutron networking project, either. They also include new features in the OpenStack Nova compute project.
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OpenStack has a long way to go before it reaches the nirvana state that one of its founders is claiming it has already attained.
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BSD
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The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1.5, the fifth security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons.
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Jean-Sébastien Pédron of the FreeBSD project gave an update at this week’s XDC2014 conference about the state of the graphics stack on FreeBSD.
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Public Services/Government
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Government contractors have traditionally been slow to embrace open source software. There’s a handful of reasons why that’s the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why government contractors are embracing open source with increasing frequency…
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Openness/Sharing
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Ambient lighting setups are always a good time, but in general these setups are either complex, expensive, or they don’t work with enough things to make the experience worth it. The folks at Antumbra think they have a solution with Glow, which is a $35 LED cube that uses open source software to offer ambient lighting to any desktop setup.
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The term “open source” refers to something that can be modified because its design is publicly accessible. Open source software is computer software with its source code made available for modification or enhancement by anyone. Projects or initiatives that utilize this type of code are those that embrace and foster open exchange, collaborative participation, fast prototyping and community development.
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Programming
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D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a high level language, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API’s and with hardware (dlang.org).
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Another son, Robert Sirleaf, resigned as chairman of Liberia’s state oil company, NOCAL, and stepped down from his role as a senior advisor to his mother last year.
Johnson Sirleaf said his resignation had nothing to do with accusations of favouritism, stating that he had simply completed his assignment to restructure NOCAL and draft a petroleum law.
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Health/Nutrition
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Medical experts further agree that it’s highly unlikely Ebola could mutate into a form that alters its mode of transmission. That type of mutation would be unprecedented according to Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello, who wrote: “We have been studying viruses for over 100 years, and we’ve never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted,” and that “There is no reason to believe that Ebola virus is any different from any of the viruses that infect humans and have not changed the way that they are spread.”
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The report exposes the many ways in which GM crops threaten the environment and farmers’ livelihood…
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Security
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The likelihood that Apple delayed releasing a fix for the recent remotely exploitable vulnerability in Bash due to licensing issues is low, according to the executive director of the Free Software Foundation.
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International Dairy Queen, Inc. today confirmed that the systems of some DQ® locations and one Orange Julius® location in the U.S. had been infected with the widely-reported Backoff malware that is targeting retailers across the country. The company previously indicated that it was investigating a possible malware intrusion that may have affected some payment cards used at certain DQ locations in the U.S. Upon learning of the issue, the company conducted an extensive investigation and retained external forensic experts to help determine the facts.
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Whether you’re a nation or a citizen, cyber security is an ever-growing issue – new hacks or data breaches emerge daily, in which people’s information is exposed or leaked, from bank details to intimate photographs. But is the threat of being hacked something that you or I really need to worry about? And if someone did hack into your computer, what would they be able to do with the information they found?
Over the summer I decided to put these questions to the test. I got in touch with an ‘ethical hacker’ called John Yeo, who works for cyber security firm Trustwave, and asked him to try and hack me.
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An HP executive told security reporter Brian Krebs that that the certificate itself wasn’t compromised. HP Global Chief Information Security Officer Brett Wahlin said that HP had recently been alerted to the signed malware—a four-year old Windows Trojan—by Symantec. Wahlin said that it appears the malware, which had infected an HP employee’s computer, accidentally got digitally signed as part of a separate software package—and then sent a signed copy of itself back to its point of origin. Though the malware has since been distributed over the Internet while bearing HP’s certificate, Wahlin noted that the Trojan was never shipped to HP customers as part of the software package.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A desperate battle by progressive Kurdish-led resistance fighters is seeking to defend Kobanê from ISIS fundamentalist forces. Kobanê is in Rojava, or Western Kurdistan, is a predominantly Kurdish area in northern Syria that is a semi-autonomous “liberated zone” experiencing a social revolution.
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A Somerset County woman with a history of political activism faces federal charges after attempting to enter protected National Security Agency property to protest lethal American drone attacks around the world.
Manijeh Saba, a court interpreter, translator and long-time human rights activist from Franklin Township will appear in United States District Court in Baltimore Thursday for protesting on May 3 outside the gate of Fort Meade, MD against NSA surveillance providing targeting information for US drone attacks.
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Finance
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Maria lived in the United States for eighteen years. She worked multiple jobs while raising two sons, a daughter, and several grandchildren. On her way home from church one Sunday, she was stopped at a checkpoint outside her trailer park. Lacking the requisite papers to be in the country, her car was seized, and she was thrown into the merciless and well-greased US deportation mill.
About her forced removal and subsequent separation from her family, she said, “I became so sad I could barely move.”
Todd Miller, veteran journalist and author of Border Patrol Nation, uses Maria’s tragedy to show the incredible geographic and psychological reach of the Border Patrol and its proxy agencies — which now include local police forces who enforce immigration violations far from the border, and the first-ever state-run Border Patrol, South Carolina’s Immigration Enforcement Unit. The “border,” once a contested hot zone in the Southwest, has become a mobile vacuum, ready to disappear undocumented immigrants and devastate communities from Niagara Falls, New York to Miami, Florida.
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Censorship
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The week is highlighted by gatherings where people read from books that have been banned at one time or another. On one side, the annual event celebrates the freedom to read and the freedom of expression. On the other, it shines the spotlight on the bigger and more pervasive problem of censorship, which affects not just books but all means of expression.
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STREETS in Hong Kong have been filled with protesters calling for democratic reform and tweeting their experiences furiously. But in mainland China, people are struggling to discuss the unrest online. Censors have been poring over Weibo, China’s closely controlled version of Twitter, to scrub out even oblique references to it.
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Index is deeply concerned that the UK government has done little to press Bahrain to improve its human rights record. Bahrain’s insistence on the prosecution of Nabeel Rajab underlines the abysmal state of free expression in that country.
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Censorship can only perpetuate suspicion, not provide clarity.
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At the end of the conversation, Nasser was told that he could not board the departing plane, which in any case had already left. The faceless homeland security officer would not disclose the reason Nasser wasn’t allowed into the US.
“Just like that?” Nasser asked. “Just like that,” the homeland security officer responded.
Nasser’s talk was still held, via Skype. But Homeland Security did manage to prevent him from the warmth of a personal address, from speaking individually to fans of his work, and from fruitful discussions with other writers.
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Privacy
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Former NSA head Keith Alexander — the original Million Dollar (a month) Man and premier cybersecurity consultant to the banking industry — is taking his years of expertise (and several mysteriously non-public patents) on the road, speaking at whatever venue will have him.
[...]
This advice is less than useless. Those who actively seek contact with terrorists likely know to stay clear of surveilled channels. Those who aren’t seeking contact have their data (and sometimes communications) agnostically hoovered up by the US government’s various surveillance and investigatory arms.
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EX-NSA DIRECTOR Keith Alexander has defended the PRISM programme he oversaw, and has warned that if members of the public speak to terrorists they are likely to be a target for the agency.
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“When the Senate returns in November, it must pass the USA Freedom Act in order to protect Americans’ civil liberties and to ensure that American tech companies can begin to rebuild trust with their customers and flourish in the global economy,” he said in a statement.
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When it comes to political activism in America, it almost all focuses within the 202 area code. But over the last few years, it’s become clear we cannot count on Washington D.C. to rein in its own surveillance programs.
We need a different approach that engages activists and concerned Americans outside of the Beltway.
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Longtime reporters who cover the NSA know that any time we ask the obstinate spy agency for information, we’re probably going to hit a brick wall. But who would have thought that trying to obtain information about information the agency has already given us would lead to the same wall?
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It’s an assertion that defies common sense but speaks volumes about how the U.S. intelligence complex dodges accountability: The National Security Agency is arguing that even the secrets it has intentionally disclosed to reporters are still so secret that disclosing their disclosure threatens national security.
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Secrecy News submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on March 10, 2014, for “a copy of any notifications to Congress transmitted in the past 12 months concerning authorized public disclosures of intelligence information.”
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A report to Congress on authorized disclosures of classified intelligence to the media — not unauthorized disclosures — is classified and is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency said.
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Does your 13-year-old need something to do next summer? Here’s a novel idea: Send her to a special cybersecurity camp run by the NSA.
The beleaguered agency’s new program tries to catch the youngest computer-savvy recruits and inculcate loyalty before they become exposed to the libertarian ideals of Reddit or read the manifestos of Aaron Swartz.
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Kids across America no longer have to wait until college to plan on being a part of the National Security Agency. In fact, they could start preparing for their NSA careers as early as age 13.
The NSA has begun sponsoring cybersecurity camps for middle and high school students, agency recruiter Steven LaFountain told CNBC’s Eamon Javers in a recent interview. Six prototype camps launched this past summer, and the NSA hopes to eventually have a presence in schools in all 50 states.
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Against a backdrop of Snowden/NSA revelations and growing consumer concern about massive data breaches on the Internet, participants in the gathering (which was organized and hosted by Intel) seemed to echo a common refrain: written privacy policies aren’t getting the job done. “There’s a huge gap between a company’s privacy policy and what happens in systems,” said Danny Weitzner, co-founder of TrustLayers and the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House.
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Call it “privacy nihilism.” Whether you’re reading about the latest security breaches across the Net, or the jaw-dropping details of the latest NSA leak, or you’re explaining the importance of crypto to your blank-faced family, or struggling to stop your own government’s plans on burning your right to privacy, it’s sometimes easy to just throw up your hands in despair and give it all up.
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Twitter is suing the FBI and the Department of Justice to be able to release more information about government surveillance of its users.
The social media company filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco to publish its full “transparency report,” which documents government requests for user information. Twitter published a surveillance report in July but couldn’t include the exact number of national security requests it received because Internet companies are prohibited from disclosing that information, even if they didn’t get any requests.
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The pervasive dragnet surveillance of Americans revealed by the Edward Snowden documents has caused serious damage to the trust that enterprises and citizens had in the United States government and unless that trust is repaired, it could have serious effects on the Internet economy, a panel of prominent technology executives said.
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Speaking at the gym at the high school where he used to play basketball in the 1960s, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) gave a dire warning to a group of students and locals on Wednesday about the effects of government spying on Silicon Valley: “There is a clear and present danger to the Internet economy.”
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Here’s one that took place a couple of weeks ago at Georgetown on “The NSA, Privacy & the Global Internet: Perspectives on EO 12333.” Participants included law professors Nathan Sales, Laura Donohue, DNI General Counsel Bob Litt, and former State Department official John Tyre.
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Experts say ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden is a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize, set to be announced Friday. But such a decision would cause huge complications for Norway with one of its closest allies, the US.
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The race for the Nobel peace prize, to be announced on Friday, has rarely been as open or unpredictable, experts say, with the pope and Edward Snowden tipped as possible winners. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who revealed the extent of US global eavesdropping, was one of the joint winners of the “alternative Nobel peace prize” in September. A hero to some and a traitor to others, he would be a highly controversial choice for the 878,000-euro ($1.11-million) award. The Pakistani girls’ education campaigner Malala Yousafzai who was also a favourite in 2013 is also said to be in the running along with Pope Francis for his defence of the poor, and a Japanese pacifist group.
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NSA whistleblower Snowden will talk via videolink from Moscow this weekend about the future of privacy, surveillance technology and democratic oversight
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The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is expected to make a public appearance in a UK event this Sunday, speaking via video link from Moscow, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
“I’m tired of people endlessly rehashing the history of Mr Snowden’s revelations, and I’m sure he is too,” the Observer technology columnist John Naughton, who will lead the discussion with Snowden, was quoted as saying.
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In 1995, the US government tried – and failed – to categorise encryption as a weapon. Today, the same lines are being drawn and the same tactics repeated as the FBI wants to do the same. Here’s why they are wrong, and why they must fail again
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The USA Freedom Act certainly has its shortcomings, but it is important to weigh the options, consider the effects of not passing this measure and realize that in a sea of unsure government options, this is truly the best choice we have.
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NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called “parallel reconstruction.” This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely-recognised as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has claimed that the UK’s electronic surveillance and oversight body GCHQ is trying to become more transparent on spying.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has challenged assurances by the Australian government that communications interception in the country was a matter of “strict oversight.”
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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and other Silicon Valley executives say controversial government spying programs are undercutting the Internet economy and want Congress to step up stalled reform.
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Schmidt and executives from Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp. and other firms said revelations of extensive NSA surveillance are prompting governments in Europe and elsewhere to consider laws requiring that their citizens’ online data be stored within their national borders.
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At the Government Accountability Project (GAP), we began working with whistleblowers in the wake of Washington’s Watergate scandal, an episode that showed what our public officials were capable of when left to their own devices. In the years since then, as the U.S. adopted sweeping privatization and deregulation policies, GAP has come to provide legal help to whistleblowers from both public agencies and private firms.
When the first whistleblowers from the National Security Agency (NSA) came forward — before Edward Snowden — they reported not only violations of privacy and the Constitution, but fraud. After all, NSA cyberspying, cyberattacking and cyberdefending are largely done by private companies which are, by the way, paid lavishly. We can’t be sure exactly how lavishly, because although we’re the people paying them, we have no right to know what we’re paying for. It’s the black budget; it’s secret.
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It has been said that we are living in a post-NSA world. What this really amounts to is that we are now slightly more aware of the level of snooping that has been going on in the background for many years. There has been widespread outrage at the revelations made by Edward Snowden, and there have been similar concerns raised outside of the US. In the UK, the FBI-like National Crime Agency, wants greater powers to monitor emails and phone calls — and it wants the public to agree to this.
Director General of the NCA, Keith Bristow, spoke with the Guardian and said that the biggest threats to public safety are to be found online. He said that more powers to monitor online data is needed, and suggested that public resistance to this was down to the fact that he had thus far failed to properly explain why such powers are needed.
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Alarmingly, Keith Bristow, Director of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), also known as Britain’s FBI, made a call to the public on Monday to obtain their consent to increase the surveillance capabilities of the state, and thus reduce their digital freedoms in return for more robust protections from organized cybercrime and terrorism.
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Foreign intelligence agencies and private companies collecting personal data online are the greatest threats to freedom in Germany, according to an annual poll.
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Chinese hacker unit PLA 61398 is hacking US companies harder than ever after bilateral talks between Beijing and Washington were interrupted by Snowden leaks, according to Mandiant boss Kevin Mandia.
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Beijing has lashed out at an allegation by FBI Director that Chinese hackers were guilty of causing billions of dollars of damage to the US economy. China accused the US of using such statements “to divert attention” from its own massive cyber-spying.
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The U.S. Justice Department said in a federal court filing on Monday that the government has the legal authority to hack into servers outside of the country without a warrant.
The claim came as part of the ongoing trial of the alleged operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website. The suspect, Ross Ulbricht, claimed that the government’s explanation for how they located the server of the anonymous website was “implausible,” claiming that it’s possible the FBI may have instead unlawfully colluded with the NSA to hack into the site – a technique known as parallel construction.
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Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA intercepts huge amounts of electronic data warrantlessly without our permission. However, that is not the only way the surveillance state violates our rights. The NSA uses other underhanded schemes behind-the-scenes to exploit us. One of them is known as ‘parallel construction.’
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I’m honored to be here to discuss the mass collection of Americans’ phone records by the NSA. Before getting into that program, though, it’s critical to recognize that this debate is not just about phone records, and it is not just about the NSA. This is a debate about the kind of society we want to live in. Do we want to live in a country in which the government routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong? Or do we want to be true to the vision of our nation’s founders, who believed that the government should — as a general matter — leave us alone unless it has cause to invade our privacy. I think our founders got it right, and I hope you’ll agree, which is why you should vote for the resolution: Mass collection of our phone records violates the Fourth Amendment.
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In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s, and numerous other credible whistleblowers‘ irrefutable revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies are capturing and indefinitely storing millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls, emails, internet transactions, and even movements and whereabouts at any given time—Apple and other tech companies are rightfully responding to their customers’ demands for enhanced encryption to protect their privacy rights.
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Brands are slowly finding ways to make sense of image-based social networks such as Instagram and Tumblr, mining user photos for insight into how their products are used.
The rise of the ‘visual economy’ poses several challenges for marketers. One is understanding how consumers like to share post-production edits of their lives. Another challenge for brands is finding a way to participate in that activity with authenticity. And the final one is how to parse this visual data for insight.
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The bad news is that Americans are at far greater risk of having their phones hacked by their government than by Russian malware hackers.
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Consider, however, the reality of your relationship with your phone. First of all, it knows everything about you. It reads all your emails, sees all your pictures, learns your favorite websites, and even remembers the unsent texts you draft in the middle of the night. It tracks where you’ve been and when, who you’ve talked to and for how long — and if you have a particularly smart new phone, it also knows your resting heart rate and level of physical activity. The jobs that NSA and KGB spies would train for decades to master are now being handled by the little computer in your pocket. In its spare time. As a sideline entertainment. And what do you know about your phone, other than the megapixels of its camera or the gigabytes of its storage?
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Your phone records, your credit-card bills, your internet trail – the government has the power to summon it all on-demand, without telling you. Until now
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The integrity of the Internet could be at risk if Congress does not act to rein in the National Security Agency, Google head Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday.
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Civil Rights
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Former NYPD police chief Ray Kelly is still telling his stop-and-frisk story to whoever will listen. The story is — and always has been — that if the NYPC isn’t allowed to make hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops every year, the city will slide back into lawlessness. The supporting evidence offered for this pending apocalypse never added up. Kelly claimed stop-and-frisk kept guns off the street but statistics maintained by the NYPD itself showed that the difference between stop-and-frisk-free 2003 and 2012′s 500,000+ stops was a grand total of 96 guns — a difference of .02%.
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“Last Week Tonight’s” John Oliver is again taking an entertaining swing at a subject that has made its way into Techdirt’s pages: asset seizure and forfeiture. Going beyond the “robbery at badgepoint” (Cory Doctorow’s term) to civil asset forfeiture (in which the government files suit against property that is presumed guilty of criminal ties), Oliver is his usual entertaining self while still managing to highlight the obscene depths these programs — started with the intent of breaking up criminal enterprises and returning assets to those defrauded, etc. — have sunk, thanks to the perversion of incentives.
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“Lets just say, homecoming this weekend is gonna go out with a bang,” it read, according to a statement from the Utah attorney general’s office.
The bulletin has since been deleted from the site, but still can be found through a Google search. It continued: “And the football game is gonna be one no one is ever gonna forget.”
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Presumably, the student was fully cleared of any potential wrongdoing and mocked gently for his use of the phrase “going out with a bang” by an officer drawing the shape of square with his opposing index fingers.
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 is to be awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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President Barack Obama yesterday said he is still “unequivocally committed to net neutrality” and that he wants the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules that prevent Internet service providers from creating paid fast lanes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has called on the Council of the European Union to publish the EU negotiating directives for the on-going Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the US. She has also proposed to the European Commission a range of practical measures to enable timely public access to TTIP documents, and to details of meetings with stakeholders. She has opened investigations involving both institutions.
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Copyrights
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As we’ve reported, France’s “three strikes and you’re out” law, known officially as Hadopi, has been a joke from start to finish. For example, the law’s first victim was convicted because his wife had downloaded some songs, while the law’s first suspension was cancelled for technical reasons. Despite these setbacks, and a change of government, France is persisting with this benighted scheme, and Numerama brings us the latest installment of this uniquely French farce (original in French.)
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10.09.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Even before the fall school buying season started, Google sold a million Chromebooks to the education market. Google now aims, with its Chromebook for Work program, for these lightweight, Linux and cloud-based laptops to become just as popular for office-users.
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Dell recently announced Chrome OS devices for businesses. Adobe is bringing its suite of image editing software to Chrome OS devices, starting off with Photoshop for its education customers. These are the early signs of Chrome OS becoming a serious, and probably dominant player for businesses.
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A do-it-yourself computer kit that got its start through a Kickstarter campaign is now available to young would-be coders. Kano, which got its start through crowdfunding in 2013, is targeting its $150 kit at technology-minded kids ages 6 to 14.
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Kano has begun selling a $150, Raspberry Pi-based educational computer that teaches kids to program using visual tools and the Debian-based Kano OS.
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German cities are now setting examples for the rest of the world to move away from vendor-locked products to vendor neutral, open source based products. After the Munich success story another German town has moved to Linux.
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Server
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IBM is aiming to re-invent itself in a new hardware era where it no longer sells x86 based servers. IBM sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo in a $2.3 billion deal that officially closed on October 1.
Doug Balog is the General Manager of Power Systems within IBM’s System and Technology Group and it’s his job to advance the Power server market position in the new non-x86 era at IBM.
As contrast to the x86 business, which was largely about Linux, IBM’s Power business includes two other operating systems. IBM Power runs and supports both the AIX Unix as well as the IBM i operating system that was originally known as AS/400.
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It might be tempting to write off StorPool. They are, after all, not really ready for the enterprise, at least in terms of compatibility and interface. But for online application and cloud providers, StorPool sounds exactly like what they want from a storage solution. These organizations are often Linux only, don’t want to deal with a graphical interface, and want the flexibility to scale the way they need to scale at any moment in time.
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Given the transparent and collaborative nature of open source, it is no wonder that the technology is widely used all around the world. Countless organizations and industries have benefited immensely from open source software — with science and engineering among the sectors driving the charge.
In an industry that heavily relies on technology and innovation, the deployment of open source initiatives in the scientific field should come as no surprise. In fact, CERN, one of the most revered names in the world of science, extensively uses open source software — here’s why.
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While sometimes dismissed as the newest entrant in the “just enough operating system” pageant, CoreOS threatens to displace incumbent Linux distributions with a minimalist approach that seeks to emulate how Google and other Web companies manage distributed systems. CoreOS uses Docker to handle the addition and management of applications and services on a system.
Indeed, by changing the very definition of the Linux distribution, CoreOS is an “existential threat” to Red Hat, Canonical, and Suse, according to some suggestions. The question for Red Hat in particular will be whether it can embrace this new way of delivering Linux while keeping its revenue model alive.
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Kernel Space
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds has indicated that he has no interest in the problems faced by chief systemd developer Lennart Poettering that led to the latter blaming Torvalds for the negative feedback he (Poettering) has faced.
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Altera, Chelsio Communications, DataCentred, Imagination Technologies, and Travelping Are Latest Companies to Support Linux
[...]
About The Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at http://www.linuxfoundation.org.
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The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has been running well in our latest SSD benchmarks but with the forthcoming Linux 3.18 kernel it’s going to be in even better shape.
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Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate 3.17 kernel (RC1) just ahead of this year’s Kernel Summit. Noting that he would be travelling (and thus not able to keep up with a massive influx of patches), he had closed the “merge window” (the period of time during which disruptive churn is allowed in any kernel development cycle) for 3.17 one day early. He also noted that, typically of northern hemisphere summers, this merge window had been “slightly smaller than the last few ones”. New features pulled into 3.17-rc1 were spread all over the kernel. They include the getrandom() system call, and support for the “memfd” and “file sealing” features needed for kdbus.
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New versions of the Linux kernel will eventually make their way into all sorts of other devices, too. A new Linux kernel means improvements for Chromebooks, Android devices, network routers, and any number of other embedded devices.
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Added to the driver core interface is a new device coredump class. This new generic kernel interface can be used for dumping firmware “core dumps” to user-space over sysfs. This is primarily intended for wireless and graphics drivers (among other potential drivers of hardware that deal a lot with firmware blobs) to implement so they can dump their hardware firmware state to assist in debugging complicated issues where it could be within the firmware code.
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In this video from the LAD’14 Conference in Reims, Gabriele Paciucci from Intel presents: Current Status of the Adoption of ZFS as Backend File System for Lustre.
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Graphics Stack (Mostly AMD)
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Alex Deucher of AMD has taken the floor at XDC2014, which got underway today in France to provide an update on the company’s new unified open-source driver strategy. Compared to what I originally reported earlier in the year when breaking the news, there’s some notable changes but overall this is an exciting endeavor for AMD Linux customers with the open and closed source AMD GPU drivers going to share the same (open-source) Linux kernel driver.
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I am not a power user of Linux or any of the various distros but I believe something very big happened today. AMD has unveiled what they are calling the “AMDGPU” Kernel Driver; something that will form the base of Closed Source (Catalyst) and Open Source (e.g. Gallium3D) drivers in Linux. This appears to be a pretty big step judging from the amount of appreciation it is receiving from the linux community.
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The Linux 3.18 kernel will bring support for reading the core temperature of AMD’s forthcoming “Carrizo” APUs.
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New ARM platform coverage with this next major Linux kernel series include support for the SAMA5D4, BCM63XX family of DSL SOCs, the HiP04 server-class SoC, Amlogic Meson6 (8726MX) platform support, and support for the R-Car E2 r8a7794 SoC. The Atmel SAMA5D4 is an ARM Cortex-A5 based design, the BCM63XX has been known to OpenWRT fans, the Hisilicon HiP04 was enabled by the Linaro crew, and the r8a7794 is an automotive-geared SoC.
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If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD’s Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn’t even have an open-source strategy… How times have changed.
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On Monday I wrote about AMD adding native object code support to their Radeon Gallium3D drivers and Clover. Besides being a huge performance win for OpenCL kernel compile times, this work is also instrumental as part of AMD’s open-source HSA Linux plans.
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Patches are pending to provide the xf86-video-modesetting with GLAMOR hardware acceleration support for 2D.
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Student developer Roy Spliet presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux this week about his X.Org Foundation funded work on improving GPU re-clocking for the open-source Nouveau (NVIDIA) Linux graphics driver. For NVA3/NVA5/NVA8 hardware owners, the reverse-engineered driver will soon start offering better performance with the GPU core and memory frequencies finally able to hit their rated targets.
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Applications
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LightDM GTK+ Greeter is the default Xubuntu (screenshot below) and Lubuntu LightDM greeter (login screen UI). For how to switch to it in Ubuntu (w/ Unity), etc., see THIS Ubuntu wiki article.
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During my search for a good Markdown editor for Linux, I came across a few that are good and a few that are not that good. See The search for a usable Markdown editor for my Linux desktop.
A few of those don’t have support for binary installation on RPM-based distributions, like Fedora, and attempts to install them using alien failed. I wrote about those at The pain of trying to install a .deb package on Fedora using Alien.
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TLP was updated to version 0.6 recently, receiving some fixes for Linux Kernel 3.15 and 3.16 along with systemd improvements and other changes.
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Proprietary
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Nervepoint Technologies Limited, the global leaders in virtualized password and identity self-service are pleased to announce we now support Linux within Access Manager, our self-service password solution. Available immediately this new feature empowers organizations to securely manage any Linux based system efficiently and effortlessly.
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So, what’s the big deal? Adobe has clearly shown it has zero interest in supporting our platform of choice. This is not new news. In fact, Reader hadn’t been updated for Linux since May, 2013. And what about the rest of Adobe products? Need I say more? And Reader for Linux has been in a pathetic state for a long time (even the Windows version is a mess). There are also other, better alternatives for Linux (such as Evince and Ocular).
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Instructionals/Technical
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It is difficult to describe the joy of watching an object that you have designed being materialized in front of your eyes. Even more satisfying is watching it print on a machine you built yourself with open source hardware and control with open source software on Linux.
A 3D printer creates things by laying down plastic a little bit at a time to build the object up in layers. Technically there are many ways to “3D print” an object. At the moment the most popular method is using a reel of plastic which is fed to a hot end that can heat up the plastic and deliver a given amount of it at a specific location.
The process of slowly adding material allows you to create objects which are difficult to create if you were starting with a block of material and removing the pieces that you don’t want. 3D printing also allows you to create things relatively cheaply; a tablet stand that precisely fits on a space on the kitchen bench might only cost you 50 cents in plastic.
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Games
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The sequel to the popular Halloween themed turn-based RPG Costume Quest was released today for Linux. This makes it the first Double Fine game to get a proper sequel on the PC.
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After more than a year in development, the real time strategy game Annex: Conquer the World 4.0 has now been released, boasting nearly twice the game content, including new armies, new modes of play, new maps, new tile-sets, and a much more refined gameplay. As of version 4.0 the game has also been released under a FOSS license.
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One week after its initial release on Steam for Linux, Stronghold 3 is available at an 80% off price in a special promotion that will end on October 13.
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The Kerbal Space Program is a game that masks it’s enormous depth under a cute-looking veneer. Kerbal-kind shares more in appearance with the lemmings of the eponymous 1991 game, than they do with the men and women who strap themselves to rockets in the real world. Don’t let this mislead you though, for although the cutesy characters don’t look hard, the science behind their space program is. (It is rocket science, after all.)
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Today should be a good day for you nostalgia lovers, because Shovel Knight has been released for Linux! Shovel Knight is a charming NES-Inspired platformer that was funded on Kickstarter and release for Windows back in June. The game has received a lot of critical praise; being described as a love letter to old school platformers. To celebrate I’ve bought a humble key (Includes DRM-Free and Steam key) to give one of our readers. If you want a shot read the instructions at the bottom of the article.
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Serious Sam 3: BFE is a first-person shooter, a prequel of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, set in a futuristic universe, with single-player, multi-player and coop modes.
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GOG.com has recently launched an up to 85% off promotion for several of its games. Under the name Mutator Promo, the discount covers a list of games which benefit of up to 85% price discount, and for each three games that you buy from the list, you will receive another one for free, randomly chosen. The list includes four Linux games, as shown below.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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According to my sources, the last stable release of XFCE was about two years ago. By anyone’s time line, that is a long time between stable releases. Bundle this issue with its apparent inability to play nicely with GTK3 friendly items and instead sticking to its older GTK roots. And others users have pointed out that the perceived GTK3 issues are largely with various desktop themes and the “fault” is to be directed at the GNOME project. Long story short, it’s a debate showing few signs of being resolved anytime soon.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After a second long bugs triage since 4.3.0 release, we have worked hard to close another sets of reported issues.. See the new list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.4.0 available through the KDE Bugtracking System.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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One of the great benefits of Linux is that you can customize it however you’d like. And while some customizations can be completely unique, others can be oddly familiar to other operating systems. We’ve already shown you how you can make a Lubuntu installation look like Windows XP.
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Is your current Linux distribution really the best in town, or are you missing something even better?
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ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the fourth in the series and uses one of the latest KDE versions. It’s a distribution that aims to please a lot of users, even the ones who come from a Windows ecosystem.
The previous version of this distribution was released back in April, so the developers had a lot of time to improve upon the operating system. That doesn’t mean that ROSA changed too much. From a design point of view it’s still pretty much the same, but many of the included packages have been updated.
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.20 kernel which has some critical security fixes.
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SparkyLinux 3.5.1 “Annagerman” Enlightenment 19 is ready to go.
Not so long ago, just three years I started my adventure with Enlightenment and Ubuntu.
At the beginning the name of the system was ue17r (Ubuntu E17 Remix) and it was far away from the current version of SparkyLinux. ue17r was a kind of experiment and I was trying to prove (myself) that a man such me, non-programmer, is able to do something what theoretically shouldn’t does.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Product Security track lots of data about every vulnerability affecting every Red Hat product. We make all this data available on our Measurement page and from time to time write various blog posts and reports about interesting metrics or trends.
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Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.
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Fedora
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Fedora 21 Workstation (which is currently in alpha), contains a neat new application for quickly viewing and searching the logs of your system. It places all the system logs in a simple to use interface without having to dig through the filesystem or use a command line tool. This new application, simply called Logs should be installed by default on your Fedora 21 install and can be found in the Activities overview by simply searching for “Logs”.
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Fedora 21 will come with GNOME 3.14, which already runs reasonably well on Wayland. Want to find out? It’s super easy to try it out! Let’s take a look at how to run GNOME on Wayland in Fedora 21, what already works, and what is yet to be finished.
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Following last month’s release of Fedora 21 Alpha I played around with the GNOME Wayland session and shared my thoughts and ran some XWayland benchmarks. The Fedora Project Magazine has also now put the Fedora 21 gnome-session-wayland-session through its paces and delivered a brief write-up. In their write-up they cover a partial list of applications known to break under Wayland some shortcomings. They also do a brief overview of the Wayland architecture and other facts, if you’ve been living under a rock the past few years, or just not reading enough Phoronix.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UbuTricks 14.10.08 has been released. This version arrives with 10 new added programs (two games and eight apps), a new version numbering system which follows the year.month.day scheme, and several other bug fixes and improvements.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has added a new offering to its training and education initiatives. This fall, the company is introducing a five-day OpenStack cloud computing training program, which it no doubt hopes will help generate expertise and familiarity with Ubuntu-friendly OpenStack distributions.
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We can’t wait for the day to see the very first Ubuntu-powered smartphone hitting the market. Canonical — which makes the popular Linux distribution — has been experimenting with few different Nexus devices but none of these were ready for prime time.
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The IoT consortium has formed a working group that will develop an open standard for smart lighting.
The AllSeen Alliance, one of several industry consortiums developing open standards for the Internet of things, is turning its attention to lights in homes and businesses.
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A mobile personal web server called “The Egg” runs Tizen on an Intel Atom and features a 12-hour battery, a 2.4-inch touchscreen, and up to 256GB of storage.
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Lascar launched a Linux-based DAQ system with a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, an ARM9-based Freescale i.MX283 SoC, and a free GUI program.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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openSUSE 13.2 RC1 is baked and ready to serve!. This previous Beta release was a blast with almost 10.000 downloads. The community responded to the call and we had lot of eyes looking for bugs in openSUSE 13.2 Beta1. Many of them have been already squashed and openSUSE 13.2 Release Candidate 1 is here to prove it.
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It’s that time of the year when Linux users get to upgrade their systems – for free of cost, of course. All major distributions are slated for upgrade in the coming weeks including openSUSE (check out our dedicated openSUSE sub-magazine), Ubuntu and Fedora.
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We have all been waiting for the Tizen Samsung Gear S to be launched and it looks like unlocked-mobiles will be the first UK online retailer to begin pre-orders with a confirmed price. They are expecting to have Stock on the 24th October, and will have the Gear S retailing for £334.98 inc VAT.
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Android
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Around 45 percent of Android devices have a browser that is vulnerable to two serious security issues, but some countries have a considerably larger percentage of affected users than others, according to data from mobile security firm Lookout.
The two security issues were discovered over the past month by a security researcher named Rafay Baloch and were described as a privacy disaster by other researchers. They allow an attacker to bypass a core security boundary, called the same-origin policy (SOP), that exists in all browsers.
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iRobot on Thursday unveiled a new controller for its unmanned bomb disposal and discovery robots, an app that runs on every Android tablet.
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He gives an idea of what the Ansible open source community is all about, including the rewards and challenges of working with users who also happen to be talented developers. He answers this and more, like what he’d work on if he could just add one more hour to the day.
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GitHub last month reported that the number of government employees using the code sharing platform had tripled in the past year, to reach more than 10,000 users from 500 organizations. The accompanying graph (re-published here with permission) shows a steep adoption curve that perfectly illustrates a larger trend toward government use of open source practices and workflows over the past five years.
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It is not necessarily a requirement to have clouds built on an open source component, but there is no denying the prevalence and significance of open source staples such as Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Apache Web Server in cloud environments. Open source software can help smooth the transition to DevOps if people are familiar with its tenets, such as collaboration, communication and transparency.
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Broadly speaking, there are two types of open source software. The free software, which has a reciprocity requirement in it. Open source software which doesn’t.
We can have debates about the merits of those two groups for the whole evening. I think both of them are needed and it depends on the usage and the purpose of your project.
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Prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh this year, I asked Adrian Pomilio, UI developer at Teradata, a few questions about the session he’ll deliver, his favorite open source tools, and recent trends in UI/UX technology relevant to open source world.
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If you’re going to rely on some OSS, get in touch with the developers of those projects. Most OSS developers are quite community-oriented and usually helpful. In case your senior executives, regulatory, or QA folks have questions, you’ll be able to answer them easily if you’re in touch with the original developers. Also, if you need changes, some developers will likely be available for hire for making changes or helping with validation.
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Events
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Women in open source are making revolutionary contributions and paving the way for others as they innovate in the field. In tandem with the Grace Hopper conference happening this week, I put together a healthy dose of knowledge on the subject with a quick spotlight on five talented women in open source. A few of them give advice on working in tech.
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Preparation for the LCA 2015 is well under way, and earlybird tickets available now. The event will take place next year from January 12th to the 16th at the University of Auckland Business School, in the modern Owen G Glenn Building.
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This morning the annual X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC) started in Bordeaux, France.
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Web Browsers
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A group of researchers is making news for building a new web privacy system for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers that more efficiently handles JavaScript code among other tasks. In a paper introduced this week in conjunction with the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the researchers reported that 59 per cent of the biggest one million websites, and 77 per cent of the top 10,000 websites, incorporate jQuery, a tool that has been preyed on by hackers.
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Chrome
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Google officially released the Chrome 38 browser on Oct. 9, providing users with few new features. The main focus of Chrome 38 is stability and security fixes—lots of security fixes.
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Though Google didn’t bother to mention Linux, if you are running Chrome browser you can easily install the app from the Chrome Store. The app will be added to the Chrome Apps and you can easily access it from your Linux desktop.
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The primary features of the Chrome 39 Beta is JavaScript (ES6) Generators support for easier asynchronous programming, playback control support for Web Animations, a new Web Application Manifest option for wrapping meta-data around web applications, Beacon API support, scroll offset improvements for HiDPI support, and other changes.
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Mozilla
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When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In my case, I have a 3D printer, and every problem is an opportunity to stare at the hypnotic movements of the extruder.
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As my post last week indicated, I’m increasingly sceptical of Mozilla’s role as the key defender of the open Web, largely because of its decision to embrace DRM. Even as a purveyor of fine Web browsers, things don’t look so rosy. Two years ago, its global market share was fairly stable around 20%; a year ago, that slipped to around 19%; today, it’s slumped to 14%. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the number two browser, and holds around 21% of the market. Obviously, these figures are to be taken with a serious grain of salt, but I think the trend is real. So, given these developments, the obvious question that needs to be answered is: where exactly does Mozilla’s future lie?
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SaaS/Big Data
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As September ended, the Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Project, a group comprised primarily of telecom operators working across open source projects and vendors to implement Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) within their organizations. News has also steadily arrived from Red Hat about its work to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack.
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is *almost* at its next major release, known as Juno — but first there all the release candidates.
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Although it is only four years old, the OpenStack cloud computing project is already having a profound impact on the plumbing and architecture of many data centers. Yesterday, I reported on how Network functions virtualization (NFV) is becoming synonymous with OpenStack, and how NFV and OpenStack could effectively rip out the proprietary infrastructure found in network deployments at many organizations.
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Databases
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When you’re about to start a project and are trying to make a decision on the what applications to use, one way to proceed is to find out what other people have to say about the available options, especially from others with first-hand experience with those available options.
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What does it take to prepare SQL database storage for the Big Data age? Altiscale believes the answer is SQL-on-Hadoop as a service delivered through the cloud, which it has introduced through a new solution that it says is the first to make Hadoop File System (HDFS) data accessible through SQL interfaces.
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CMS
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Alfresco just reaffirmed its good-guy enterprise content management (ECM) credentials. It’s contributing an open source integration called Chemistry Pars to the Apache Software Foundation.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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After browsing through all the flashing lights and shiny colors in Dribbble, casual admirers might come to the conclusion that web design is a unique bespoke process. But looking closer you can see some motifs with two columns here, or a grid layout there. When it comes down to layouts, it makes sense to at least have a solid foundation as a starting point rather than coding all the layout and responsiveness yourself.
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Funding
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Now that the needed money has been raised, the brothers Nielsen can get to work evolving the quality of their product. As Jared said back in September, “Our production value continues to improve with each video and tutorial we create. ‘Superusers: The Legendary GNU/LINUX Show’ is leagues ahead of our first episode, ‘What is a Robot?’ The ten computer science videos proposed in our Indiegogo campaign will only be better. We will focus on improving our script writing, fine-tuning the balance of education and entertainment, incorporating more animations, and refining our audio/visual production techniques.”
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Openness/Sharing
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As of now, JuliusJS can only recognise a few words included in a sample dictionary. Programmers who want more will have to expand the software’s vocabulary themselves. But it’s an open source project. So it can grow.
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Wired U.K. has just done an interesting report on JuliusJS — an open source tool that lets software developers build voice-controlled applications for web browsers. Its developers want to usher in a whole new class of Siri-like apps for the desktop.
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Open Data
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Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council are pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content” and plays a key role in supporting the growing open data ecosystem.
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The question of how much data an individual should share was a key theme of Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote speech at IP Expo in London.
Addressing a packed conference room, the father of the web said opening up data for clinical trials is the only way to solve big problems and, in the event of a road accident, he would want any doctor to access his records.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Rich Geldreich, one of the original Valve Linux team members who started work on their VOGL OpenGL debugger, thinks it will take three years or more before the next-generation OpenGL materializes for users.
Geldreich sadly left Valve earlier this year without disclosing his reasons at the time. It turns out he’s now relocating back to Dallas, Texas and will be working for a start-up. The former Valve and former Microsoft developer has written his first blog post in a while and made a few interesting remarks:
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Science
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Prehistoric paintings at least 40,000 years old that depict animals — including one known as a “pig-deer” — and the outline of human hands in seven caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting the history of art.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Regular US drone strikes are back, killing people on Pakistani territory. The mother of all terrorists says it is targeting the terrorists but by now we should be wise enough to know that she’s up to something else. At a time when the Pak Armed Forces are successfully eliminating terrorists from the very area being droned, what axe is the meddlesome superpower trying to grind? Is it leveling the ground for introducing its new and deadlier ISIS offspring into Pakistan via Afghanistan?
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Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, says that defeating our enemies in the Middle East and North Africa “is going to take a long time.” How long? “I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty-year war,” Panetta predicts.
Whether the United States will be involved in this war for thirty years is an open question. But the notion that such a lengthy war is necessary is nonsense.
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At least 23 people were killed and several others injured in three US drone strikes during last 36 hours in North Waziristan’s tribal region. In the latest attack, six people were killed and 11 injured when a US drone fired two missiles on militant Commander Mustaqeem’s centre in Kandghar area of Shawal on Wednesday.
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In President Obama’s six years in office, he’s ordered about eight times as many drone strikes as his predecessor did in eight years in office. Apparently, not everyone thinks that’s a good thing.
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A U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has reportedly killed at least four people. The victims were described as suspected militants in North Waziristan. At least 25 people have died this week in a series of U.S. strikes in tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
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At least four people were killed and two others injured in a US drone attack in the North Waziristan tribal region, security sources said.
Sources said that the drone fired missiles targeting a vehicle in the Loman area of Dattakhel Tehsil. Today’s strike is the fifth consecutive drone attack in the last five days, as the US-led drone campaign targets suspected militants and their hideouts in restive North and South Waziristan.
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There is certainly at least one way America is exceptional
The U.S. Empire today is the largest in world history with 1,100 military bases and outposts spreading over the globe, dwarfing the Alexander, Roman, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Spanish and British empires of yesteryear.
President Obama has urged Americans to shift attention to Asia but surreptitiously has increased militarism in Africa from A to Z (Algeria to Zambia). Africa swarms with U.S. military.
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The Obama administration has overseen an eightfold increase in the number of attacks flown by unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones.” These small, pilotless aircraft have become popular with the U.S. Air Force for their ability to take on dangerous missions deep inside hostile territory while keeping American servicemen out of harm’s way. Yet the American drone program has also come under harsh scrutiny by human rights groups.
[...]
I’m all for productive discussion of the covert war against terrorism in the Middle East. As we talk, however, remember to keep the focus on the real problem: an endless war against a nameless foe without concrete objectives. Don’t jump to conclusions just because some of our planes don’t have pilots in them.
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The dispute that occurred on the October 3 edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” between Maher and author Sam Harris, on the one hand, and prominent actor Ben Affleck, on the other, was revealing. In particular, it helped clarify the relationship between anti-Muslim bigotry, the “identity politics” of the affluent middle class and defense of American imperialist policy in the Middle East.
[...]
Affleck heatedly responded that those positions were “gross” and “racist.” He commented, “It’s like saying ‘you shifty Jew.’” When Harris went on to claim that “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas,” Affleck responded, quite legitimately, “That’s an ugly thing to say.”
The actor continued, “How about the more than a billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches… and don’t do any of the things that you’re saying all Muslims [do]?… [It’s] stereotyping.”
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Those days also seem to be over, as another US drone strike tore through Datta Khel, North Waziristan today killing two more people. It was the fifth distinct US strike against Waziristan in just four days.
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Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan said on Tuesday night that he was sure of general elections in the year 2015. “Elections will be held early next year. Nothing can stop ‘Naya (new) Pakistan’ from coming into being,” said Imran Khan while talking to a private TV channel. Elections would be announced in a month or two, Imran Khan added.
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The Central Intelligence Agency carried out four drone strikes against suspected militants in the North Waziristan Agency during the Eidul Azha holidays, killing 17 persons and causing injuries to several others.
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On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a June 1st 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.
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UK trade relations with Israel between January and August 2014 are reported to have reached record levels, despite worldwide public outrage against the IDF’s recent military assault on Gaza.
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A report published last Tuesday claims that President Barack Obama’s once-strict standards regarding civilian deaths have fallen by the wayside, as US forces intensify air strikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.
What is most troubling about this specific report is that it conveys the notion that President Obama’s civilian-death standards were, at one time, tight or even “strict.”
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In an article for National Review Online, anti-Muslim activist David Horowitz described the benefits to conservatives of the recent beheadings carried out by the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS).
[...]
Horowitz is a former member of the New Left who, since his political conversion, has made a career out of alleging liberal bias on college campuses and accusing anyone who is not overtly Islamophobic of being in league with terrorists. The Southern Poverty Law Center described Horowitz as “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A recent Rolling Stone article documenting Koch Industries’ “lucrative blend of pollution, speculation, law-bending and self-righteousness” over the last few decades has sparked a string of personal attacks on the reporter, Tim Dickinson, by “KochFacts.com” and a point-by-point rebuttal from Rolling Stone.
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Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world’s largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don’t want you to know is how they made all that money
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Finance
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Fox News hyped a Watchdog.org study purporting to show Colorado recipients of government assistance programs accessed the government funds from exotic, out-of-state locations while on lavish vacations. But Fox’s report failed to mention that the study only found less than 2 percent of withdrawals fell into that category.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A tactic used by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to evade state public records laws has popped up in Florida, prompting a lawsuit against the Orange County mayor for allegedly using an internet dropbox to dodge transparency surrounding the county’s latest effort to thwart paid sick day legislation.
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A recent essay in Harper’s (10/14) roiled the waters at PBS by arguing that public television is too often geared towards serving the “aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics.”
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To no one’s surprise, Jeff Bezos has made good on his promise to subsume the venerable Post into the Amazon machine
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Privacy
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On Monday, I was pleased to see that Robert X. Cringely shares my thoughts. In an article well worth reading on Forbes, he writes: “Here’s the simple truth: it makes no sense, none, nada, for a bank to send financial transactions over the public Internet. It makes no sense for a bank or any other company to build gateways between their private networks and the public Internet. If a company PC connects to both the corporate network and the Internet, then the corporate network is vulnerable.”
No kidding.
Again, retailers are being hit for billions of dollars, almost daily it seems; our military defenses are being constantly prodded and breached by foreign governments; and our infrastructure is a sitting duck waiting to be exploited. It’s time we realize that not everything needs to be online.
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Civil Rights
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So support for sharia law might not be all that revealing. But for Bill O’Reilly, it’s a chance to draw the conclusions you wish to draw about Muslims. The Pew poll also makes clear that Muslims do not “think their religion should dictate what happens in society.” Most who support sharia law think it should apply only to Muslims, and Pew notes that “most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion.”
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He tells me that he used to log on for his LulzSec romps using his school Internet account so it wasn’t a surprise that he got caught. It was a surprise that it took them so long. He recounts for me the day he got busted, waking up in his bed in Galway, Ireland surrounded by policemen with machine guns. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep; it was so surreal he assumed it must be a bad dream.
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Which seems plausible. Less than 48 hours had passed and Hooks would have had no idea he was on the receiving end of a drug task force “investigation.” The word “investigation” receives the scariest of scare quotes, considering it mostly consisted of a multiple felon trying to explain away the gun, scale and meth in his possession. If the suspect had claimed he didn’t rob Hooks’ house, the police wouldn’t have believed him. But when this same suspect starts blabbering about finding meth during his robbery, the cops are all ears, as though he were Abraham Lincoln himself, swearing on a stack of Bibles.
How do we know all of this is bullshit? Because the police spent almost as much time searching Hooks’ house — nearly two days — as it did between the point Hooks’ house was invaded the first time (by confessed burglar Rodney Garrett) and the second time (by the SWAT team).
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A cellphone video released Tuesday shows police in Indiana breaking a car window and using a stun gun on a man after police stopped the driver for not wearing a seat belt.
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It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:
Get out of town.
She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack. As she was about to detach herself from her past geography and her personal connections, she called her parents and told them she had committed a nonviolent direct action “and was possibly being pursued by the federal government. I told them I could not be in touch by phone, and I would do my best to let them know how I was, but not where I was.”
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DRM
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Digital Editions even tracks which pages you’ve read. It might break a New Jersey Law.
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Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues.
A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.
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This column has written many times about the deep flaws of Digital Rights Management (DRM) – or “Digital Restrictions Management” as Richard Stallman rightly calls it – and the ridiculous laws that have been passed to “protect” it. What these effectively do is place copyright above basic rights – not just in the realm of copyright, but even in areas like privacy. Yesterday, another example of the folly of using DRM’d products came to light.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Much has been made over the last few weeks about the desires of the Prime Minister to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Cameron has said he wants to bring more powers back to London, because he doesn’t like the way it ‘hands power’ off – powers we British have given to that court more than 60 years ago. Most notably, he doesn’t like the way it often deals with his right wing agenda of disenfranchising people, and creeping towards a police state, but seems to be championing the way with misinformation.
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Copyrights
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More specifically, Article 5 of the Declaration poses that “any use of the data as a creative work” is subject to prior consent of the individual. Such a formulation completely ignores the fundamental role of the public domain as well as the exceptions and limitations to copyright, which are all essential in balancing and preserving the system.
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It’s now been 20 years since the Internet went mainstream. Today, every single aspect of private life, business, and civic society depends on a functioning net. Without it, you’re basically in exile from society.
In some countries, coding is now the most common profession. All growth sectors are heavily technology-dependent, which always means that the net is at underpinning all of it. All celebrated entrepreneurs have built super-scaling businesses enabled by the net. We also shop for food online, we date online, we build things together online.
It stands clear that the net is by far the most critical piece of infrastructure existing today. Not only does it build all future jobs, growth, economy, and entrepreneurship; we also exercise all our civil liberties, civic duties, and spend a lot of our social activities on this infrastructure. It’s more important than any other piece of infrastructure in society. We can do without the phone network, without cable TV, even without paved roads when we have the net.
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Google’s new and improved sitelinks section has introduced a novel feature that could prove unintentionally popular with Pirate Bay fans. Alongside the same feature for other sites, the search engine now displays a custom Pirate Bay search box complete with related AutoComplete suggestions. Needless to say, copyright holders are not going to be happy with these latest improvements.
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The future of copyright amendments crowdsourced by the Finnish public appear to be in doubt. The citizen-drafted proposals, which received 50,000 signatures, seek to decriminalize file-sharing, but Finland’s Education and Culture Committee now wants to reject the historic initiative.
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Send this to a friend
10.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Kano, the runaway Kickstarter success that raised $1.52 million on a promise to teach kids how to code and assemble a Raspberry Pi-based computer, is now widely available to the public. Priced at $149.99, the kit includes everything you need to get started — other than a display, which you’ll need to provide yourself. (An HDMI cord comes in the box.) But beyond that, it’s all there: the Raspberry Pi, a custom-made Bluetooth keyboard with built-in trackpad, the plastic case that holds this mini-computer together, and plenty of stickers and colorful options for customizing your Kano. The first of two illustrated guides walks younger users through piecing Kano together, and most everything in the kit is color coded to make setup a breeze for all ages. The second book will teach you how to start using the Kano OS software, which comes preloaded on an SD card that plugs into the Raspberry Pi.
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Google has pushed an update for the stable channel of its Chrome OS, bringing MTP support to all Chrome OS devices, excluding Chromeboxes. MTP support means you can now plug your Android devices to your Chromebooks and transfer files between devices. The update also adds a set of features that enhances touch screen accessibility.
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Server
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Spotify can aptly be called the “Netflix for music.” The company started off in 2008 and by 2014 it boasts more than 40 million users with 10 million paid subscribers. The Swedish company is yet another example of how Linux and open source enable businesses to serve millions of customers using state-of-the-art, shared technologies.
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A host of technologies — most prominently CoreOS — are challenging the foundation of what Linux means and how it’s sold.
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The hot virtualization vendor makes its second acquisition in as many months with the purchase of Koality; what is it building?
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Docker decided to use some of the $40M from its most recent funding round at the end of last month to purchase Koality today for an undisclosed price.
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Kernel Space
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Now that the MSI X99S SLI PLUS is running great on Linux, I’ve been working with the company towards some other Linux improvements along with some other interesting Linux hardware reviews to come thanks to our renewed cooperation. One of the items I’ve been voicing has been regarding better supporting Linux users with regard to a smoother BIOS/UEFI update process. Well, there is a utility they support for updating your MSI motherboard BIOS from the Linux desktop!
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Rafael Wysocki sent out his first aligned set of changes of ACPI core and power management changes he’s planning on volleying over to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window.
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According to a study conducted earlier this year by Dice, the tech career site, 93 percent of hiring managers are looking to employ Linux professionals. If you want one of those jobs, a great way to increase your chances is to go to human resources with one of the Linux Foundation’s new certifications as a Certified SysAdmin (LFCS) or Certified Engineer (LFCE).
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The open source community is “quite a sick place to be in,” Red Hat engineer and Systemd developer Lennart Poettering said Monday in a post on Google+.
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Meanwhile, Michael Hall of the Ubuntu camp wrote a post entitled the open-source community is wonderful. Hall says the community isn’t perfect but it’s still wonderful. He cites that mono-culture is dangerous, good people are humans too, and to love the whole rather than parts. “There are some annoying, obnoxious people in our family. There are good people who are sometimes annoying and obnoxious. But neither of those truths changes the fact that we are still a part of an amazing, inspiring, wonderful community of open source contributors and enthusiasts.”
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The ARM64 changes for the Linux 3.18 merge window were sent in and include an eBPF JIT compiler for ARM64, a CPU suspend back-end for the PSCI firmware interface, EFI stub improvements, and a code clean-up to allow partially building the kernel with LLVM.
Via the LLVMLinux initiative has been work to build the Linux kernel with Clang for its faster build times, lower memory usage, static analysis capabilities, and for making the kernel’s code more portable across compilers. The Clang compiler for x86 and ARM is generally in good shape for being able to build the Linux kernel but there’s still patches that haven’t yet been mainlined for the kernel side. For more information you can read Building The Linux Kernel With LLVM’s Clang Yields Comparable Performance. The good news is that for Linux 3.18 the 64-bit ARM code is closer to being Clang-compatible from mainline.
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Though he had at one point been hoping for an early release, Linus Torvalds unleashed version 3.17 of the Linux kernel on Sunday, thereby sticking to the “normal” schedule after all.
“The past week was fairly calm, and so I have no qualms about releasing 3.17 on the normal schedule (as opposed to the optimistic ‘maybe I can release it one week early’ schedule that was not to be),” Torvalds wrote in the official announcement.
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Back in August I wrote about systemd working to create a new user-space VT solution that could eventually succeed the Linux kernel’s VT support. With the upcoming systemd 217 release, the terminal is present.
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Highlights of the Linux 3.18 input changes include a TI haptics/vibrator drv260x driver (DRV2667) written by Texas Instruments themselves, the Xpad driver can now properly identify the Razer Sabertooth game controller, support for detecting FocalTech PS/2 touch-pads, a haptic driver for the max77693, and other changes. The PID/VID mappings for the Razer Sabertooth make it recognize as an Xbox 360 controller rather than generic Xbox controller.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in pull requests on Tuesday for the various kernel subsystems he maintains. The USB changes as he put it are “lots of little changes in here, all over the place”, per his mailing list post.
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Applications
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Of course, you can easily manage your Todo.txt tasks with a simple text editor, but using a tool such as QTodoTxt simplifies things, providing a better overview of your tasks by using colored priorities and due dates as well as a sidebar treeview which allows you to quickly access contexts and projects.
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CherryTree is a powerful notes-taking application with features like rich text support, syntax highlighting, support for images, lists, tables, a spellchecker, and support for importing or exporting to and from various formats.
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Brackets was updated to version 0.44 recently, getting one of the most requested features: vertical and horizontal split view, so you can now view files side by side or one above another.
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The FrostWire BitTorrent client, an application that allows users to download files from P2P networks and play media files, has been upgraded to version 5.7.7.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Annex: Conquer the World is a real-time strategy game with an anime theme, featuring four factions, 3D graphics, 30 tech trees, single-player and multi-player modes, maps, scenarios and missions.
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Gaming On Linux, a popular online portal for Linux gamers, shut down today. And it’s a shame. For all intents and purposes, The Powerbase is shut down as well — but not for today. Gaming on Linux has shut down because of the incessant troll behavior of the Gaming on Linux Podcast. It upsets me that the Editor of Gaming on Linux can’t just ignore it — but that’s beyond the scope of this rant. I am not so much reporting the news today as I am speaking out against the rampant, virus-like stupidity that is the Linux Game Cast. The crew at Linux Game Cast are some of the most unhappy, loneliest, skill-less vagina repellants I’ve ever encountered on the Internet. And I’m mostly just talking about Pedro…
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The very second paragraph already promises Linux release on side of the PC/Mac versions, and considering the game is quite distinctively running on Unreal Engine, it indeed shouldn’t be a hassle for the developers, to create a Linux port of it.
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As many of you may know the new game by Colossal Order (creators of Cities in Motion) called Cities: Skylines will have a Linux version, and it like its predecessors will be another city building game. In a recent developer diary zoning was explored, explaining better how it will work in game. It will be divided into three classes: residential, commercial, and workplace.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In other news something that has been bothering me for a while is that okular just didn’t want to get launched from any visual launcher. Clicking on a pdf in dolphin acted like it was launching, but no Okular ui would appear. Clicking view book on pdf books in Calibre would do likewise. So I spent a couple of days adding debug messages to kinit and klauncher trying to figure out what was going on. Kate launches just fine, so I tried copying the kate.desktop to okularApplication_pdf.desktop and replaced kate with okular etc. and that worked fine also.
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The KDE community announced the release of KDE Frameworks 5.3.0 today. The release brings a number of fixes and enhancements atop KDE 5 released exactly 3 months back.
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Releases of KDE Frameworks are now a monthly feature.
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This is yet another big step for Cutelyst, this release bring several important fixes to the last version, and stabilizes the API a bit more. So far I have successfully deployed 3 commercial applications build on top of Cutelyst + Grantlee5, and the result is great.
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KDE Software continues to be the best of the breed Open Source projects which stays ahead of its time – thus the science fictional name ‘Plasma’ for its desktop environment. KDE’s Plasma desktop remains the most popular, community driven projects.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.
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Fedora
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It has been a while since we had a badge post, with getting ready for Fedora 21, Shellshock and getting planning started for Flock 2015, things have been very busy around the community.
I wanted to first highlight some of the new badges that are in a series. We all know about Wiki Editing. Helping out on a page or helping clean up old info out of pages counts as an edit.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for October 7th, 2014:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Users might know this distribution by its old name, which was the Untangle gateway. The name changed a while ago into Untangle Next Generation (NG) Firewall, but the system has remained true to its roots. It’s now based on Debian “Wheezy” and it’s using the 3.2.0 branch of the kernel.
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Images of Meizu MX4 running Ubuntu Touch made the rounds online. By default, the high-end Chinese smartphone runs Android-based Flyme OS.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu will finally enter the ocean of mobile operating systems with its Ubuntu Touch, before the end of the year. So as Meizu and Canonical announced their partnership earlier this year, we know that the first phone powered by the Ubuntu Touch will be Meizu’s MX4 model.
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After a few rumors that Meizu may be using Ubuntu Touch as its “stunning new OS,” there seems to be some confirmation that the rumors are real after what appears to be a Meizu MX4 Pro device was spotted in the wild running Ubuntu touch.
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Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu is an open source software with limited proprietary components, meaning that users are encouraged to upload it, improve it, upload those improvements, and make the world—or, rather, the computer—a better place. Once, back when these things were discussed by men with nicotine-stained fingers and furtive eyes, open source promised to be the keystone in a shared economy ushered in by the digital revolution. Open source too often fell in a paradoxical grey zone—software created by a billionaire who lives on an island of money is not exactly the stuff of utopian dreams. But that shouldn’t detract from the fact that it once offered very real possibilities. Sadly, the digital revolution was thoroughly co-opted by non-visionaries like Bill Gates, a man so boring he made a fucking office out of pixels, and those who helped turn the Internet into a one-click shopping mall.
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The Internet of Thing (IoT) isn’t just about connected refrigerators and toasters sending you email. It’s about lighting, too. Today the AllSeen Alliance announced the formation of a new Connected Lighting Working Group that is tasked with building out a framework for network-enabled lighting.
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The open source AllSeen Alliance, which is standardizing IoT built around Qualcomm’s AllJoyn platform, has launched a Connected Lighting Working Group.
The Linux Foundation announced the AllSeen Alliance last December to promote Qualcomm’s cross-platform AllJoyn open source project for Internet of Things interoperability. Since then, the Allseen Alliance has launched a number of working groups, the latest of which is a Connected Lighting Working Group.
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Pactron announced a Linux-based “Sherwood” COM Express Module and hardware development kit built around Marvell’s Armada XP SoC featuring four ARMv7 cores.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Opera Mini has the ability to shrink a webpage down to an amazing 10% of its original size, and can hopefully reformat it for a 2″ display. Users also get The Smart Page, which gives users all their social updates and the latest news on one screen. We also get website shortcuts as large buttons and Private browsing which removes any trace of the web pages visited on your wearable device.
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Here are this weeks wallpapers for your enjoyment for your Samsung Gear / Gear 2 / Neo Smartwatches. They are mainly abstract and Avatar (from the movie) ones.
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If your a Samsung Galaxy Gear owner that is still running the old outdated Android OS, then its time for you to move with the times and get Tizen running on your wrist companion. Below is a step by step instructional guide (created by JaysDMC) on how you can safely flash your Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch to Tizen, using the Samsung Kies application.
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The Tizen Samsung Gear 2 has certainly been out for a while now, but it seems that it has more admirers than we initially thought. The Gear 2 is so good that they have actually started copying it in China, model Smartwatch LX36.
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Android
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There always comes a time when you just need to take a break and chill out, so that you can get rid of all the accumulated stress of the day. In those moments, I choose to play a game on my Android phone, because it takes up less time than playing Metro 2033 on the PC and because I can jump right back into my daily routine after a 15 minute break. What’s always hard when it comes to these breaks is to choose an Android game that is actually fun and doesn’t make me close the app after two levels. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of 10 Android games that I consider the best ones I’ve stumbled across recently. Enjoy your breaks!
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The HTC Nexus 9 will be shipped with Android L “Lollipop” soon, according to reports. The device was just passed through the FCC, so the official unveiling is imminent.
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Open source has already won the enterprise, and we’ll continue to see use cases expanding into new environments, according to Red Hat, Inc. CIO Lee Congdon. During a live interview at this week’s Splunk conference, Congdon explains the reasons behind open source’s enterprise victory. he feels open source is best suited for the enterprise, highlighting that as communities come together, people manage to solve their business issues, support each other, and gain recognition from peers and vendors.
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Along with the transition to an app-based world comes the exponential growth of data. However, most of the data is unstructured and hence it takes a process and method to extract useful information from the data and transform it into understandable and usable form. This is where data mining comes into picture. Plenty of tools are available for data mining tasks using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other techniques to extract data.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Last week’s launch of OPNFV is a good opportunity to think about a simmering debate in the OpenStack developer community for a while now—what exactly does NFV (Network Function Virtualization) have to do with OpenStack, and is it a good thing?
My own “journey” on this started exactly one year ago today when I visited a local Red Hat partner to talk about OpenStack and, towards the end of our Q&A, I was asked something like “will OpenStack support NFV?” I’d never heard of the term and, when the general idea was explained, I gave a less than coherent version of “OpenStack implements an elastic cloud for cattle; this sounds like pets. Sorry.” After the meeting, the person who asked the question forwarded me an NFV whitepaper from October 2012 and, glancing through it, most of it went right over my head and I didn’t see what it had to do with OpenStack.
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Databases
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SUSE and MariaDB (the company formerly known as SkySQL!) officially teamed up today, joining forces with IBM Power Systems, in a partnership that promises to expand the Linux application ecosystem. According to sources at SUSE, customers will now be able to run a wider variety of applications on Power8, increasing both flexibility and choice while working within existing IT infrastructure. More options is ALWAYS a good thing!
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Funding
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AH Google Logo Colored 1.6Each year Google facilitates contests and mentorships to help students from all over the world gain valuable experience in the field of open source code development. Google has recently revealed some of the information regarding their upcoming Code-In and Summer of Code events. The Code-In will begin this upcoming December and last until mid- January. The Summer of Code will begin in May of 2015 and last until August. According to their official statement regarding these programs, Google states that “we are passionate about introducing students to open source software development. Since 2005, the Open Source Programs team at Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 485 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for us all.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) might finally be switching over its default C standard from the C89-derived GNU89 to the much more modern ISO C11-based GNU11.
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Project Releases
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OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
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Blender 2.72 brings the pie menus feature for menu items spread radially around the mouse, animation improvements within its editor, a “face split by edges” tool, a new workflow for texture painting, a new “sun beams” simulation, game development improvements, freestyle non-photorealistic rendering improvements, and a ton of other new features. There’s also many new add-ons like a new DXF importer, new game publishing features, and much more.
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The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.72
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Public Services/Government
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Germany is now at the forefront on open source because many cities in this country are either considering the switch to Linux or they have already finished this process. Now, the German city of Gummersbach is reporting that the administration is now almost exclusively running on Linux systems.
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The German town of Gummersbach announced that this summer it has completed its switch to Linux PCs, retiring a decade-old proprietary operating system no longer supported by the IT vendor. The migration has saved the town a five-figure sum, and Gummersbach expects a further reduction of IT costs, a combination of savings on proprietary licences and lower hardware costs.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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The first ever Europe Code Week took place last year and was largely an experiment to test things out. Opensource.com covered it in an interview with Julie Cullen, the Irish Ambassador, asking her what activities were planned in her home country. This year, Europe Code Week has even more activities planned, over 1000 and counting! To get more insight on the event, I interviewed Alja Isakovic, one of the Young Advisors and organizers for the Europe Code Week program. In this interview, she shares some of last year’s successes and tells us what people can look forward to this year.
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For those into compilers, bytecodes, and low-level programming or just wanting to know why Facebook’s HHVM project tends to be so much faster for PHP than PHP itself, here’s a great article.
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Health/Nutrition
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Webb’s reporting for the San Jose Mercury News cast a harsh light on the links between the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua and drug trafficking in the United States, particularly the crack cocaine boom of the 1980s.
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The bodies and minds of children living on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i are being threatened by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a synthetic insecticide that is heavily sprayed on fields located near their homes and schools.
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Security
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is on the front lines for protecting digital freedom and preventing censorship of the web, applauded content delivery network provider CloudFlare for the company’s recent announcement that it will offer encrypted HTTPs as its default setting for any website it hosts.
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The Bugzilla open source flaw-tracking platform has patched a potentially disastrous security flaw that would have allowed an attacker to subvert the developer registration process in order to gain privileged access to information on zero days submitted to the site.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s refusal to defend the Government Accountability Board in a federal lawsuit challenging the investigation into Governor Scott Walker and his allies is a reversal of his office’s earlier position, could have grave implications for openness in the state, and undermines the GAB’s role in enforcing the state’s campaign finance laws. It isn’t the first time that Van Hollen has put politics above government transparency.
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On Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said that it has extended its time to file responses and oppositions for the Comcast/Time Warner merger from October 8 to October 29. This is due to a motion filed by DISH Network, which said that Comcast didn’t fully respond to the Commission’s Request to Responses and Oppositions.
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Privacy
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‘Open Rights Group welcomes any public debate about the surveillance of our personal communications by the police and intelligence services but so far the government seems intent on simply increasing its powers to allow unchecked whole population profiling. To tackle terrorism and serious crime, we need need targeted surveillance that is authorised by judges not politicians, as well as proper democratic oversight to ensure that powers are not abused.’
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Twitter, the world’s largest microblogging platform, on Tuesday sued the U.S. government, alleging that the Justice Department’s restrictions on what the company can say publicly about the government’s national security requests for user data violate the firm’s First Amendment rights.
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Data and Goliath is the title of a soon-to-be published book by Bruce Schneier, a well-known figure in cryptography and currently the Chief Technology Officer of Co3 Systems, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
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Civil Rights
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No, I’m not making a prediction. She hasn’t lost the nomination battle for 2016, not yet anyway. However what she did do today, or what I should more accurately say, is she lost my respect. Back in 2011, at a speech she, in her capacity as Secretary of State, was giving for international internet freedom, a worthy cause. During the speech, Ray McGovern, a retired CIA agent who became a political activist against the wars fought in our name in the Middle east, stood up and tuned his back on her, a silent form of protest. For that he was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Exactly three weeks ago today I caught myself before hitting the “share” button on my Google Plus stream. My intent was to complain about some thing or another. I believe it was an out loud groan about a USB wireless device not working out of the box with Linux. I think I was going to triangulate on Broadcom’s insistence on making wireless a real headache.
And yeah, it doesn’t take that much to get a Broadcom chip working in most cases. Unless you are installing Linux at a friend’s house or another place that doesn’t have a wired connection. Then you’re pretty much sunk. The popup says that the wireless will work once you connect to the package manager. Uh, what if I am not located near a wired connection? That’s kinda why I wanted to connect to the web anyway you friggin’ ijit.
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Desktop
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This last feature isn’t for the novice users that just buy Chromebooks for their simplicity. But this is World Beyond Windows, where I tout the benefits of Linux, so I can’t leave it out.
Flip the developer mode switch (it’s in software now, but it used to be a hardware switch) and you can get full access to your Chromebook’s internals. You can install a full desktop Linux system (like Ubuntu) alongside your Chrome OS system. Flip over to the Linux system when you want to do some work with traditional desktop apps and powerful terminal commands.
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The performance of the device is about acceptable (unfortunately, I do not have any comparison in this device class). Even when typing this blog post in the visual wordpress editor, I notice some sluggishness. Opening the app launcher or loading the new tab page while music is playing makes the music stop for or skip a few ms (20-50ms if I had to guess). Running a benchmark in parallel or browsing does not usually cause this stuttering, though.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation’s “Introduction to Linux” MOOC on edX has enjoyed impressive popularity since launching in the summer. And the organization’s Certification Program for open source engineers, which went live in August, is also rising in stature, according to data the Foundation has made available.
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Rafael Wysocki sent out his first aligned set of changes of ACPI core and power management changes he’s planning on volleying over to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 3.18 kernel merge window.
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The Linux 3.17 kernel is the fifth major kernel release so far in 2014 and among its features is a fix for a flaw that wouldn’t actually impact Linux for another 24 years.
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Kernel configuration has become more and more complex through the years with the proliferation of new drivers, new hardware and specific behaviors that might be needed for particular uses. It has reached about 3,000 config options, and that number will only increase.
Jean Delvare recently pointed out that a lot of those config options were relevant only to particular hardware, and yet the config system presented them to users who didn’t have that hardware. This seemed like a bug to him, and he suggested that maintainers begin requiring proper hardware dependencies for all config options.
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Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator and leader, is known for his sometimes frank and vulgar language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). He doesn’t suffer programming fools gladly. For him, his management style works. Not everyone is happy about it and Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat engineer and one of the creators of the controversial systemd system and service replacement for Unix and Linux’s sysvinit daemon, has called out Torvalds for his salty attitude in a public Google+ post.
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Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is “quite a sick place to be in.”
He also said the Linux development community is “awful” – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.
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The systemd fallout is getting to creator Lennart Poettering, who is sounding quite disillusioned. Sean Michael Kerner scored an interview with The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli on the future of LibreOffice. Jesse Smith reviewed PC-BSD 10.0.3 in today’s Distrowatch Weekly and Paul Venezia imagines Linux servers as “transient processes and services.” And finally today, we have several Linux distribution tidbits to report.
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With Lennart spearheading projects like systemd and PulseAudio that have ruffled the feathers of some users, Lennart is no stranger to controversy but today wrote about how “the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source.” He also claims to receive hate mail from people who want him to stop developing and how reportedly there’s even a Bitcoin collection for people trying to hire a hitman for him.
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Greg KH has released stable kernels 3.16.4, 3.14.20, and 3.10.56.
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Graphics Stack
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Our latest Linux graphics driver benchmarks are taking a look at the binary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers using the latest versions while running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It’s been a while since last time we closely compared the two proprietary GPU drivers with 2D workloads on an array of graphics cards so these results should be definitely interesting.
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Tom Stellard announced his latest OpenCL-related improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.
Announced this afternoon by Tom Stellard are patches that add support to Gallium3D’s Clover — the OpenCL state tracker — for compiling compute kernels into native object code. These native object code binaries from Clover are then accepted by the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers.
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Our latest Linux graphics driver benchmarks are taking a look at the binary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers using the latest versions while running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It’s been a while since last time we closely compared the two proprietary GPU drivers with 2D workloads on an array of graphics cards so these results should be definitely interesting.
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Applications
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Marker is a cross-platform screenshot tool which allows you to easily annotate and share screenshots via Google Drive.
The application is developed by Insync, the company behind the popular cross-platform Google Drive client ‘Insync’ and it’s not free and open source software but it’s free to use.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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We have been awaiting Frozenbyte’s platformer Splot for quite some time now, and it seems Linux gamers will have to wait even longer.
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There has to be a conspiracy of some sort against us. I believe someone somewhere is deliberately trying to ruin our productivity by unleashing a storm of awesome games that we (at least I) get hooked on. Here’s one of them: Borderlands 2!
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Unvanquished, a shoot ‘em up game available for Linux, Windows and OS X, has reached Alpha 32, bringing several new fixes, a new model for the SMG, and updated textures for the mantis.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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In the end, I like Cinnamon. It’s high-quality, beautiful, and the team that works on it should be incredibly proud of what they’ve done. I just can’t imagine the scenario in which I’d use it over something else.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Instead, GNOME, which breaks most of the traditional “desktop” meme, has returned to being the default. Newbies will need their hands held just to start something up. Single-CD installations are dead. That hammers much of the emerging “market” for GNU/Linux where CDs and even electricity and networks are in short supply. Of course, one can install XFCE4 instead of GNOME but the user has to take charge, something newbies may find intimidating.
Just say “No!”. Uncheck GNOME. Check XFCE in the “tasksel” page of the installer or use APT to install XFCE4 after you boot your system. You can do it. You have the power.
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Recently, the GNOME Project announced the release of GNOME 3.14. Since it’s arrival it has drawn some attention for its enhanced application development platform and some compelling new features. Some people in the open source community view GNOME as a project that lost its way, but the new version is actually being heralded as a big comeback for a project that has made the Linux desktop friendlier to use for many users.
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GNOME Summit is a three-day hackfest for GNOME developers and contributors. It is not primarily aimed at users or new contributors, but if you want to jump right into the deep end, it’s a fantastic way to meet everyone and get involved. Unlike traditional conferences, the Boston Summit is all about getting developers together and getting things done. While there are some non-hacking sessions, they are geared heavily towards many-to-many, interactive discussion and planning, rather than one-to-many presentations.
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The GNOME Infrastructure is now powered by Red Hat’s FreeIPA which bundles several FOSS softwares into one big “bundle” all surrounded by an easy and intuitive web UI that will help users update their account information on their own without the need of the Accounts Team or any other administrative entity. Users will also find two custom fields on their “Overview” page, these being “Foundation Member since” and “Last Renewed on date”. As you may have understood already we finally managed to migrate the Foundation membership database into LDAP itself to store the information we want once and for all. As a side note it might be possible that some users that were Foundation members in the past won’t find any detail stored on the Foundation fields outlined above. That is actually expected as we were able to migrate all the current and old Foundation members that had an LDAP account registered at the time of the migration. If that’s your case and you still would like the information to be stored on the new setup please get in contact with the Membership Committee at stating so.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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ownCloud Inc. and Red Hat (RHT) say they can deliver open source storage with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and better compliance standards through a partnership that combines Red Hat Storage Server 3 with ownCloud’s file syncing and sharing platform.
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Chinese technology company Inspur and American open source manufacturer Red Hat have reached a strategic deal to combine Red Hat’s latest-generation enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Inspur’s X86 platform products.
According to the agreement, Inspur and Red Hat will become OEM partners. The OEM partner designation is the highest partner rank for Red Hat and Inspur will enjoy the best prices and the highest priority technical support. Other financial terms of the deal were not released.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of these open source infrastructure solutions, and offers the benefits of open source with the capabilities expected from modern IT infrastructure. To make management even easier, enterprises can utilize Red Hat Satellite to handle life-cycle and systems management.
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This year’s keynote speaker at the annual All Things Open conference is Red Hat’s DeLisa Alexander, executive VP and head of Red Hat’s human resources operations. DeLisa is not only in a professional position to comment on gender and diversity in open source and tech but has also personally campaigned for inclusiveness in the workplace to produce better outcomes for everybody.
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Fedora
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Going back to 2009 with Fedora 11 has been delta RPM support to enable support with Yum for these packages that just contain the differences between one installed RPM version to the next version. With Fedora frequently pushing down new packages, delta RPMs have allowed those in bandwidth-constrained environments to more easily download updates since the file sizes of the deltas tend to be significantly smaller than full RPMs. Additionally, it’s placed less of a burden on the Fedora infrastructure by having less disk space and bandwidth requirements. However, with DNF it looks like Fedora could revert to going back to full RPMs for distribution of updates.
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This being said, one of the Fedora developers have asked on the mailing lists whether Debian’s dash or Android’s mksh would be a safer alternative, as the future system’s default, non-interactive shell.
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Fedora 21 hasn’t been released just yet, but the developers are already making plans for subsequent releases that will be made in the future. Right now, they are looking for a possible implementation of the Btrfs file system instead of the current Ext4.
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During my search for a good Markdown text editor for Linux, I came across a few that had binary installation only for Debian and Ubuntu distributions. See The search for a usable Markdown editor for my Linux desktop.
Because my main Linux desktop is powered for Fedora, I decided to find an alternate method of installing those applications other than compiling them from source. Call it a lazy approach, but sometimes you have to find shortcuts.
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Debian Family
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Debian comes with over 20,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) – all of it free. It’s a bit like a tower. At the base is the kernel. On top of that are all the basic tools.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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What is also interesting that some people still plan to install Ubuntu 14.10 even though they are not waiting for that release. And, vice versa, some people are waiting for Utopic Unicorn release, but do not plan the installation.
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A Kickstarter project from a startup called I2P Designs has spun a Raspberry Pi compatible HDMI stick computer plus a media player with an optional HDD.
The combined Raspberry HDMI Stick (Pi-Stick) and Raspberry STB (Pi-STB) project is looking for £50,000 (about $80,000) in Kickstarter funding, with 11 days left to go. The project is listed under the name Richard Swatton, who appears to be CEO of Shenzhen-based startup I2P Designs. The Pi-Stick and Pi-STB are ready to go for £50 ($80) apiece, and like the almost complete Pi-STB-HDD version of the Pi-STB, are set to ship in November.
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Today the Tizen Technical Steering Group (TSG) have announced the release of the Tizen SDK Wearable final version 1.0.0. Earlier this month we saw Beta 3 being released and adding support for the Gear S Smartwatch.
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The Pi Vessel is a B+ Raspberry Pi-based computer enhanced with an indestructible case, power, and more disk space. It’s better than your average Pi.
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Logic Supply unveiled four Ubuntu-ready, Mini-ITX industrial PCs based on Intel Celeron (Bay Trail and Ivy Bridge) and Core (Haswell-ULT and Haswell) CPUs.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung are serious about Tizen and their wearable devices such as the Gear 2 and the Gear S, as can be seen from the agenda of their Samsung Developer Conference. In order to help developers they have released two videos that should make it easier for them to create great Tizen wearable applications.
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Android
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If you are someone who uses Microsoft Exchange a lot, then switching to Android might not have been as smooth as you imagined. Despite having great compatibility with MS Exchange out of the box, Android users still are looking for some better apps that can help them get the most out of their business emails.
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Google doesn’t have a dedicated PC or Mac client for Android devices, but you can still manage your smartphone or tablet from a desktop with AirDroid.
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After months of rumors and leaks, we’re now witnessing the first leaked images of what may be the upcoming Nexus 9. The image, leaked by @upleaks, features the Nexus branding as well as an HTC logo at the bottom and what appears to be a more squarish form factor than most Android slates.
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In the guide, I wrote about doing your research by casting a wide net, then evaluating yourself (your skills, your goals, and your time). In this evaluation to find the right fit, I looked at my motivations and skills, made a list of goals, and named a few target projects. Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I take a good, hard look at my track record. What can I learn from the ones that didn’t stick to find the one that will? I notice patterns I can avoid and see how they line up against my new list of goals and skills. Then, I evaluate four open source projects and their communities to see if they might be a good fit. See the winner at the end!
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Not all open-source projects are created equal. There are plenty that have not been touched in years — heck, I probably wrote a few of them. If you’re going to rely on a community-contributed open-source project, you’ll want to ensure the code is up to your standards and that the community will continue to support it throughout the project’s life cycle.
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It’s a fact of life in virtually every community that there will be countless daily distractions — news announcements, controversies, squabbles — that take up the majority of our time and energy, leaving little for the big picture.
The Linux community is no exception.
That’s why it was such a relief to see a post over at Linux.com recently that struck directly to the core of all that is FOSS and offered a reminder as to what it’s really all about.
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Events
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The annual X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC) is taking place this week in Bordeaux, France. Here’s some of the interesting sessions taking place alongside wine drinking.
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Web Browsers
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Here is an overview of nine web browsers for Linux. Does not include terminal-based ones.
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Mozilla
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You’ve got it pretty good, you know that? While you’re sitting there using your Internet-enabled device to read about some other Internet-enabled device, it’s easy to forget that the majority of people doesn’t have any access to the Internet at all. The “World Wide” Web is actually not that worldwide—only about one-third of the population is online. That’s 4.8 billion people out there with no way to get to the Internet.
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Databases
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SUSE, the company behind SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE, has partnered with MariaDB Corporation to optimize MariaDB Enterprise for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 on IBM POWER8-based servers. MariaDB Enterpise was ‘founded’ recently when SkySQL, the MariaDB company, changed its name to bridge the gap between the product and company.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“NoSQL is definitely a component of Big Data and is part of the strategy of storing and managing very fast but simple operations over simple data,” Seglau explained to hosts Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Oracle’s namesake relational system has a notoriously difficult time handling that kind of unstructured information, a critical gap that leaves the vendor little choice but to embrace the new paradigm of enterprise data management.
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The Document Foundation has been able to attract contributions to LibreOffice from AMD and Intel as well as governments, including Saudi Arabia and France. Donations are the primary source of revenue for The Document Foundation and Vignoli said that the donations have been growing steadily over the years. That funding has enabled The Document Foundation to hire three full-time people and two part-time people, as well as supporting continuing developer efforts around LibreOffice.
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One of the main areas of growth for LibreOffice is in competitive migrations away from other office suites, including Microsoft’s Office. While The Document Foundation would like to see more people use LibreOffice, the plan is not for all users to totally abandon Microsoft Office.
“The objective is not to eradicate Microsoft Office from companies,” Vignoli said. “The concept of migration is about giving an alternative to companies.” – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/libreoffice-at-4-how-the-openoffice-fork-is-forging-ahead.html#sthash.Jp29EQC7.dpuf
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CMS
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The Open Source Initiative ® (OSI), the premiere organization that promotes and protects open source, announced today that the WordPress Foundation (WordPress) has joined the OSI as an Affiliate Member. The WordPress Foundation’s mission, to democratize publishing through open source, has elevated WordPress to not only a globally recognized content management tool, but a vibrant community encompassing the ideals of open source software development, and advocacy for the adherence to the Open Source Definition. Its affiliation with OSI helps enhance and sustain the open software development community, while ensuring that millions of individuals, organizations and businesses can cost-effectively communicate online using a robust set of content management capabilities.
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BSD
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While OpenBSD generally prides itself on being a secure, open-source operating system and focusing more on code corectness and security rather than flashy features, it turns out a potential security bug has been living within OpenBSD for the past decade.
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Linux is a terrific desktop operating system but sometimes it can be fun to use something else, particularly if you have the personality of a distrohopper. PC-BSD is one alternative that’s worth considering since it’s based on FreeBSD. DistroWatch has a review of PC-BSD 10.0.3 and finds that it compares well to most desktop Linux distributions.
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All in all, I am impressed with what the PC-BSD team has managed to deliver with their 10.0.3 release. The project has taken on additional polish with the last few releases. The graphical front ends look nicer, some bugs I spotted in previous releases (especially with Life Preserver) have been fixed and the way ZFS integrates with the other PC-BSD tools was very useful to me. There are a lot of great features in this release I would love to see ported to Linux and there were no serious problems during my trial, beyond the video driver issue I was able to work around. I definitely recommend giving PC-BSD a try, it offers a great deal of power in an attractive package.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU ddrescue, an open-source data recovery tool that copies data from one file / block device to another while rescuing the good portions of data in case of read errors, is out with a new version.
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I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.19.
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.
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Project Releases
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I’ve released man-pages-3.74. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
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Public Services/Government
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Platform reuse and open source technology are guiding IT principles being championed by GSA’s CIO, Sonny Hashimi. The agency’s new IT integration policy requires all new projects that are undertaken within GSA to follow several IT principles. For example, GSA must consider the reuse of its existing platforms before any new investments are contemplated.
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On this historic Wednesday, the Government was interfacing with the IT community to discuss among others the draft FOSS and Open Standards Policy and the National FOSS Strategy. This is the very reason that made it indeed historic, finally FOSS has arrived. While a few other African countries make mention of FOSS in their ICT related policies, one can hardly identify those that have come up with specific policies and strategies addressing FOSS. South Africa and now Uganda are going the extra mile to take the bull by the horn with the hope that others may follow.
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Openness/Sharing
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It would be easy, and even no surprise, to spend a year in Washington, D.C. and never hear the word “open” used during a high level policy discussion. That wasn’t as true at the beginning of the first term of President Obama, when open source software and open data were mentioned frequently on the White House web site, at least. But that was then, and this is now.
It’s quite the opposite in Europe, where all things open (standards, source code, data and research) have been the subject of lively discussion and incorporation into core policy goals and directives. Nor has that happened by coincidence.
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Makers and developers looking for a new open source BLE Arduino board to help expand their projects with smartphone control might be interested in a new board called the Tah.
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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The NOLATech Week entrepreneurship rally that began Monday (Oct. 6) has a structure that evokes a well-known collaborative concept in technology. As “open source” allows anyone to make additions to software, NOLATech Week allows anyone to add events to the conference.
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The north London headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is replete with history.
When the executive meets, just across the corridor from Mick Cash’s office, they sit around a table where, more than a century ago, union leaders made the decision to found the Labour Party.
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That is, nothing to do with their beliefs, just trying to save their jobs. Exactly like the Westminster Labour establishment in Scotland.
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At least 18 people, including 16 men and two women, have lost their lives after an illegal mine collapsed in Indonesia’s Borneo island.
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Health/Nutrition
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Fox News host Mike Huckabee is claiming the American public should distrust statements made by President Obama and the federal government about the spread of Ebola because they have purportedly lied about the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
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Security
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Hackers could have had an inside track on unpatched flaws in major software projects because of a critical vulnerability in Bugzilla, a system that many developers use to track and discuss bugs in their code.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Qatar and Saudi Arabia have ignited a “time bomb” by funding the global spread of radical Islam, according to a former commander of British forces in Iraq.
General Jonathan Shaw, who retired as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff in 2012, told The Telegraph that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were primarily responsible for the rise of the extremist Islam that inspires Isil terrorists.
The two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting a militant and proselytising interpretation of their faith derived from Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar, and based on the Salaf, or the original followers of the Prophet.
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Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg offered to intervene to help secure the release of British hostage Alan Henning, he has told the BBC.
Mr Begg, 46, said he thought he knew who had been holding the aid worker but said the government rejected his offer.
He said Mr Henning’s friends had sought his help and he had told the government he was going to intervene regardless.
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At least eight militants were killed today when a US drone fired four missiles on a Taliban compound in Pakistan’s volatile North Waziristan tribal region, the second such incident in the area in 24 hours.
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On Tuesday, a U.S. drone strike hit a suspected militant training camp in northwest Pakistan, in an attack that intelligence officials say killed six and wounded nine. It marked the third U.S. drone strike on Pakistan in three days, after 2014 began with a six-month hiatus of strikes against terror cells in the country. Five suspected militants were killed in a strike Monday and another five in a strike Sunday. All three were in the Shawal area of South Waziristan. The U.S. had halted drone strikes in the first half of the year at the behest of Pakistan while it attempted, but failed, to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. Pakistan is dealing with unrest in other areas, as well. Its tenuous relationship with India has also flared up over Kashmir. In the worst attacks since their 2003 ceasefire, there have been casualties on both sides, with nine civilians dead in total.
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The difficulty seems to be that addressing the issues which drive people to violence and terror is more complex and demanding than simply bombing them. Rather than listening to grievances and struggling to address them, the choice is made to send in drones. They don’t risk American lives and they keep the war far from America’s shores.
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At least nineteen people have been killed while several others injured in three US drone strikes during last 36 hours in North Waziristan tribal region, Dunya News reported on Tuesday.
In the latest attack, six people were killed and 11 injured when a U.S. drone fired two missiles on militant commander Mustaqeem’s centre in Kandghar area of Shawal today.
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Late one afternoon in December, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles was flying low over the Yemeni desert, an audible buzzing presence, tracking a convoy of cars and trucks that were caterpillaring along a route between villages. Within the convoy were the members of two large families, escorting a bride from a wedding celebration in her own village to another in her groom’s, and though they noticed the drone, its presence was not unusual. Then, while the group was stopped because of a flat tire, the noise from the drone grew louder, as if a decision had been reached, and it began to discharge missiles. Several men jumped from the fourth truck before it was destroyed, but as they fled the drone seemed to track them across the sand, and fired again, according to Al Jazeera America. An older sheikh ran from his car and found his son, dead and bloodied, pierced by flying shrapnel in his face, neck, and chest. Twelve men were killed. They were farmers, shepherds, and migrant laborers, mostly. U.S. government officials would say later that the target had been a militant, affiliated with Al Qaeda, who managed to escape the attack. A report by Human Rights Watch suggested that he might never have been there at all.
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A group of about 50 anti-drone activists cordoned off by barriers protested without any arrests or incidents Sunday afternoon.
The protesters, led by Upstate Drone Action and the Syracuse Peace Council, obtained a permit from the town of DeWitt, which allowed them to demonstrate for about two and a half hours starting at 1 p.m. The protest was part of a Global Action Day against the use of drones for surveillance and killing.
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As Canada’s Parliament prepares to vote this week on expanding military involvement in the Middle East, the U.S. political system has already moved on to the next difficult conversation — about civilian casualties.
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So, why shouldn’t the United States torture suspected terrorists, rain hellfire missiles into Middle Eastern villages aimed at terror targets or use mass domestic surveillance to gather intelligence? Well, even if you have no sympathy for those who support terrorism, there are both blatant, moral and strategic flaws in these policies that not only violate the very principles that our great nation was founded on, but further perpetuate the seemingly never ending war on terror.
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War is a dirty, unforgiving business. It is not rendered clean by remote deployments and orders executed at a distance from seemingly safe areas. It takes lives, inflicts unspeakable harm, and rarely brings smiles to those who suffer it. But the members of the US-led coalition currently involved in striking Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq would have you think otherwise. They give the impression that clean distances are golden, and air strikes will have their intended “degrading” effect. Therein lies the message about the false salvation of machinery – the technological panacea that rarely does what it is meant to.
The notion that air power would win the day has been something of a fetish for enthusiasts, both of the prophetic and practising sort. It prophetically concerned H. G. Wells in The War in the Air (1908). It enraptured Britain’s blood lusting Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris during World War II, who believed in characteristically delusional fashion that his death sowing fleets won the war in exclusive fashion. Curtis “Demon” Le May fronted as the US equivalent, instrumental behind the striking of sixty-four Japanese cities between March and August 1945 that killed around 330,000 people. The doctrinal holy water, however, came from the font of the US Strategic Bombing Survey.
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Jeremy Scahill and Glen Greenwald’s report Death by Metadata reveals that US drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen and are mostly targeted using phone metadata obtained by the NSA, with very little human intelligence (of either sort) involved. The result is pretty much what one would expect. “Real terrorists” who know they’re targets change phones and SIM cards regularly to avoid detection, while victims of strikes often include random bystanders and uninvolved users of the same phone. This situation will only get worse for the NSA as word of Scahill and Greenwald’s report spreads and more people start taking appropriate precautions.
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Kenya’s military has confirmed that its soldiers have killed 22 ‘al-Shabaab’ militants and disrupted logistical base in Bula Gadud in southern Somalia.
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Hamas has resumed rocket manufacturing in Gaza, the head of the Israeli Air Force’s Air Defense Command said.
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Egypt’s army killed 16 militants from the Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis jihadist group early Tuesday as it continues its operation to rein in extremists in the restive Sinai Peninsula, Aswat Masriya reported.
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Not only are we not getting satisfactory answers about the new conflict in Iraq — no one is even asking the right questions.
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Ironically, while Holder scored on the civil rights front, he failed on the civil liberties front. His Justice Department authorized the use of drones to kill American citizens on foreign soil without a fair trial. His Justice Department has also defended the National Security Agency’s wholesale collection of phone data on millions of Americans accused of no crimes.
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The terrorist group known as ISIS or ISIL has committed some atrocious acts, beheadings or throat slittings of innocent Westerners from the United States, Britain and France. This suddenly prompted a change in public opinion in these three countries, which now support air strikes on the facilities or oil rigs controlled by this spin-off of al-Qaeda. In the United States, a strong majority of Americans opposed strikes on Syria in 2013 and now supports them – even though they are illegal and will prove ineffective.
The politics of emotion have won and abolished the lessons that the failure of the war on terror should have taught leaders, citizens and all kinds of political decision makers. France, which famously opposed the war in Iraq in 2003, is now in the forefront, at least the rhetorical forefront, of this new misguided war. This war could push the whole world into a Huntington corner and ignite a “clash of civilizations” which did not exist before the Soviet and American forays into Afghanistan.
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During the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Barack Obama told the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters. “I’ve got two words for you,” he said, cueing up the punchline: “Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.” The crowd burst into hysterics.
Back then, flying death machines that kill innocent people were a lot of laughs. Nowadays, it’s unlikely the president’s joke would get the same response. The Obama administration has launched eight times more drone attacks in the past five years than Bush did throughout his entire presidency, the deaths of civilians in drone strikes are frequently publicized, and in late 2012 the world became aware of “double taps,” which involve two attacks in quick succession, ensuring the slaughter of friends and family trying to rescue their loved ones from the bomb site.
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Perhaps you are among many who give little thought to a growing arms race arising from the proliferation of military hardware in space overhead. The US Strategic Command is strengthening US space dominance over the entire world through satellites that control our so-called missile defense system, drones that kill by remote control, laser weapons that could destroy other nation’s satellites and the possible placement of nuclear weapons in space. There are dangers that space clutter from a war in space could make space impenetrable in the future eliminating the benefits space provides us.
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Since 2004, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has conducted 379 armed drone strikes against presumed terrorists living in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which is comprised of several so-called tribal agencies and governed by a colonial-era legal dispensation that effectively renders the citizens of the FATA second-class citizens. While drone strikes have occurred in all agencies, the vast majority of them have taken place in the two agencies of FATA known as North and South Waziristan. Because international media cannot travel to FATA legally and because the U.S. government refuses to speak about the covert program, most reports rely upon the often conflicting claims made by militant groups or parts of the Pakistani government. What is known is that American drone strikes have killed innocent persons in Pakistan (and elsewhere where drones are used). What remains unknown — and perhaps unknowable — is how many of the persons killed in U.S. drone strikes are in fact innocent civilians.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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California swimming pool companies just regaining their financial footing after the recession are now facing a new challenge: a devastating drought that has put the state’s ubiquitous backyard pools under the microscope.
More than three dozen water agencies and local cities are cracking down on water use in swimming pools with rules that range from requiring a pool cover to prevent evaporation to banning residents from draining and refilling older ones that need repairs.
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Animal rights activists across China and the rest of the globe have increasingly condemned the Dog Meat Festival, calling for an immediate stop to eating man’s best friend. They say the dog meat trade is illegal, unregulated, and cruel. Many claim that numerous dogs that end up in cooking pots are stolen pets or diseased strays.
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Finance
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Argentina has legislated to create a commission to investigate the origin of the country’s debt, dating back to the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. The law states that once the commission has been established, it will report within 180 days. Campaigners in Argentina have been calling for a public audit into the debt, to discover if any loans were odious or illegitimate, and hence should not be paid. It is not yet clear when the commission will be established.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court could decide the future of the criminal investigation into Governor Scott Walker and independent electoral groups, but some of the justices are faced with a significant conflict of interest: two of the groups under investigation have been the dominant spenders in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections in recent years, spending over $10 million to elect the Court’s Republican majority.
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The Left is ignored, and the Right is pampered. The critical, thoughtful professional of yesteryear has been replaced by the savvy networker who conforms to all the rules and regulations of the well-oiled machine that is the modern media corporation.
Public media in the United States, while having an appearance of neutrality, is actually a tool of powerful groups representing establishment interests. Years ago, Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent showed, using example after example, just how this happens. At times it could be a bit subtle – effective media engineering may require a dash of contrary opinion just to make it sound even-handed.
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Censorship
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Over the weekend, the NY Times revealed that it is the latest publication to receive notification from Google that some of its results will no longer show up for searches on certain people’s names, under the whole “right to be forgotten” nuttiness going on in Europe these days. As people in our comments have pointed out in the past, it’s important to note that the stories themselves aren’t erased from Google’s index entirely — they just won’t show up when someone searches on the particular name of the person who complained. Still, the whole effort is creating a bit of a Streisand Effect in calling new attention to the impacted articles.
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Overnight I received a notice that several domain names I owned were transferred by a sealed court from Verisign without notice and of course without the court order.
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Privacy
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The police’s use of RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to access journalists’ phone records came under attack this weekend from the Lib Dems, the Sun newspaper, Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, and the Government’s Interception of Communications Commissioner.
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The CIA’s spying on Senate staff members during the compilation of the “Torture Report” (last seen delayed until late October) provoked some righteous (but hypocritical) indignation from political figures who were otherwise fans of government surveillance of American citizens. Dianne Feinstein’s dismay may have been genuine, but it was also completely tone-deaf.
CIA director John Brennan said no spying occurred while also admitting some spying had occurred. Further details revealed by an Inspector General’s investigation noted that spying continued after Brennan finally told everyone to knock it off, using a classified “hacking tool” to peer into Senate staffers’ email accounts.
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It appears that the police and other law enforcement folks who spent department money on the awful ComputerCOP spyware simply can’t admit that they were handing out software that made kids less safe. Instead, they’re sticking by their decision to do so. Given that the company personalized the software in the name of local law enforcement, and pitched it as the “perfect election and fundraising tool,” you can understand their reticence to actually admit that they’ve been making kids a hell of a lot less safe. We already discussed San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis defending the software, even while issuing an “alert” telling parents how to disable the keylogging feature. Even more bizarre was the response of Limestone County, Alabama, Sheriff Mike Blakely, who simply questioned EFF’s credibility in revealing the dangerous nature of the software.
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FBI Director James Comey was on 60 Minutes on Sunday, in a segment that will continue next week as well. Apparently next week is when we’ll find out his views on mobile encryption and whether or not the FBI is spying on all of us, but this week, he gave us a tiny hint towards the end of the segment, in which he discusses why the internet is so dangerous.
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Based on its legacy, the CBS show 60 Minutes is still sometimes thought of as the remaining place in TV news where tough investigative journalism has a home. But lately, they’ve been doing something else.
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New court documents released this week by the U.S. government in its case against the alleged ringleader of the Silk Road online black market and drug bazaar suggest that the feds may have some ‘splaining to do.
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British police are to be forced to disclose their use of anti-terror legislation to investigate journalists as part of a new investigation by the U.K.’s top interception official.
After the Mail on Sunday revealed this weekend that British police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)—a piece of legislation designed for combatting terrorism—in order to uncover one of the newspaper’s sources for a report implicating a government minister in perverting the course of justice, acting Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy announced on Oct. 6 an enquiry into the use of RIPA against journalists throughout the U.K.
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Civil Rights
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Over the course of the last few years Islamophobia has alarmingly risen throughout the world. The roots of the problem can be traced back to 9/11, which to this day, is still constantly evoked by political leaders to justify murderous foreign policy.
Countless human beings, including many Muslims, have been killed by Western bombs in the years following 9/11.All of this was done of course, in the name of making the world a safer place.
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David Hooks’s death reads like a boilerplate tale of a police raid gone wrong. Around 11 PM on September 24, deputies from the Laurens County, Georgia, sheriff’s department stormed their way into his house looking, they say, for meth. A reported 16 shots later, the 59-year-old was dead, and naturally there are conflicting accounts about what happened. The cops claim Hooks brandished his shotgun at them when they came in; Hooks’s family’s lawyer says that the raid victim’s wife, Teresa, had seen cops in hoods lurking around the house and was worried they were robbers (the home had been burglarized only a couple nights before) and Hooks was merely worried about defending his property. No drugs or anything illegal was found in the home, according to the lawyer.
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The crackdown on protesters after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, highlighted that more and more, police departments possess sophisticated weapons and equipment originally designed for the battlefield. Federal anti-terrorism funding is a major driver of this trend, but once police departments have this equipment they use it — even if it’s not against terrorists.
What few people understand is that police increasingly make use of sophisticated surveillance equipment as well. NSA-style mass surveillance technologies are making it possible for local police departments to gather information on each and every one of us, on a scale never before been possible.
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DRM
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When Apple first launched the iTunes store for music, it had DRM deeply embedded in it. According to reports around the time, this DRM was a key part of allowing Apple to get into the business of selling music. The labels demanded strong DRM. It didn’t take long for most people to recognize how the labels’ own demands for DRM actually gave Apple tremendous leverage over the record labels by basically handing the market over to Apple while making it that much more difficult for a competitor to jump into the space. While, years later, Apple and the labels finally ditched the DRM on music, one of Apple’s competitors, Real Networks had tried to hack its way around Apple’s DRM, which was called FairPlay, with its own DRM, called Harmony, that more or less reverse engineered Apple’s DRM. Apple responded by changing things so that Real’s music wouldn’t work on iPods (yes, this was back in the day of iPods). Real adjusted… and Apple broke it again.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As previous updates – and many economists – have pointed out, the huge economic gains claimed for TTIP are largely illusory. The 119bn euros boost for the EU not only turns out to be under the most optimistic assumptions, clearly impossible to obtain now given the growing resistance to TTIP’s de-regulation, but refers to 2027, and is the difference between an EU economy with TTIP and without. That means the claimed 0.5% GDP boost is actually a ten-year cumulative figure, and amounts to the rather less impressive 0.05% extra GDP on average – in mathematical terms, indistinguishable from zero given the very approximate nature of the models used to make these predictions.
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10.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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It didn’t happen overnight, but Steam’s catalogue of Linux games has grown significantly over the last few years, no doubt helped by the release Value’s Debian-powered SteamOS. Abandoning Windows for the open source platform was once the quickest way to gaming frustration, be it a lack of native ports or wrestling with the likes of Wine or other virtualisation option, but with almost 700 working titles available, the variety is certainly there.
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Server
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Lately I’ve been causing a ruckus among readers who appear to have a very narrow view of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. My main point has been that we need a streamlined, finely tailored Linux server distro that better supports what server instances are becoming: transient, highly specialized bundles of processes and services. At some point, beyond Linux containers and cloud-scale server instances, we hit on the concept of server as process.
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ARM and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced a new multi-year agreement that will deliver ARMv8-A processor IP optimized for TSMC 10nm FinFET process technology. Because of the success in scaling from 20nm SoC to 16nm FinFET, ARM and TSMC have decided to collaborate again for 10FinFET. This early pathfinding work will provide valuable learning to enable physical design IP and methodologies in support of customers to tape-out 10nm FinFET designs as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.
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It gets even better. ARM and its “partners” are drawing a bead on 10nm which will make ARMed processors even less expensive to produce/operate. This will allow even more processors to be sold for tiny gadgets, mobile gadgets, personal computers and yes, servers and HPC. Of course Intel can do this too, reclaiming some performance leads but Intel will have to go head to head on price/performance, the antithesis of monopoly.
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Kernel Space
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AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone are the platinum-level founding members of Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNVF), a newly established carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform by Linux Foundation intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV.
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Other updates that are included with the release include support for the Radeon R9 290 GPU family in the open-source AMD Linux driver. In addition, the open-source NVIDIA driver has received several improvements.
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After a calm week when Linux 3.17 was extended by one week, Linus Torvalds happily released the Linux 3.17 kernel a few minutes ago. Linux 3.17 is out in all of its glory and due to Torvalds’ travel schedule the Linux 3.18 merge window will be open for about three weeks.
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Graphics Stack
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In addition to doing the xf86-video-freedreno 1.3.0 release this weekend, Rob Clark also took the opportunity to write a lengthy blog post on the progress made for the open-source, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver stack for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware. The few contributors involved have done a stunning job over the past few months to implement much of OpenGL 3 for this ARM graphics driver and make other improvements — all without the support or backing of Qualcomm.
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A number of people have recently asked what is new with freedreno. It had been a while since posting an update.. and, well, not everyone watches mesa commit logs for fun, or watches #freedreno on freenode, so it seemed like time for another semi-irregular freedreno blog post.
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Last week having done the GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with a ton of OpenGL benchmarks followed by GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks and yesterday even running some updated NVIDIA VDPAU Linux benchmarks, next up for this high-end Maxwell graphics processor are some 2D performance benchmarks using NVIDIA’s binary blob.
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Now having done the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with plenty of OpenGL benchmarks and yesterday running a bunch of GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks, for your Sunday morning viewing are now some Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) results for a range of NVIDIA GPUs.
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Applications
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A subtitle editor is a type of computer software that lets users create and edit subtitles. These subtitles are superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Subtitles can literally make the difference between being immersed in a movie or only watching the screen, trying to keep up with developments. Good subtitling does not distract but actually enhances viewing pleasure, and even native speakers can find subtitles useful, not only where the individual is hearing-impaired.
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QupZilla is a relatively new WebKit-based web browser written in Qt, which makes it perfect for KDE users. QupZilla looks just great, and it seems to be a perfect browser for those users who prefer a more different approach when it comes to the interface look and feel. QupZilla stands out with an interface that doesn’t resemble neither of the ‘modern’ ones like Firefox, Chrome or Opera, but rather keeps a classic look, which I believe may fit many users out there. So let’s see what this impressive browser is all about.
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The latest stable stable release for XBMC is 13.2 and this is the final branch of the application with that name. The developers have been working for quite some time on the replacement, and, from the looks of it, they are getting closer with each new version.
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Kodi, the open-source multimedia software formerly known as XBMC, is out with a new alpha release in preparation for its inaugural v14.0 debut.
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Proprietary
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Ubuntu Touch is stable enough for daily usage, but it also requires apps. While it has not been officially confirmed yet, but it looks like the Netflix developers are already working at a native Netflix client for Ubuntu Touch.
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As you may know, Adobe has decided to dropped the Adobe Reader support for the Linux platform, like they also did with Adobe Flash and Adobe Air.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Here is some Sunday reading for you from other gaming sites across the internet. Not much generally happens on a Sunday, so hopefully this will be a regular article.
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Here is a look back at the last week on GamingOnLinux, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past week for Linux Gaming! Sorted from lowest to highest to make sure you don’t miss the smaller news stories. There’s just so much news now that things like this are needed for people not to get swallowed up in a sea of Linux games. Think of it like reading a handy Linux gaming magazine of the last weeks news all in one handy place! We don’t include todays stories as that only requires you to look down a little on the home page. Also if you wish to keep track of these overview posts you can with our Overview RSS.
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This 32nd alpha release to the Unvanquished game brings a new SMG model for its rifle replacement, animation/texture fixes and updates, various bug fixes, and more rendering work. The latest renderer work to its “Daemon” engine include fixes, optimizations, and other improvements. However, compared to some of the earlier Unvanquished Alpha releases that brought major engine changes, new maps, and gameplay improvements, there aren’t too many exciting updates to share this month…
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A new (well, actually old for Windows gamers, it was released there in 2011) is now available for Steam on Linux gamers.
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The game has now seen the official release, and it looks pretty wild. One thing to note is that apparently pulseaudio causes a slight audio delay in Reckpunk, so if you check it out then disable pulseaudio for it for an optimal experience. I can’t say with pulseaudio I noticed any delay myself, so maybe it’s not always an issue. At least ir runs for me now though, as when we covered it before it wouldn’t even run.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Eric is a Python integrated development environment with rich features, coming in two variants: Eric4, which will use Python 2, and Eric5, using Python 3. Eric is written in Qt and thus fits well in a KDE environment.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Is there still a future for GNOME 3, the open source Linux desktop that was once massively popular, yet in recent years has seen its preponderance wane in favor of alternatives such as Xfce and Canonical’s Unity? Recent indicators say yes.
Full disclosure: I should was an avid GNOME user in the days of GNOME 2, the dead-simple yet elegant desktop environment that powered many Linux desktops for the better part of a decade. But when the GNOME developers switched their focus to the next generation of the platform, GNOME 3, circa 2011, I jumped ship, mostly because I couldn’t make sense of GNOME Shell, the developers’ attempt to discard everything users have learned to expect from the desktop-computer experience over the last 30 years and impose a radically new metaphor of user interaction in its place.
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New Releases
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This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.2.0. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we fixed the following reported issues:
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OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run the XBMC media player solution and to work on virtually any kind of device out there. This is just an update, but it’s still quite an interesting read.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has revamped its Storage Server platform, adding support for the Hadoop framework and the ability to scale up to support larger volumes of data.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the availability of the newest major release of Red Hat Storage Server, a leading open software-defined storage solution for scale-out file storage. The advanced capabilities in Red Hat Storage 3 are well-suited for data-intensive enterprise workloads including big data, operational analytics and enterprise file sharing and collaboration. With its proven and validated workload solutions, Red Hat Storage Server 3 enables enterprises to curate enterprise data to increase responsiveness, control costs and improve operational efficiency.
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Heiko Rupp, a contributor to Opensource.com and Principal Software Engineer and Project Lead for the RHQ project at Red Hat, shares with us in this Community Spotlight the hardware he wishes were more open in his life. Heiko also gives a glimpse into his day-to-day on the RHQ-Project, an enterprise management solution for JBoss middleware projects and other server-side applications.
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Fedora
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Josef Bacik commented this Sunday morning, “My plan is to push for F23, I’m still wrapping up some balance bugs and some other issues we’ve found at work and then this will be my next priority. Suse benefits from having a narrow ‘supported’ criteria, like only use it with lots of space and don’t use any of the RAID stuff, plus they have two kernel guys on it and Dave Sterba who is now in charge of btrfs-progs. Fedora unfortunately has me who has Facebook work to do and Eric [Sandeen] who is a professional [file-system] juggler. We will get there, and when we do it will be less painful than its going to be for Suse since they will have fixed it all for us.”
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Debian Family
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The Debian Installer Team has announced that Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is out and ready for download. This latest version brings some very interesting changes for Jessie and a ton of improvements.
The Debian installer is always launched first, so if you want to test the latest Debian 8 version, you will have to install it. There is no Live CD, which means that you will need to have a lot of patience. From what we’ve seen so far, Debian Jessie Beta 2 was worth the wait.
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Significant about the Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is that it defaults again to using the GNOME desktop environment over Xfce and there’s currently initial support for the ARM64 and PowerPC64el architectures with the Debian installer. This Jessie beta 2 update also has console setup changes, hardware detection improvements, and a number of other changes.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The first thing you need to know is that Ubuntu 14.10 is almost exactly like 14.04. There are virtually no visible meaningful differences as far as I can tell. So if you are using Ubuntu and are sticking with Ubuntu, don’t expect pretty fireworks. This will not be an exciting upgrade.
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Meizu’s MX4 flagship has been launched at the beginning of last month and the device is selling like hotcakes. People around the world have ordered (and many of them already received) Meizu’s flagship. It seems like Meizu will soon get an interesting software offering. Meizu, Bq and Canonical announced their partnership a while ago and it was just a matter of time before we see Ubuntu on Meizu, that’s at least what everyone was guessing at the time.
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UbuTricks is a Zenity-based, graphical script with a simple interface. Although early in development, its aim is to create a simple, graphical way of installing updated applications in Ubuntu 14.04 and future releases.
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While the first Ubuntu Touch RTM (release to manufacturing) image has been made available a few weeks ago, the Ubuntu Touch RTM #3 image has been recently released, bringing better user feedback for secure connections has been implemented, the developer mode has been enhanced, and fixes for the dialer, messaging, address-book, the ofono packages have been added and the Mir display server and QtMir packages have been updated.
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hile Canonical is focusing a lot on developing Ubuntu Touch and taking the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Mobile systems closer to convergence, the Ubuntu Mate version may convince many users to switch to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu Mate 14.10 will be using MATE 1.8.1 as default and will contain some special optimizations for Ubuntu, optimizations that are not available if you only install the classical Mate version on Ubuntu.
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Open source projects live and die by their communities. Cultivating that core group of developers, administrators, users and other contributors who work together to improve the code base is no easy task, even for experienced community managers. There are some tried-and-true methods to follow, however, pioneered by some of the best open source communities around.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most of the Linux operating systems usually choose a specific design for the login window and stick with it. Developers rarely let users choose details about the login window, and at most they only allow them to modify the background.
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German developers have this week launched a new mini PC called the Pi Vessel, which as the name suggests is based on the Raspberry Pi platform and comes supplied running a version of the versatile Linux operating system.
The Pi Vessel has been created to provide a complete mini PC package and offers a fully enclosed Pi minicomputer using the Raspberry Pi a model B+ computer encased in an aluminium outer casing.
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Phones
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Firefox OS was developed by Mozilla and it made its appearance in 2012, but it was released one year later for smartphones and tablets, following to be used on smart TVs as well. It was built on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, which means that the websites are treated as applications and the HTML5 apps are communicating with the phone’s hardware through Web APIs. This makes it unique, but it’s not just a browser that runs on a Linux-based OS. Even the camera or the dialer are considered applications, and every website that is ran in the form of an app is accessed through Gecko engine. For now, the devices that can support Fire OS are Keon and Peak by Geeksphone.
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Android
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So in an attempt to stem the flow of phone manufactures using the free version of Android, Google have developed Android One, which is essentially a premium version of Android which Google itself will run and maintain. It is essentially a light weight version of the original with less customization options which manufactures will be able to install and forget about because Google will take care of the maintenance.
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SureMote controls appliances through the infrared blaster on newer Android phones (there’s no iOS version yet, so iPhone fans need to hold on to their Blu-Ray clickers for now). It was developed by Israeli company Tekoia and already has thousands of devices connected. It’s a strong start, though the app will need to continue growing its list of compatible devices to be a true approximation of a universal remote.
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Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it’s also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn’t seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.
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I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.
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I was working on another human-centered file system feature, union mounts, when I heard that a friend of mine had been groped at an open source conference for the third time in one year. While I loved my file systems work, I felt like stopping sexual harassment and assault of women in open source was more urgent, and that I was uniquely qualified to work on it. (I myself had been groped by another Linux storage developer.) So I quit my job as a Linux kernel developer and co-founded the Ada Initiative, whose mission is supporting women in open technology and culture. Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault.
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Nine years ago, Sam Altman was a Stanford University computer science student. And then he dropped out to start a startup.
This year, he’s returned to campus — not to finish his degree, but to teach a class called “How to Start a Startup.”
Altman, whose mobile location startup Loopt eventually sold for a cool $43.4 million, is now 29 years old and the president of Y Combinator, an accelerator that provides seed funding and guidance to fledgling startups. He launched the class to make the wealth of knowledge Y Combinator gives to a select group of startups more publicly available — not only by giving it to a class of 300 Stanford students but to everyone.
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I was introduced to open source nearly 15 years ago by a friend when I asked him what that foot thing was bouncing around on his screen saver. He then explained what GNOME was and what open source software was. I was hooked immediately; the philosophy and methodology made perfect sense to me. It took awhile for it to become the focus of my career, but it’s been an incredibly rewarding path.
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Sayan Chowdhury couldn’t believe his name would be etched on the wall of fame along with other Mozillians. The Mozilla Monument outside the company’s office in San Francisco recognizes contributors who’ve helped the maker of the Firefox browser and other products keep the internet alive, open and accessible. Chowdhury is one among the 5,000-odd Mozilla volunteers doing his bit for the love of code.
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Databases
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CMS
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In 2001, Moodle was launched as an online solution for educators to freely adopt as a tool to reach and engage students in the learning experience within their own websites. Today, Moodle’s design and evolution continues to achieve this goal as a free and open source learning platform with clear pedagogical principles, adopted by over 50 million users in pretty much every country that has computers.
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BSD
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The first RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The next stable version of GNU make, version 4.1, has been released and is available for download from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/
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Manuel explained, “GCC diagnostics have steadily improved in recent releases. In addition to the myriad of bugs fixed per release, every release had at least one major improvement in diagnostics. Unfortunately, the number of people contributing to this effort is very limited and we are more and more busy with other obligations. We need new blood and we need help. It has never been easier to contribute to GCC than nowadays. There are many ways you can help and there are tasks for every level of skill and time commitment.”
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Public Services/Government
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Germany might become an example for other cities that are looking to shed their dependency on proprietary solutions, such as Windows. After Munich, which has already made the move to Linux, Hamburg could be the next big city in Germany to do the same thing.
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Openness/Sharing
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A Canadian 3D printing company has devised a hydroponics system which it calls 3Dponics, using some parts which are printed on a 3D printer and others which are commonly available.
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Open Data
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The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US. ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.
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Programming
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We’ve covered Capstone in the past as a disassembly framework built atop LLVM. Capstone supports multiple platforms and architectures with an intent to be used for security purposes and binary analysis.
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Obviously Apple is very keen to only supply review units and grant event accreditation only to medias that are guaranteed to heap praise on its products and wouldn’t bother investigating any potential issues with it.
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Science
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PBS’ Miles O’Brien On Fox News’ Coverage: “It Reflects A Level Of Ignorance Which We Should Not Allow In Our Media”
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Health/Drug War
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A review of Eula Biss’s ‘On Immunity,’ which tackles the history of anti-vaccination movements
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That crackpot theory turned out to have credence. “In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign . . . to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location.” (The attempt failed.) The politics of immunization, it’s clear, are complex.
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Efforts by the government to provide vaccines were badly undermined after it was revealed that the CIA used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, offering a program of hepatitis vaccinations in the north-western city of Abbottabad as a front to obtain DNA samples from children at a local compound where Osama bin Laden lived.
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However, efforts to eradicate it are hampered by the Taliban, which have banned immunizations and attacked polio vaccination teams across Pakistan. Militants stepped up attacks on polio workers after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, offered a program of hepatitis vaccinations in the northwestern city of Abbottabad as a for his CIA-backed effort to obtain DNA samples from children at a local compound where Osama bin Laden live. The al-Qaida leader was later killed during a 2011 raid there by U.S. Navy SEALs.
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And yet even for the president, this latest yelping and yowling is unseemly. Mr Karzai and his late brother — formerly Kandahar’s most eligible drug peddler — were largely sustained by piles of CIA ‘black cash’, a cute expression the Western press trotted out last year.
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The movie follows Webb as he stumbles onto a story, which leads to the shady origins of the men who started the crack epidemic on the nation’s streets… and further alleges that the CIA was aware of major dealers who were smuggling cocaine into the U.S., and using the profits to arm rebels fighting in Nicaragua.
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Based upon the books “Dark Alliance,” by former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, and “Kill the Messenger,” by Nick Schou, the film chronicles Webb’s pursuit of a very complicated story involving the CIA, guns, and the crack epidemic. After writing a controversial article that alleged the CIA was aware of drug dealers smuggling cocaine into the United States and using the profits to arm rebels fighting in Nicaragua, Webb’s life was turned upside down amid accusations of inaccuracy, and the reporter became the story.
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Since the Contra-cocaine scandal surfaced in 1985, major U.S. news outlets have disparaged it, most notably when the big newspapers destroyed Gary Webb for reviving it in 1996. But a New York Times review of a movie on Webb finally admits the reality, writes Robert Parry.
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Still eager to break into the lucrative, real-life espionage miniseries game—despite the ratings failure of previous effort The Assets—ABC is producing another miniseries about the history of spying. This time, the network is sweetening the deal by choosing a subject rife with easily marketable stuff like drugs, torture, and mind control: the CIA’s Project MKUltra. Titled MKUltra, the miniseries will explore the agency’s infamous mind control project, which ran for much of the Cold War and was focused on using brainwashing, LSD, and physical and psychological abuse to forcibly take control of the human mind. Of course, MKUltra was only the last in a long string of names that government agents gave their often-bizarre efforts; in a different (and, we’d argue, better) world where they’d been less fickle, we could be talking about a series named ARTICHOKE.
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Security
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A recently-declassified CIA document analyzing the founding of America determined that Benjamin Franklin — yes, that one — had been such a massive security risk that it was a miracle that he didn’t screw up the entire American Revolution.
The article, which ran in the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, focused on Franklin’s time in France as part of the three-man American Commission, and found that the diplomatic group — key to coordinating France’s crucial assistance to American forces — had been “penetrated” by multiple British spies.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The vast majority of Americans—some 72 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late September—say they believe that the United States will end up using ground troops to combat ISIS in Iraq.
In other words, they don’t believe the multiple explicit promises that President Obama has made to the contrary since he first announced the start of this conflict in August.
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US intelligence services seem to have a knack for seeing what isn’t there – Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and endless communist plots in an earlier era – while missing what is. The CIA famously failed to spot the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union but it has also missed the pretty conspicuous warning signs of looming catastrophes where benign American action could have saved a lot of lives, such as the genocide in Rwanda two decades ago.
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Brandishing colour-coded maps and complex scoring systems and boasting an array of top-level government contacts, political risk consultancies can charge large sums for their analysis and reports.
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It should be obvious by now that if such bombing campaigns have an effect, it is to make things much worse. What western leaders portray as valiant efforts to rid the world of evil forces such as ISIL just don’t play the same way in the region. In Iraq, for instance, western military intervention is viewed as support for the authoritarian, sectarian and West-approved leadership, whose persecution and air strikes are so bad that many Sunnis are prepared to put up with ISIL, for now, as preferable.
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One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.
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The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.
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Waging war abroad won’t stop the long-term spread of extremism, but tackling it in our schools and mosques will
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Indeed, going further back in history, the United States grew from 13 former colonies into a vast nation based on the European model of colonial conquest: Wage brutal war on the indigenous population with the goal of annihilation.
The nation that prides itself on declaring its independence from a colonial empire actually adapted the colonial model of expansion, both domestically and as an international military interventionist.
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American bombs had killed 36 civilians in the first days of the Syrian campaign.
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Conservative media is dubiously claiming that the rise of the Islamic State is due in part to President Obama skipping scheduled daily intelligence briefings. The basis of this claim is a misleading interpretation of how intelligence briefings are received by the White House that was debunked two years ago.
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The purpose of the US campaign against the Islamic State is to provide grounds for the trillion dollar annual military budget Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, told RT.
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The Bureau’s drones team has been shortlisted for two awards: an Amnesty Media Award for digital innovation and a Lovie Award for best news website.
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The U.S. and Russia are sinking billions into nuclear-capable bombers, missiles, and submarines. Another round of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” anyone?
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This fascinating new study shows how the CIA and the British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II.
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Israeli intelligence has given up to modern trends and introduced an online questionnaire for would-be spies. Unlike the businesslike CIA or MI5 web draft campaigns, Israelis are luring volunteers with mystery halo always shrouding Mossad’s activities.
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When the CIA’s ex-Cairo station chief Miles Copeland penned his book ‘The Game of Nations’ in 1969, readers were shocked to discover the huge resources spent by Washington stage-managing the post-war politics of the Middle East and Egypt in particular.
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This could get awkward. A new film, “Colonia,” starring Emma Watson (@emwatson) and Daniel Bruhl, depicts events that transpired during the 1973 Chilean military coup. Will it touch on things the United States might or might not have done during that time frame?
The United States, in 2000, admitted to some indirect involvement in the coup, which led to the ascension of dictator Augusto Pinochet. But the CIA has not gone so far as saying it was involved directly. That led to a peculiar exchange when President Obama went to Chile in 2009.
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The documentary is called “USA Invasion: History of American Intervention in Bolivia”, covering the relationship between North America and Bolivia from 1920 until recent times.
A documentary series that implicated Bolivian opposition candidates with United States agencies and neoliberal policies will be released on Friday, which is less than two weeks before the general elections.
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Cuban national hero José Martí referred to land lying between the Rio Grande River and the Straits of Magellan as “Our America.” In an essay with that title published in 1892, Martí evoked the Rio Grande boundary as a divide between peoples with their own history, culture and future and an industrializing, crass civilization to the north promising no good.
Indeed, U.S. agents or proxies would soon be sewing grief and despair. Early in the 20th century they launched military incursions. Subsequently less blatant interventions left terror in their wake. Anniversaries in September and October – a season of sorrow in Our America – recall murder and mayhem. One asks: Can international solidarity prevent victims? Who in North America, epicenter of terrorist plotting, will take on that job?
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The committee was formed in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal and subsequent revelations about CIA activities, including information about the agency’s anti-Castro efforts not divulged to the Warren Commission.
Its conclusion was stunning, though tempered by its choice of language: Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”, but investigators were unable to identify a second gunman or the extent of the conspiracy. The committee ruled out the Cuban and Soviet governments, as well as the Secret Service, FBI and CIA; it didn’t rule out the possible involvement of individual members of organised crime or anti-Castro Cuban groups.
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A former Cuban exile anti-Castro militant told a conference audience Sept. 26 in a blockbuster revelation that he saw accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with their mutual CIA handler six weeks before the killing and there would have been no anti-Castro movement in Cuba without the CIA funding.
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US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew up plans to “smash Cuba” with air strikes nearly 40 years ago, government papers obtained by researchers show. He was angered by Cuba’s 1976 military intervention in Angola and was considering retaliation if Cuban forces were deployed elsewhere in Africa.
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Except it wasn’t just Cuba that was intervening in Angola. China, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were messing about. Zaire (as the Democratic Republic of Congo was called under the terrible, autocratic reign of Mobutu Sese Seko) was trying to steal the oil province of Cabinda from Angola. And South Africa had invaded, worried that a leftie Angola might undermine apartheid and give upstart Namibians unwelcome notions about independence.
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In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba.
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In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba. Among the revelations are details of how then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger considered launching airstrikes against Cuba after Fidel Castro sent troops to support independence fighters in Angola in 1976. In the years that followed, top-secret U.S. emissaries, including former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, worked to normalize relations with Cuba. The book’s release comes as Cuban leader Raúl Castro is set to participate for the first time in next year’s Summit of the Americas in Panama. Cuba recently denounced the Obama administration for extending the more than 50-year embargo for another year in a little-noticed move in September.
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The Secret Service did not disclose this amount of information. Also, after the hearing, Leonnig brought to light President Obama‘s elevator ride with an armed felon who was acting strange.
Leonnig “…has been on the beleaguered agency’s tail for years: She reported in 2012 that a dozen agents solicited prostitutes while traveling with the president,” Yahoo! said.
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Pierson’s undoing was not telling the president about a Sept. 16 incident in Atlanta in which President Barack Obama rode an elevator with an armed security contractor during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two White House officials said. The armed contractor’s proximity to Obama violated the agency’s security protocols.
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After being driven out of most of Benghazi CIA-linked Khalifa Haftar and his allies are holed up in the key Benina air base on the outskirts of Benghazi.
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Usually, Washington starts scapegoating its spies after its wars have failed to achieve their objectives – as happened in Iraq, when the natives failed to greet the American invaders with bottomless gratitude, and in Vietnam, where the awesome U.S. war machine slaughtered three million people but still could not subdue a Third World country’s quest for independence.
But President Obama has essentially inaugurated his bombing campaign in Syria with an admission of past “mistakes,” telling 60 Minutes that the CIA “underestimated” the strength of ISIS. What Obama’s admission actually shows is that the real U.S. mission in Syria – the three-year proxy war to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad – is already a failure.
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As far as the public knows, there is no money attached to the bill. The Saudi government has already volunteered to train and contribute funds to approved Syrian rebel groups. According to an expert from Foreign Policy Magazine, the CIA has already been training Syrian fighters at a base in Jordan for a long time. Understandably, the efforts have not started to pay off yet. Obviously there is a broad range of people fighting against the regime in Damascus. One of them has gained strength more rapidly than the others – ISIS. Well, who are these militants? Where do they come from? According to the BBC, the group was first established in Iraq as a derivation of al-Qaida in Iraq.
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America’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, Barack Obama, who helped turn Libya into a failed state by toppling ruler Moammar Gadhafi, has started a new war in Syria and Iraq even as the U.S. remains embroiled in the Afghanistan war. Obama’s air war in Syria — his presidency’s seventh military campaign in a Muslim nation and the one likely to consume his remaining term in office — raises troubling questions about its objectives and his own adherence to the rule of law.
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Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on Washington-led coalition airstrikes in Syria that began last week.
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Afghanistan has inaugurated its first new president in a decade, swearing in Ashraf Ghani to head a power-sharing government. Joining him on stage Monday was Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s new vice president. Dostum is one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, once described by Ghani himself as a “known killer.” Dostum’s rise to the vice presidency comes despite his involvement in a 2001 massacre that killed up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war. The victims were allegedly shot to death or suffocated in sealed metal truck containers after they surrendered to Dostum and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. The dead prisoners — some of whom had been tortured — were then buried in the northern Afghan desert. Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll, has been widely accused of orchestrating the massacre and tampering with evidence of the mass killing. For more than a decade, human rights groups have called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into the massacre including the role of U.S. special forces and CIA operatives. We speak to Jamie Doran, director of the 2002 documentary “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” and Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy at Physicians for Human Rights, the group that discovered the site of the mass graves of the Taliban POWs.
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In an extensive new report, The Intercept questions whether the much-hyped Khorasan Group actually exists
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As the U.S. expands military operations in Syria, we look at the Khorasan group, the shadowy militant organization the Obama administration has invoked to help justify the strikes. One month ago, no one had heard of Khorasan, but now U.S. officials say it poses an imminent threat to the United States. As the strikes on Syria began, U.S. officials said Khorasan was “nearing the execution phase” of an attack on the United States or Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up a commercial plane in flight. We are joined by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, whose new article with Glenn Greenwald is “The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria.”
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Media scoundrels cheerlead them. They regurgitate Big Lies doing so. Last week’s headlines featured a so-called Khorasan Group.
It’s more fiction than fact. It’s fake. Irresponsible fear-mongering gets people to believe otherwise.
Posing a threat to Europe and America’s heartland, it’s claimed. Truth is polar opposite.
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The ranks of the Islamic State jihadists are already full of “moderate rebels” previously trained, equipped and funded by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA. So much for the State Department and CIA’s vetting process, particularly when these militias have shown a capability to shift allegiances on a daily, if not more frequent, basis. The fact of the matter is that the main beneficiaries of our attacks on the Islamic State will be the Iranian proxies in Damascus and Baghdad.
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A few months ago, a former top CIA operative applied for a Lebanese visa to do some work in Beirut for an oil company. While he was waiting for approval, a package arrived at his client’s office. Inside was a full dossier on his CIA career. “It included things on where I had served, well back into 1990s,” said Charles Faddis, who ran the CIA’s covert action program in Kurdistan during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other top assignments. “It had details on my travels to Israel and Lebanon—years ago.”
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What the U.S. government doesn’t want the world to focus on is the fact that the CIA was very active in supplying Libyan rebels with support to take down Gaddafi. Unfortunately, in an effort to take out one enemy of freedom, the CIA got in bed with another — many of the Libyan rebels included Al-Qaeda backed jihadists who were also Al-Qaeda in Iraq. (1)
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For several years, Official Washington blinded itself to the growing radicalism of the Syrian opposition, all the better to portray the Assad regime as the “bad guys” and the rebels as the “good guys.” Now, everyone is pointing fingers about the ISIS “surprise,” as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
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For the past three years, Official Washington has viewed the Syrian civil war as “white-hatted” rebels against “black-hatted” President Assad, but finally some of the “gray-hatted” reality is breaking through, though perhaps too late, Robert Parry reports.
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Human rights groups also say coalition airstrikes in both countries have killed as many as two dozen civilians. U.S. officials say they can’t rule out civilian deaths but haven’t confirmed any.
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Warren acknowledged that the Pentagon could not say for sure that every person killed in the bombing of Iraq and Syria has been a combatant.
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The activists assured me their message was still relevant — that America’s foreign policy remains one of “war-making,” as longtime protestor Greg Giogio put it — and it seems they were right.
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Famed public intellectual Cornel West, whose new book Black Prophetic Fire is a re-examination of key black political figures through a different lens, was initially a big supporter of Barack Obama and appeared with him during his first presidential campaign. But in 2012, West says he didn’t even vote. “I couldn’t vote for a war criminal,” he said, calling Obama’s administration a “drone presidency.”
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Cornel West has been one of President Obama‘s biggest liberal critics, both on race and foreign policy, and in a new video for TIME, West says that Obama has a very “paternalistic” way of speaking when he addresses young black men.
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Cornel West — acclaimed thinker and activist — sat down to talk with Belinda Luscombe about his new book, Black Prophetic Fire. The book, which he wrote with Christa Buschendorf, looks at the work of six leaders from African-American history. But, as is pointed out in the video above, those six leaders aren’t all equally well known: the book moves from the most famous Civil Rights names, W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, Jr., to a name that may be unfamiliar to those not versed in the subject.
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Fred Branfman, the first person to draw public attention to a previously unknown U.S. bombing campaign inside Laos during the Vietnam War and who later became a leading antiwar activist in Washington, died Sept. 24 at a medical facility in Budapest, where he had lived for several years. He was 72.
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Many rumors are circulating in Amman about alleged terror threats to shopping malls and other public places in response to news that the kingdom’s air force has joined the US-led coalition in targeting Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria.
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While US President Barack Obama has said his country’s intelligence services underestimated the strength of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Saudi Interior Minister Prince Muhammad Bin Naif said: “We know that ISIS was not randomly formed but rather sponsored by states and organizations that employ all their resources and ill intentions in backing ISIS.” How can we interpret this?
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Late in the 20th century, state terror was a routine instrument of policy, both domestically and internationally. The Phoenix Program in South Vietnam was a CIA-sponsored assassination campaign against suspected Communist leaders on the village level. Chile’s dictator Pinochet waged state terror against leftists and even blew up a Chilean exile in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan funded the Nicaraguan contras, who murdered schoolteachers, while the CIA laid mines in Nicaraguan harbours. South Africa’s apartheid regime carried out state terror against African National Congress members both domestically and in other African countries.
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Next April will be the 40th anniversary of the operation. Watching the film made me think again of the all the follow-on effects and long-term consequences of any war. It made me think also of the refugees who came to the U.S. and of their accomplishments. In 2009, Commander Hung B. Le, son of a Vietnamese navy officer and rescued by the USS Barbour County (LST-1195) at sea after the air evacuation ended, commanded the USS Lassen (DDG-82) as she sailed into Da Nang. Maj. Bung Lee and his family, now retired Rear Admiral Chambers and Commander Vern Jumper, the USS Midway’s Air Boss who managed the flight deck that hectic day, attended the 35th anniversary celebration held on the Midway, now a museum in San Diego. Recently, Brigadier General Viet Luong, whose family left Vietnam in the “black operation” the day before the official evacuation, became the U.S. Army’s first Vietnamese general officer.
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US Vice President Joe Biden apologized Saturday to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was angry over comments in which Biden said Erdogan had admitted that Turkey had made mistakes by allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria.
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When Joe Biden gets candid, he really lets rip. The US vice president, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on Thursday told his audience – point blank – that America’s Sunni allies are responsible for funding and arming Al Qaeda-type extremists in Syria.
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A Nobel Peace Prize observer with a relatively unsuccessful betting record speculates that the Japanese people who uphold war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution are most likely to be chosen the winner of this year’s award, which is to be announced this week.
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Transparency Reporting
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In a trailer advertising WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s new book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, the never-before-seen clip (below) shows WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison phoning the State Department’s front desk and asking to speak with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It’s an emergency,” Assange prompts Harrison to say, passing a notecard across the table.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused an Australian government agency of giving misleading evidence to a parliamentary inquiry.
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The Dissenter [reposted from here, “Inspector General Claims to Have Found No ‘Instances’ Where CIA Over-Classified Secrets”)
Also, the CIA “chose not to evaluate declassification actions” in this report but provided “no explanation for that decision.” In other words, it did not bother to inspect whether it is appropriately declassifying information that should not be kept secret.
All the recommendations in the inspector general report are censored. They all address how the CIA can better mark information that the agency classifies and for some unclear reason that is sensitive information that if released would help the terrorists win.
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In a September 2013 report, the CIA’s inspector general could find “no instances” of over-classification. The report, obtained Wednesday by The Huffington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, was based on a sample of CIA intelligence reports.
The report was produced in response to a federal law meant to reduce over-classification. In January, the CIA refused to release the report to HuffPost until after it underwent a review process.
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The Central Intelligence Agency has asked for authority to destroy email messages sent by non-senior officials of the Agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tentatively approved the proposal.
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The CIA asked the National Archives and Records Administration In August if it could destroy certain employee emails, according to an NARA appraisal obtained by the Federation of American Scientists.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Taking to the General Assembly podium today, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Joe Natuman said that as a Pacific small Island developing State (SIDS), his country was confronted with unique development challenges, which needed to be addressed by the UN and international community.
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Noting that small island developing nations must speak with one voice at the global level, representatives of those countries today pressed for international economic partnerships and efforts to combat climate change, on the final day of the annual General Assembly debate in New York.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade for Barbados urged the international community to make provisions for countries which are both small island developing nations and highly-indebted middle income countries.
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Harvest the Hope, a concert on the farm of Art and Helen Tanderup in Neligh, Nebraska, right on the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, was many things: a musical tour de force starring Neil Young and Willie Nelson; an anti-pipeline message to President Obama whose election graphic formed the O of “Hope” on the stage banner, the word itself Obama campaign terminology; an artistic call to activism designed by artists Richard Vollaire and John Quigley whose crop design “Heartland No KXL” was plowed by farmer Tanderup into his corn field as he followed Quigley’s direction, in an image spanning the size of 80 football fields; and “The day the idea of the Keystone Pipleline died” as pronounced by thousands of attendees who stood in rows like the corn and chanted in call and response with Quigley.
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Four months after Sao Paulo’s state water utility Sabesp spent 80 million reais (26.3 million euros) to tap so-called dead reserves in its shrinking reservoirs, water supplies for South America’s biggest metropolis are even worse than they were before.
Brazil’s worst drought in eight decades has turned most of Cantareira, the four-lake complex that supplies half of greater Sao Paulo’s 20 million residents, into a dried-up bed of cracked earth. What’s left are sediment-filled pools in the centre — the dead reserves — that were previously untappable until Sabesp built 3 kilometres of pipes to drain the water.
The manoeuvre bought Sabesp some time by boosting drinking supplies by 182.5 billion litres to almost 27 per cent of Cantareira’s capacity. Sabesp, formally Cia. de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo, expected the water to last until reservoirs are refreshed by summer rains that typically run from October through March.
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Finance
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We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatization have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re skeptical, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favors certain personality traits and penalizes others.
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He claimed the government had tried to frame him because of his criticism of the FBI, CIA and Internal Revenue Service.
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He claimed the government had tried to frame him because of his criticism of the FBI, CIA and IRS. During the two-month trial, he did a curbside interview on live network TV outside the courthouse each morning and then went inside to challenge U.S. District Judge Lesley Brooks Wells, who tried to dissuade Mr. Traficant from representing himself.
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In Washington, he barreled through the House in rumpled sports coats and loud shirts. Traficant fashioned himself as a maverick populist, spending much of his career railing against foreign aid and various government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the CIA.
“Lying, thieving, stealing nincompoops” is how he once described the latter.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The court plays a growing activist role in our politics and lives — yet all nine justices hide in the shadows
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Evangelists aren’t the only ones who have long recognized the virtues of cross-lingual engagement. By the end of World War II, the U.S.-funded Voice of America radio network was producing more than 1,000 different programs for worldwide broadcast in over 40 languages. In the late 1950s, the CIA had thousands of copies of a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago printed, which it then surreptitiously distributed to Soviet citizens.
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He jets to Afghanistan and announces a new commitment to address threats. Honest awakening or election-year opportunism?
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As Iraqi forces struggle to pin back the Islamic State group on the ground, Baghdad is taking its war against the jihadists to the airwaves with a television comedy series.
The usually elusive Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi features prominently in the show, whose promoters argue that ridiculing the jihadist supremo can help dent his aura of almost supernatural villainy.
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Censorship
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Before last week’s Banned Book Week recedes much farther in the rearview mirror, let’s pause for a moment to note this curious fact: Some of those who oppose censorship also support it.
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There was once a telling advertisement for Guinness that went: “I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.” This super-intelligent cautionary jingle was adopted as the touchstone for his case by Dr Kehinde Andrews in his Head to Head with one of Exhibit B’s actors, Stella Odunlami (New Review).
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This past week, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government shut down a critical news site, censored an article written by a columnist and launched an investigation into another news portal.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lined himself up against a powerful enemy today, when he voiced his growing opposition to the world wide web.
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When the College Board established new national standards for Advanced Placement U.S. History courses, conservative members of the school board in Jefferson County, Colorado, called for changes to their local curriculum to promote patriotism and the free enterprise system and discourage civil disorder. Hari Sreenivasan reports on the ensuing protests against censorship by students.
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The Egyptian authorities on Wednesday confiscated all the copies of one of the country’s largest private newspapers in order to censor an article, just days after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed in an American television interview that there was “no limitation on freedom of expression in Egypt.”
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It is estimated that Iranian authorities block access to more than 5 million webpages, including popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; in addition to porn sites, bank webpages, and any media considered hostile to Iran.
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Privacy
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A dirty trick by politicians will come back to haunt them if a looming fight exposes the motherlode of spying power – and shuts off the data vacuum
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An ACLU Freedom of Information request reveals that the NSA considers Reagan’s “Executive Order 12333″ (previously) its “primary source” of spying authority — and so it conducts this surveillance without reporting to Congress on it.
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Authorities in southern England were embarrassed but defensive Thursday after telling workers to destroy a mural they later realized was created by the internationally famous graffiti artist Banksy.
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He is also likely to take up the issue of NSA snooping on Indian entities, said a senior government official.
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However, many traditional investigative methods will still work.“Wiretaps would still work. You can also get call-details records,” he said. “That’s available from the phone companies and it’s not affected by this decision.”
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The German secret service provided Internet data about German citizens to the American National Secutiry Agency, a top-secret report reveals.
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Amidst simultaneous media-driven foreign policy crises dealing with Russia and ISIS, most normally well informed Americans might well be forgiven for missing a recent Associate Press report headlined “CIA halts spying in Europe.”
The text somewhat contradicts the headline, as it goes on to describe how the Central Intelligence Agency has issued instructions to its case officers operating in Europe to stand down only on “unilateral operations” involving officials of foreign host nations, which presumably implies countries in the NATO alliance. What that means in plain English is that if one is an American spy assigned to the station in France, one’s “host country,” going after a French official to turn him into a recruited agent is currently not allowed. A “unilateral operation” is one in which the CIA controls and runs the agent clandestinely without anyone else being aware of the relationship.
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There’s now talk of Congress getting involved and passing laws that would either outlaw such encryption, and Holder went as far as to suggest that there should be legally mandated backdoors installed in such devices so that law enforcement could take a peek if they deemed it necessary.
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With an impressive history, the vessel has circumnavigated the world twice, been through two cyclones, served as a listening post for the CIA off the coast of China and even been boarded by pirates.
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Privacy may seem like a relic, but as companies adopt end-to-end data encryption for security purposes, individuals will be able to reassert control over their personal information, according to Gus Hunt, former chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. That shift also may upend data-driven business models such as online advertising, he said.
[...]
Mr. Hunt predicts a “return to privacy by default.” Encryption on computer and smartphone chips will become ubiquitous, and users will be able to control their data through the use of fine-grained tagging that establishes what other people can and can’t access.
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Civil Rights
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Today’s Project Censored Show presents a speech given by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. After his retirement from the CIA, McGovern founded “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,” and has criticized US spy agencies for their lawbreaking, and subservience to the agendas of politicians. He spoke in Santa Rosa, California on September 24, 2014, at an event co-sponsored by Project Censored.
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McGovern is a changed man. He started out in the Army, then he worked for the CIA from the Kennedy administration up through the first Bush presidency, preparing the president’s daily intel brief. He was a hell of a spy. McGovern began to see the evil of much of the government’s work, and has since become an outspoken critic of the intelligence world and an advocate for free speech. He speaks on behalf of people like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
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This may be the first time that Australian anti-terrorism powers have been used in detention of suspects without charge
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At least six people killed and at least 20 students ‘disappeared’ by police in Iguala believed to be controlled by drug cartel
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Mexico has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, and women can find themselves criminalised even after miscarriage
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South Africa has to be wary of attempts to censor the media, such as SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s recent suggestion that journalists be licensed, US ambassador Patrick Gaspard said on Tuesday.
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When the Department of Homeland Security illegally seized notes from Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson in 2013, the Times and the reporter took the DHS to court. A settlement has now been reached that includes a review of training for the DHS’ Coast Guard criminal investigators.
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Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter who faces possible jail time for refusing to reveal confidential sources, will receive Colby’s Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and give a formal address at 5:30 p.m. in Lorimer Chapel. The public is invited to the panel discussion and the convocation.
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A New York Times reporter who faced the prospect of jail for refusing to reveal a CIA source of classified information is recipient of this year’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.
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The New York Times journalist who’s receiving this year’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism has faced down the prospect of jail for refusing to reveal a CIA source of classified information.
The Justice Department is trying to force reporter James Risen to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Risen used an unidentified source for his reports about a botched CIA effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
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Accusations from pro-Kremlin media reflect Russia’s growing ties with China after US and EU sanctions
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Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government
Ming Chun Tang in the alternative media CounterPunch says that the protests are against the neoliberal economic policies that are destroying the prospects of everyone but the one percent. In other words, the protests are akin to the American occupy movement.
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I have been watching the Occupy Central Movement with some detachment (some are also calling it the Umbrella Movement, since protestors sport umbrellas against the tropical sun and afternoon showers). The rubber stamp, Ministry of Truth-Western mainstream media is kowtowing to the Washington-London-Paris consensus, declaring that Occupy Central is hungering for Western style “democracy”, that it is bigger than Hong Kong. It all sounds so predictably deja vu. Knowing that free-wheeling Hong Kong is gladly letting CIA front NGO National Endowment for Democracy operate on its soil, is all we need to know. The main “non” governmental organizations (NGOs) that do the CIA’s bidding around the world are…
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We Fully Support A People’s Movement In Hong Kong. As we explain further details about ‘Occupy Central’, it is the intention of this article to help the students and Hong Kongese people who are fighting for the future of Hong Kong make informed decisions on who they join in coalitions with and choose for Chief Executive when they achieve True Universal Sufferage.
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(This Chinese peninsula) became a colony of the British Empire after the First Opium War (1839–42). As a result of the negotiations and the 1984 agreement between China and Britain, Hong Kong was handed over to the People’s Republic of China and became its first Special Administrative Region on 1 July 1997, under the principle of “one country, two systems”. The educational system followed the British English model until 2009, and Hong Kong’s independent judiciary functions under the common law framework.[15][16] The constitutional document drafted by the Chinese side before the handover based on the terms enshrined in the Joint Declaration,[17] governs its political system, and stipulates that Hong Kong shall have a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign relations and military defense.[18][19] Although it has a multi-party system, a minority controls 30 out of 70 seats of its legislature. Hong Kong has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world but also the highest income inequality among advanced economies.[5][tag]
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A number of progressive and left-leaning writers in the US have jumped on a report by Wikileaks that the neo-con dominated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and various other US-government linked organizations with a history of subversion and sowing discord abroad are operating in Hong Kong and on that basis are making the leap of “logic” that the democracy protests in Hong Kong must therefore be a creation of US policy-makers.
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Charles Lewis’ book, 935 Lies, would make a fine introduction to reality for anyone who believes the U.S. government usually means well or corporations tend to tell the truth in the free market. And it would make an excellent introduction to the decline and fall of the corporate media. Even if these topics aren’t new to you, this book has something to add and retells the familiar quite well.
The familiar topics include the Gulf of Tonkin, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the civil rights movement, U.S. aggression and CIA overthrows, Pinochet, Iran-Contra, lying tobacco companies, and Edward R. Murrow. Lewis brings insight to these and other topics, and if he doesn’t document that things were better before the 1960s, he does establish that horrible things have been getting worse since, and are now much more poorly reported on.
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Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers.
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A German journalist reveals in his new bestseller that Western Media is paid by the CIA to print propaganda instead of the news.
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AN OIREACHTAS COMMITTEE visited Shannon Airport this week to look at concerns by human rights group Shannonwatch about its use by US military aircraft in contravention of Irish neutrality and its possible use by the CIA for illegal renditions.
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The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the CIA for records on the agency’s spying on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network.
The complaint recounts events leading up to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accusing the CIA of secretly removing documents from the Intelligence Committee, searching its computers and trying to intimidate congressional investigators.
The Committee has been investigating the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
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The Public Policy robo-poll of 898 registered voters was commissioned by the Constitution Project, a highly-respected non-partisan group that has been active in calling attention to the lack of accountability for the torture of detainees during the last administration.
The poll found overwhelming public support for release of a long-completed report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report is said to disclose abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized, and to expose a pattern of deceit in the Bush administration’s descriptions of the program to Congress and the public.
But despite having been completed in December 2012, the report remains inaccessible to the public. Most recently, the White House and the CIA have proposed redactions that Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein said effectively undermine its key findings.
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Make no mistake: Torture is not “enhanced interrogation,” but a war crime under the Geneva Conventions written at the direction of the U.S. since World War II when Japanese officials were executed for the offense.
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The Senate intelligence committee hopes to release soon a redacted summary of its 6,300-page report on the CIA’s interrogational torture program. As we wait, the committee is wrangling with the CIA over redactions that the CIA is demanding. So it is an opportune moment to think about how the public might react to the report.
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An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans thinks that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence should make public its comprehensive report on the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11, according to a new poll released today by The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.
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He claims that he was “abducted by the CIA” with his then-pregnant wife a decade ago, in Thailand, then transited through the UK-controlled island Diego Garcia and handed over to the Gadhafi regime.
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On October 1, 2014, Human Rights First released the following letter, signed by over a dozen former military and intelligence officials, categorically condemning the U.S. torture regime – calling it illegal, ineffective and counterproductive. As the Senate Intelligence Committee gears up to release portions of its CIA torture report, the Government Accountability Project commends the efforts of these and other former military and intelligence officials, without whom the public would still be in the dark about the United States’ torture program. National security whistleblowers have a long and notable history of exposing the crimes and human rights abuses the United States has committed in the name of national security, including torture. By bringing these abuses to light, national security whistleblowers play a vital role in ensuring that the United States never commits these terrible acts again.
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A Washington-based privacy organization is suing the CIA to obtain details about how it spied on Senate staffers.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the agency inspector general’s report on the spying incident, it announced on Thursday.
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President Obama’s “war on terrorism,” spurred by the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), poses a potential threat to American civil liberties. Under mounting pressure to eliminate an increasing number of security threats, national security professionals may be tempted to overlook boundaries in the name of national security.
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Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said he was effectively given a “green light” to go to Syria by MI5 before being detained on terror charges on his return.
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This last weekend the AARC Conference drew over 200 to the Bethesda Hyatt Regency on the 50 th anniversary of the Warren Report. Kennedy’s violent death in 1963 shocked Americans, undermining public trust.
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The Council of the European Union decided on Monday to mandate EULEX to support the judicial proceedings relocated from Kosovo that arise from the investigation by the EU Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) into the allegations contained in prosecutor Dick Marty’s Council of Europe (CoE) report on the human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Albania in 1999.
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Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager has had his home raided by police searching for the hacker Rawshark.
In a 10-hour search of his house, Hager said computers and papers were seized in what appeared to be an attempt to discover the identity of the person who provided information used in the Dirty Politics book.
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A photo appearing to show a refugee being abused at a home for asylum seekers has caused outrage in Germany. The photo has been compared to those from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Police are now investigating six cases of abuse at three different centres.
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German police are investigating reports that guards at three asylum centres in North Rhine-Westphalia have been abusing the refugees interned in the centres. Photos released showing the abuse have been compared to Abu-Ghraib, whilst a colleague has told German media that the group of guards were nicknamed “the SS”, The Local has reported.
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Holder, for that reason, leaves the rule of law in something of a tattered state, and his successor is not likely to do much of a restoration work. This, suggests Ryan Cooper, may be as much a matter of personal flaw as systemic problem.[4] Truly, an altogether illustrative statement about the Obama administration.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said Russia must increase its cybersecurity but pledged not to impose total control over the Internet, amid fears Moscow is mulling whether to limit access to the worldwide Web.
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President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday he would not restrict Internet access for Russians but Moscow must protect state domains against a surge of cyber attacks since the Ukraine crisis began.
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Russia needs to defend itself from a rising number of cyber attacks from outside the country, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has ruled out any move to restrict Internet access for Russians despite the surge in cyber attacks. The president’s comments allayed concerns that Putin might try to disconnect Russia from the global web in an emergency.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The DDOS attack that has rendered the popular Linux site Tux Machines virtually unreachable for nearly two weeks, now seems to be affecting sister site TechRights. Roy Schestowitz, publisher of both sites, told FOSS Force that the attack on TechRights began at about one o’clock Friday afternoon GMT.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The GeForce GTX 980 dominates as well under OpenCL as it does with OpenGL. While the GTX 980 has just 2048 CUDA cores compared to 2,880 on the GTX 780 Ti, the Maxwell architecture is a heck of a lot more efficient and powerful than Kepler. My earlier GTX 980 Linux review is worth reading if you’re not yet up to speed with NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 900 series as the new graphics cards are real winners for Linux users as long as you don’t mind obliging to using proprietary hardware drivers on your systems.
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Rob Clark has released an updated X.Org DDX driver for his Freedreno driver project that continues to strive towards reverse-engineering the Adreno graphics processors found on Qualcomm’s ARM SoCs.
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AMD’s Alex Deucher released a new version of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver for X.Org Servers on Wednesday night.
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Luc Verhaegen has issued his annual call for speakers for those developers wishing to discuss their work on X.Org-related projects, including Wayland, Mir, Mesa, etc.
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I’ve been writing for a while already about the DRM graphics changes coming to Linux 3.18 even with Linux 3.17 not being quite out yet while courtesy of Intel OTC’s Daniel Vetter is a comprehensive list of the i915 DRM changes to be found for the next kernel development cycle.
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Applications
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The latest version available is Timeshift 1.6.2, which has been released a while ago, coming with a brand new clone button for cloning the entire system, improved first snapshot size estimation, cleaned terminal output and support for saving backups on LUKS-encrypted partitions.
While the regular Timeshift works only with the EXT file systems, the developer has forked it to work with BTRFS, under the name of Timeshift BTRFS.
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One of my goals for this year is to become proficient in a cross platform GUI tool kit. The toolkit I’ve chosen to get my hands dirty with is Qt because in addition to being cross platform it also has a fantastic amount of documentation.
I always find I learn programming easier when I am building some practical instead of going through various tutorials that you just throw away when you are done. So with that, my “learn Qt” project is something I’m calling qAndora.
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Proprietary
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Univention Corporate Server can be a cost-effective alternative to upgrading to Microsoft Server 2012.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you are not a fan of using an online source code searching tool like lxr.kde.org, but are still tired of grepping for a particular class or function in the KDE Frameworks (and other projects as well), you might find the GNU Global tool quite useful.
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Valve have released the Steam Hardware Survey results for September and thus, GOL’s first survey comes to an end. 670 people completed the survey, which is quite a nice sample – so thanks all of you who took the time to do it.
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Dreamfall Chapters is a highly anticipated sequel to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The game will finally released on October the 21st.
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The newest game in the Natural Selection series titled NS2: Combat has a new teaser trailer out and it’s looking good!
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Crusader Kings II is a strategy game available on Linux, featuring single and multi-player, and set in various historical periods. Crusader Kings II was launched in 2012 and it received positive reviews.
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For those that have read us for some time you will probably know I am a big space sci-fi fan, so J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars ticks literally every single box for me. Here’s my thoughts on the soon to be released Linux version.
J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars was funded on Indiegogo and even though they didn’t hit the goal for Linux they still decided to bring it to our platform, and we have been lucky enough to be able to give it a run.
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Banished is a city-builder from Shining Rock Software LLC that was praised rather a lot when it came out, and the developer noted they planned a Linux version. We caught up with the developer to see when.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the past months cooperation has increased between Maui, KDE and LXDE developers, not only regarding libraries, but also key components such as SDDM (which has become the new standard for Qt based login managers) or Calamares, a new unified installer framework based on Qt.
In the meantime, KDE also released their long awaited effort named KDE Frameworks 5.
Frameworks 5 is a comprehensive set of technologies for the Qt ecosystem.
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The Maui Project that’s been focusing on a Wayland desktop, their own Wayland compositor, and other tasks has decided to adopt the KDE Frameworks 5.
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After helping with a recent local KDE translation sprint, Andrej Mernik suggested that I should ask for direct commit access to the KDE localisations SVN, so I do not bug him or Andrej Vernekar to commit translations for me.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The release of GNOME 3.14 on September 24 has earned good marks and Elementary OS is still getting positive reviews. Gearhead Mark Gibbs introduces users to Debian GNU/Linux. We have Scott Dowdle and Christian Schaller on Fedora 21 Alpha and Phoronix is reporting Rahul Sundaram suggests using Dash instead of Bash. We have more on Shellshock and its fallout as well as some gaming news from GamingOnLinux.com. And finally today is an opinion on Mark Shuttleworth’s September 30, 2014 post.
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The GNOME desktop has had a rough last few years. The transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 left a bad taste in the mouths of many GNOME users, and some abandoned GNOME for other desktops. But PC World thinks that GNOME 3.14 could be just what the doctor ordered to bring some of those users back to the GNOME desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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For those seeking Scientific’s re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, it should soon be coming with today marking the availability of Scientific Linux 7.0 RC2.
Pat Riehecky on the behalf of Fermilab and others announced Scientific Linux 7.0 x86_64 Release Candidate 2 as the latest available for testing — months after RHEL 7.0 shipped along with CentOS 7.0, Oracle Linux 7.0, etc.
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With this new system, the CentOS 7.0 x86_64 release didn’t fully support the hardware. The USB mouse didn’t work at all (for what it’s worth was a ROCCAT Lua), the Gigabit Ethernet wasn’t detected, and the installation process crashed for unknown reasons. The installation target was to an Intel 530 Series M.2 SSD.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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APT (Advanced Package Tool) is a set of core tools inside Debian that allow users to install, remove, and keep applications up to date. A new version of APT is now out and brings even more improvements.
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Debian GNU/Linux, more usually just called “Debian,” is an operating system distribution or “distro” where the kernel can be either Linux or kFreeBSD (the FreeBSD kernel). Wikipedia notes that “… there are 1,276 times as many Linux users as there are kFreeBSD users.” Adventurous geeks might also like to try the unofficially supported multi-server microkernel called GNU HURD. The distro is free and open source mostly under the GNU General Public License.
The Debian project began in 1993 and the first release was in 1996. The most recent release, version 7.6, codenamed “Wheezy”, was released on July 12, 2014. The next release, version 8, codenamed “Jessie”, is currently in Beta 1 release.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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At this year’s IFA, Samsung has introduced a new SmartWatch, which goes by the name Gear S. This Smartwatch has a twist, actually a 3G integrated twist, but I’m sure you already know about that.
In a press release, Samsung have announced that the Gear S will be available in Germany starting on the 17 October. The suggested retail price is Euro 399, which is what we anticipated for a european launch.
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Like Samsung, which offers both Android Wear and Tizen-based smartwatches, LG has apparently decided to have a Plan B in hand, or rather on the wrist. According to The Verge, a developer website hosted by LG teased an upcoming SDK for a WebOS-based LG SmartWatch with a “Coming soon!” tag. An image on one of the screens showed a Bean Bird logo borrowed from LG’s WebOS based smart TVs, as well as a rough sketch of a round-faced watch (see below).
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Android
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iOS has long been a popular platform for some developers. But what happens when a longtime iOS developer decides to try his hand at programming for Android? Tom Redman shares how he learned to appreciate Android, and notes some of the differences between Android and iOS development.
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My name is Tom, and I’m Buffer’s Android developer, though you might be surprised to learn that before Buffer I had very little experience developing for Android.
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A comment like that will draw some fire from IBM. Big Blue has megabucks invested in Linux and is tooting the Eclipse horn to prove its openness in developing software such as Rational Developer for i. Zend Technologies has had success with PHP, as has other application development vendors such as Profound Logic and BCD. And newcomer to the IBM i community, PowerRuby, has joined the app dev party as well.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The proof of concept for this is already out in The Pirate Browser, a product of The Pirate Bay, which offers a Firefox Tor bundle designed to access banned websites, though not specifically to protect anonymity. Tor’s web browser, too, is a version of the open source Firefox web browser.
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Funding
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You may have been wondering what has been going on since the 0.93 release and the Pitivi fundraising campaign.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Recently, I had a discussion with RMS about being a speaker for Free Software. In the end I was told simply to record some of my talks and that I would be given some feedback, but during the discussion I explained why I think GNUstep is important to free software and I believe that this is something that I think is important for other people to understand as well:
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Public Services/Government
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Myanmar is to build an open source e-government platform with help from Vietnam.
The first phase of the platform will be launched at the end of the year with functions allowing officials to manage citizen data and exchange information with other ministries and local governments, according to Vietnamese media reports.
The platform will be upgraded in 2015 with cloud technology, and capabilities to handle more complex datasets and mobile users, it added.
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Openness/Sharing
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What does an open source research approach mean for cancer? How will crowdfunding help develop better drugs faster? How will making a research project’s data accessible to anyone open up new avenues for research and innovation? A chemist who’s been writing software since his childhood aims to find out.
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In a video COMPUTER BILD showed how easy it is to bend an iPhone 6 Plus. The reaction from Apple: no more testing devices and no more invites for COMPUTER BILD. It is time for an open letter to Tim Cook.
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If you’ve paid attention to anything tangentially related to technology news over the past couple of weeks, you’re probably familiar with “bendgate”, the feverish reaction to the realization that Apple’s newest iPhone 6 Plus includes the feature of a bending case if you accidentally sit on it or something. As an Android loyalist, these reports have been an endless source of entertainment thus far, but even that has now been trumped by Apple’s reaction to the issue. Apparently the company has decided that the best response to a technology news organization’s reporting on the bendy Apple phones is to threaten to freeze that publication out of future bendy phones and likely-bendy Apple events.
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Security
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Of all the technology companies in the world, Apple is easily the biggest in terms of its cash pile. Yet when it comes to security issues, the company appears to be unwilling to invest enough resources to keep its users safe in a timely fashion.
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Russian security company Dr. Web has discovered a flaw in the Mac OS X, which enables hackers to control infected computers using a search service at Reddit. The company says at least 17,000 unique IPs have been hacked, mostly in the US.
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Amidst reports of high-profile hacks targeting major American entities, a top congressional lawmaker said this week that that the United States must act immediately to iron out offensive and defensive rules for the cyber realm.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Does ISIS pose a credible threat to the United States and its interests? And if so, what is the best way to manage that threat? If you had asked any politician in 2003, they most likely would have agreed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq under his reign posed a credible threat to the United States, and a 10-year war was started because of that belief.
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But now, with scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive US president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well, launching strikes not only on fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) but also on the Al Qaeda–linked Nusra Front and Khorasan.
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A long-term solution to terrorism will be a comprehensive battle against dangerous ideas that occupy minds of some youths in Middle East
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As Vice President Joe Biden warns it will take a “hell of a long fight” for the United States to stop militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we speak to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” We talk about how the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that helped create the threat now posed by the Islamic State. We also discuss the role of Baathist forces in ISIS, Obama’s targeting of journalists, and the trial of four former Blackwater operatives involved in the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square.
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That’s how the US government has found itself since George W. Bush started a “war on terror” by invading Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, dragging US allies into a “coalition of the willing” that got mired in two wars for over a decade. Barack Obama, vowing to end the long and costly conflicts, withdrew American troops from Iraq (in 2011) and scheduled a wind-down in Afghanistan this year.
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Have you ever considered what life would be like if attack drones were visible over New York, Omaha, Nashville, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver and San Francisco?
If our government were to deploy drones over American cities with the intent of targeting terrorists, what would our lives be like?
Would we be comfortable with robot death machines flying through the sky like in a Ray Bradbury novel?
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Oliver’s funny, angry piece is a great summary of the lawlessness of the US’s drone policy, going from President Obama’s ill-advised drone striking the Jonas Brothers joke in 2009, to the fact that “imminent threat” and “civilian casualty” mean whatever the government wants them to mean.
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Two U.S. presidents have authorized the use of drones to carry out attacks beyond armed conflict zones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The deaths of all persons from missile strikes is unlawful. The situation in Afghanistan is more complicated because it is the scene of a civil war. Because [ex-]President Karzai has demanded a zero civilian death rate and his policies are the only legitimate ones in the civil war, then civilian deaths are unlawful there, too. As for why international institutions have not done more, the U.S. has a veto that prevents the Security Council from taking up the matter.
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More than 2,000 people marched through London in the driving rain today, Saturday, against the bombing of Iraq.
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“The public won’t like it. They’ll think it’s a police state.”
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Transparency Reporting
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The National Security Agency (NSA) is probing an alert from cyber security experts on weaponised surveillance software used by Pakistan and Bangladesh intelligence to spy on computers and mobile phones used by Indian politicians, journalists and security establishments. Several computers and mobile phones have already been exposed. Following the most recent Wikileaks release titled ‘Spyfiles 4’ on surveillance malware FinSpy, cyber security experts here claim that several computers and mobile phones of important people could have been compromised, exposing a huge chink in Indian cyber space.
On September 15, Wikileaks released previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware, FinFisher, that had been used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others.Analysing the report in detail, cyber security experts at Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation (CSPF) here isolated records of Pakistan-based users, accessing FinFisher products to spy on Indians. “Several FinFisher products have been sold to a person/organisation in Pakistan.
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Does the CIA actually believe some sort of irreparable rift in the National Security Complex might occur if this dollar amount from three decades ago (unadjusted for inflation) was made public? Probably not. Aftergood theorizes that it’s a blanket exemption used to redact more sensitive dollar amounts and this innocent cost just became collateral damage during the rush to declassify several dozen documents in response to an FOIA lawsuit court order.
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Finance
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The announcement on Wednesday that the paper was slashing hundreds of jobs and retooling its troubled digital products was just the latest in a string of bad news for the Times in 2014.
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Prospective students in the United States who can’t afford to pay for college or don’t want to rack up tens of thousands in student debt should try their luck in Germany. Higher education is now free throughout the country, even for international students. Yesterday, Lower Saxony became the last of seven German states to abolish tuition fees, which were already extremely low compared to those paid in the United States.
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Deputy prime minister attacks his coalition partner’s austerity measures, and says ‘compassionate conservatism’ claim is dead
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Does social media dictate political discourse?
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A growing group of small cable-TV providers are realizing that both they and their customers can live without expensive TV channels.
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Censorship
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“I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.
Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA.”
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From an American legal perspective, the recently established European Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) is a disaster. It’s a confusing, vague, impractical and possibly even dangerous decision. But from a European historical perspective, it makes considerable sense.
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Privacy
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All the money being poured into the NSA (under the cover of darkness) over the past several years is paying off. Taxpayers who helped fund the NSA’s programs have the opportunity to pay even more money for the privilege of licensing the non-classified fruits of the agency’s labor.
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Given the government’s technological and legal power, it’s unclear that any social media network could ever really guarantee this first kind of privacy. Presumably there could be a breakthrough in cryptography that would allow for truly anonymous social networking–though this would provide a haven for the antisocial (stalkers, cybercriminals, etc.) as well as those who just don’t want the government to be rummaging through their email. Ideally, privacy-from-government would be restored with a Supreme Court decision that reaffirms that the Fourth Amendment means what it says: that government needs to have a reason to suspect you before it intrudes into your personal space.
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The letter suggests Google’s responsibility to celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Rihanna, Arianna Grande and others goes well beyond the call to scrub search engines. Google is also blamed for how it’s allegedly accommodating those using YouTube and Blogspot to post the offending images.
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“Bad things will be on the Internet, and Google offers a ‘Safe Search’ function if users would rather not be shown that type of content,” Gorup said.
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Interactive NSA Decoded explained implications of the Edward Snowden leaks on mass surveillance by intelligence agencies
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Intelligence service BND failed to protect the private data of German citizens as it handed over internet data collected at a Frankfurt traffic hub to the US, German media report citing secret documents.
The documents cited by VDR and EDR television and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the news together, were obtained from the federal government during an ongoing parliamentary investigation into US National Security Service spying on German soil.
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Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency has for years passed data on German citizens to the NSA, according to media reports. All data on Germans was previously said to have been filtered out.
From 2004 to 2008, raw data was siphoned from an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and forwarded to the NSA, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR reported on Friday.
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We’ve been told for a few years now that the Internet of Things — common household, industrial and public devices enabled with sensors — will transform how we work, play and interact with the world around us.
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In recent years, the line between the outer world and the one online has become increasingly blurred. Much of cyberspace has come to mirror the outer structures of power. There wouldn’t be anyone who understands the severity of the infiltration of these coercive powers in the digital space better than the man who had to live under constant threat of their force. Even before revelations of NSA mass surveillance, Julian Assange warned the world. In his 2012 book Cypherpunks, he said “the internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”. He further noted how the internet has become “a threat to human civilization” (p. 1).
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It was a rare and unnerving look at how the NSA really felt about spying on Americans: a smiley face drawn next to a plan to circumvent encryption in Google’s cloud.
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There is good reason to believe then, that the security establishment’s surveillance and monitoring plan, to the extent they even have one, not only isn’t working, but can’t work. If they are running a Panopticon it’s only a byproduct of the impossibility of their true goals, and therefore far less effective than it might be. It’s not difficult to peek behind the curtain to see the flaws in its inner workings and tailor one’s tactics accordingly. That few of us do so is more of a testament to the enormous weight of propaganda and indoctrination imposed by the media and school system than to any actual invulnerability of the surveillance state. When supposedly radical analysts take the propaganda at face value and repeat it the impact is doubled. After all, if one’s friends and one’s enemies are both telling the same story it must be true, right? Not necessarily. The first step in fighting the hopelessness machine is not believing everything it tells you. Or failing that, at least not repeating it…
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Public demand for action on privacy issues led Google to quickly announce that it, too, would offer smartphone users additional protection. The Washington Post notes that this “is part of a broad shift by American technology companies to make their products more resistant to government snooping.”
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Facebook is already a hotbed for your hypochondriac and conspiracy theorist friends to post poorly sourced or blatantly false medical information — like the bogus “Johns Hopkins Cancer Update” that pops up every few months — but the social network apparently wants to be more actively involved in the collecting and sharing of healthcare information to its users.
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Facebook is looking at users’ health care information as the new frontier and plans to create illness-based communities and health apps, according to a Reuters exclusive report.
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The ethical question is less what Snowden did than what the U.S. government has been doing.
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The Film Society at Lincoln Center has announced that on October 10, journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras’ documentary on Edward Snowden will be shown at Alice Tully Hall at 6 p.m. as part of the New York Film Festival. CITIZENFOUR is the third in Poitras’ trilogy about how America and the world have changed since 9/11 and will detail her interactions with Snowden, the man who released confidential security documents from the NSA and fled the country.Poitras was already making a film about the surveillance methods in the United States when Snowden contacted her online, wanting to share his story to the world. With two award-winning nonfiction films already released in the past few years, entitled My Country, My Country on the Iraq War and The Oath about Guantanamo, Poitras is no stranger to released hot-button films. Partnering with Glenn Greenwald, author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Poitras exchanged encrypted Internet messages with Snowden before meeting him in Hong Kong, the material exchanged there released to the world and erupted in a media and political firestorm in 2013. Her work has landed her film accolades, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and helped her win a Pulitzer. During her reporting on the subjects, Poitras found herself being targeted as a national security risk, her struggles to get the story and keep her sources safe informing her work in this newest film.
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Government data collection is scary for many reasons. But least understood: what it does to our personal creativity
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Edward Snowden is on the run from U.S. authorities after disclosing secret National Security Agency (NSA) programs involving the collection of telephone and email data to media outlets, including The Guardian and The Washington Post.
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Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of top secret documents including information about two U.S. monitoring programs, is among the nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
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Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is pushing a bill that would stop the National Security Agency from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, and he says he has the support of Republicans to pass it this year.
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If the Senate doesn’t pass the USA Freedom Act after the midterm elections, a key section of the Patriot Act could expire
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The USA FREEDOM Act as it stands will make Americans less safe while contributing little or nothing to their privacy. The bulk collection program the bill abolishes grew from a very real intelligence failure. In the run-up to 9/11, NSA intercepted calls to Yemen from a terrorist in San Diego, but in a costly deference to the civil liberties concerns of the 1990s, NSA had never developed a way to track calls back to the United States. The metadata program closed that gap.
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A career MI6 officer has been appointed as the new head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
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The Tory leader’s eagerness to brand not only miners’ leaders but the Labour party as enemies of democracy was a measure of her extremism and determination for class revenge
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If there was ever a seemingly unflappable group of individuals it is America’s librarians, who take the privacy of their patrons very, very seriously. Since the introduction of the Patriot Act the group representing our nation’s librarians has been fighting to protect its patrons from government intrusion.
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Thanks to Edward Snowden, it’s been revealed that the NSA is currently researching how to create its own quantum computer. Templeton takes solace in that information because it means that they don’t already have one. And, he points out, they may never have one. After all, the machine is only the stuff of theory at this point. If someone were able to build one, Templeton says we’d know of its existence thanks to the legions of panicking Wall Street executives.
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A new independent investigation by Flashpoint Global Partners (FGP) reveals that despite the claims by the National Security Agency (NSA), documents leaked by whistle blower Edward Snowden did not damage America’s National Security by alerting Al Qaida they were being spied on. There have been no real consequences and Al Qaida has not changed the way they communicate because of the leaks. Al Qaida changed the way they communicate long before the revelations by Snowden.
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But imagine for a moment you caught an FBI agent in the act of rummaging through your mail, and he explained to you that he wasn’t going to actually read the letters. He was only planning on making copies of your mail in case the FBI needs to read them at a later date.
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It doesn’t take an NSA spymaster to snoop on your digital doings. Thanks to a free software program, distributed by police departments all around the country, any creep with a basic knowledge of the Internet could be monitoring your children’s online activities.
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For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.
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The EFF has put together a rather astounding bit of investigative reporting, digging into a program called “ComputerCOP” that is apparently handed out (in locally branded versions) by various law enforcement agencies — generally local police, but also the US Marshals — claiming to be software to “protect your children” on the computer. What the EFF investigation actually found is that the software is little more than spyware with weak to non-existent security that likely makes kids and your computer a lot less safe. Aren’t you glad your tax dollars are being spent on it?
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Facebook just got a little more up in your business. Starting today, the ‘book will fully implement a new ad network called Atlas. In a spin it’s calling “people-based marketing,” Atlas will serve ads targeted to you based on your Facebook data. And, while it’s a Facebook property, Atlas will also serve up ads on non-Facebook sites.
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These installations can be used for a variety of crowd control tactics, including impersonation of lead officials within the group, as well as broadcasted statements that could fool less informed users into thinking that negotiations have been a fruitless endeavor, encouraging them to leave the front lines or even head back home.
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Former CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern spoke at Shasta College to a packed auditorium the evening of September 16. McGovern served for 27 years as an intelligence analyst in the CIA. He has now grown quite concerned about the overreach of our security apparatus as reflected in the title of his talk, “The surveillance state: Are freedom and security compatible?”
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Following its software-as-a-service rival Salesforce, Oracle has announced plans to open two new cloud datacentres in Germany which should be available for government and enterprise customers by the end of the year.
Oracle already announced late last year that one new datacentre in Germany would be operational by the second half of 2014, and while that hasn’t happened yet, the database giant — whose execs have been talking up its cloud credentials this week — announced that the number of facilities in Germany would be bumped up to two. One will be located in Frankfurt and another in Munich.
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The two new facilities, located in Frankfurt and Munich, will go live in the next few weeks and will be completely operational before the end of the year. They join the two other European countries that already have their own data centres, the UK and the Netherlands.
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Administration officials say they are sympathetic to U.S. cloud service providers’ concerns that data-localization requirements, other restrictive policies and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations cut off access to foreign markets.
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Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the Internet more anonymous.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit soon will hear argument over the merits of the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
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Even if there were evidence that a domestic spying program was unconstitutional, interference by the courts could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security, the government told a federal judge.
Urging U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to deny the plaintiffs partial summary judgment and instead rule for the government, the Monday filing from the Department of Justice says that the National Security Administration’s information-collecting techniques do not violate the Fourth Amendment.
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Gov. Brown signed into law Tuesday bipartisan legislation which bans the state from aiding the federal government in spying on Californians. The Senate Bill 828 was proposed by Senator Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. It will take effect January 1, 2015.
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California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a bill prohibiting the state from supplying “material support, participation, or assistance” in response to certain federal requests for metadata and electronic communications.
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Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web (sidebar: that was 25 years ago, can you believe it?!), wants to ensure that the internet is free from government (or corporate) intrusion.
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A recent news release advises us that the National Security Agency, in its infinite wisdom, has just appointed Anne Neuberger as the agency’s new “risk officer.”
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Apple is truly ramping up the PR machine and has even managed to get a few people in government to make some rather outrageous statements on the new phone and iOS 8. One of the new stories going around is about how the new iPhone and iOS8 are suddenly “NSA Proof” because they have added data encryption. The fallacy of this claim is almost beyond belief and shows once again that most in the technical press have absolutely no memory.
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Kill switch is a built in OS that gives companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) or Google (GOOGL) the power to access user data to get rid of malicious software. The companies can also access data stored on mobile devices through kill switch. Although this feature was created for security reasons, it is unclear whether the new encryption will prevent its access or not.
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Social network Ello is capitalizing on discontent with online advertising.
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Last week longtime local publisher Howard Owens, founder of the online news site the Batavian, launched a new publication covering Wyoming County in upstate New York. Buried in a parenthetical within his welcome message to readers was a fascinating promise: “We’ll also respect your privacy by not gathering personal data to distribute to multinational media conglomerates for so-called ‘targeted advertising.’”
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Ulbricht attorney Joshua Horowitz, in a new legal filing, wrote that the “explanation of how the FBI discovered the server’s IP address is implausible.” [PDF]
For starters, he said, the government has maintained no record of packet logs [PDF] of the FBI actually capturing leakage from the CAPTCHA.
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Federal authorities are pushing for new rules to force American-owned internet companies to open all electronic data to intelligence agencies regardless of geography, sparking privacy concerns for consumers abroad.
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Theo Sommer: Ten years ago relations between Germany and the United States were rather strained because of divergent views over the Iraq War. And we thought that we should try to make the Americans understand our point of view and vice versa make the Germans understand the American point of view. And our whole aim was to convince people that the German-American, and the European-American relationship for that matter, is far too important to be sacrificed to the vagaries of the one or the other difference we might have.
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Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the internet more anonymous.
They were viewed mostly as paranoid, weird and potentially criminal.
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This week on Four Corners, Frontline producer Martin Smith explores the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency, investigating how the Government and tech companies worked together to gather and warehouse data. That data includes the communication of Americans and anyone else who communicates via US data systems.
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While the newest Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) and Google Inc. (GOOGL:US) smartphones will automatically encrypt data stored on them, that won’t keep U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies from obtaining evidence linked to the devices.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed on Monday that the U.S. government has released new documents that showed a 1981 Executive Order (EO) as a basis for the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs.
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According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and discussed at length in a new post on the ACLU’s official blog by Alex Abdo (a staff attorney in the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project), most of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) authority to collect data and spy on both international and domestic targets is derived from Executive Order 12333 – signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
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If Americans want to understand how their government justifies sweeping intelligence-gathering measures, they need to familiarize themselves with a little-known executive order from the Reagan era: E.O. 12333.
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Neustar’s lobbying effort to stop a key federal number-portability contract from slipping away to Ericsson’s (NASDAQ: ERIC) Telcordia unit took another turn via a report sent to the FCC from Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security. The report, from Chertoff’s security consulting firm, the Chertoff Group, concluded that the bidding terms for the contract related to national security were “insufficient in both scope and specificity when compared with widely accepted national and international standards.”
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Thanks to some financial prompting and aligned priorities, the Chertoff Group (home of former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former NSA boss Michael Hayden) is sending a letter [pdf link] to the FCC in hopes of preventing control of a crucial cellphone number database from ending up in the hands of a foreign company.
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“Put money, national interest, and ego together, and now you’re talking about shaping the world writ large.”
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Today, our social media identities are deeply intertwined with our non-digital one, and the rise of social media has bred new kinds of problems. For Internet-goers, issues such as online privacy, Internet surveillance and data collecting have now become pertinent in their daily lives. It is in this climate of NSA snooping, data collecting and social media experimenting, that a new form of social networking has formed, an anonymous one.
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The second is the awareness on behalf of users that the information they are sharing online does not belong to them. There is a realization on the side of users that their online information is valuable to the government, data marketers and big corporations like Facebook. The latest examples are the online experiments conducted on behalf of Facebook in which the company tracked users’ emotions based on Facebook statuses. The same violation of privacy was seen with OkCupid where the dating site purposely set up bad matches in order to see how users would react to being mismatched.
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What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for… well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you’ve created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of “spycraft” gains its own name: LOVEINT.
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Secure collaboration firm Intralinks has launched new capabilities designed to allow its customers to unilaterally manage their own encryption keys, ensuring that any cloud-based data can’t be accessed without their permission.
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The Obama Administration might have to start letting people know when they’ve been flagged for terrorist connections based on information picked up from secret NSA spying programs.
That could potentially affect the tens of thousands of individuals on the government’s no fly list, as well as those people and groups that the Treasury Department designates as foreign terrorists, The New York Times reported yesterday.
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The National Security Agency is working to repair its fractured relationship with major tech companies following disclosures by former agency contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA had been secretly pulling data from company servers for surveillance purposes.
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Boiseans will be able to weigh in this evening on one of the most controversial issues of our times—the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities—when an attorney currently representing fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden comes to the Treasure Valley.
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Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will host a “Chairman’s Roundtable” on Oct. 8 to discuss the impact of mass surveillance by the government (through agencies like the NSA) on the digital economy.
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On Sept. 18, a San Diego judge denied technological entrepreneur Michael Robertson’s request to access his own license plate data from police scanners.
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The campaign aimed to raise $70.000 from their international community and privacy enthusiasts worldwide and €50.000 from their German supporters.
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Civil Rights
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Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder is perpetuating a bipartisan raid on privacy, reports The Washington Post. He’s calling on tech makers to provide “backdoors” to products and services so that law enforcement can route around encryption and get bad guys such as “kidnappers and sexual predators.”
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Democratic Governor Jerry Brown rejected a bill on Sunday that would have required law enforcement authorities to secure a court-issued warrant before they can fly unmanned aerial vehicles in most cases.
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The documents reveal a series of secret meetings that took place in hotels, airport lounges and restaurants from New York to Paris to Guadalajara and involved intermediaries like the chairman of Coca-Cola, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s representative, to Carter himself.
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The portraits also include NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. It also feature less prominent people in global struggles for freedom — people Ai says have been “forgotten by society.”
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Systemic issues might be too much for any one person
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Human rights abuses entrenched in legal system, with women facing flogging or jail for going about their daily lives
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It is, of course, very difficult to choose the single most extreme episode of misleading American media propaganda, but if forced to do so, coverage of the February, 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt would be an excellent candidate. For weeks, U.S. media outlets openly positioned themselves on the side of the demonstrators, depicting the upheaval as a Manichean battle between the evil despot Hosni Mubarak’s “three decades of iron rule” and the hordes of ordinary, oppressed Egyptians inspirationally yearning for American-style freedom and democracy.
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Say what you want, but one thing has become abundantly clear since the whole Ferguson debacle began: the people running and policing that city aren’t interested in your concerns. Throughout this entire process, the city and its police force have obfuscated the facts and people involved in the shooting of a civilian, they have cynically released information and videos when it suits them, and they’ve treated journalists covering the story with the kind of contempt they normally reserve for their own constituents. And now, utilizing a method previously beta-tested by both local and federal law enforcement agencies, they’ve decided the best way to respond to the ongoing outcry is to try to charge insane amounts for FOIA requests.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Marriott will cough up $600,000 in penalties after being caught blocking mobile hotspots so that guests would have to pay for its own WiFi services, the FCC has confirmed today. The fine comes after staff at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee were found to be jamming individual hotspots and then charging people up to $1,000 per device to get online.
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Hotel WiFi sucks. If you do any traveling, you’re aware of this. Though, from what I’ve seen, the higher end the hotel, the worse the WiFi is and the more insane its prices are. Cheap discount hotels often offer free WiFi, and it’s generally pretty reliable. High end hotels? I’ve seen prices of $30 per day or higher, and it’s dreadfully low bandwidth. These days, when traveling, I often pick hotels based on reviews of the WiFi quality, because nothing can be more frustrating than a crappy internet connection when it’s needed. But, even worse than the WiFi in your room, if you’re using the WiFi for a business meeting or event — the hotels love to price gouge. And, it appears that’s exactly what the Marriott-operated Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville did. Except, the company went one step further. Thanks to things like tethering on phones and MiFi devices that allow you to set up your own WiFi hotspot using wireless broadband, Marriott realized that some smart business folks were getting around its (absolutely insane) $1,000 per device WiFi charges, and just using MiFi’s. So, Marriott then broke FCC regulations and started jamming the devices to force business folks to pay its extortionate fees.
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DRM
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Apple will soon have to face a trial over accusations it used digital rights management, or DRM, to unlawfully maintain a lead in the iPod market, a federal judge has ruled. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing a class of consumers who bought iPods between 2006 and 2009, are asking for $350 million.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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For many years, we’ve written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization’s insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as “we own and control everything.” Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money
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Copyrights
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Under a new exception to copyright law, anyone will be able to make creative montage from existing material – as long as it is funny
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Mainstream Kiwi journalism in the wake of Dotcom, Assange, Snowden & Greenwald’s pre-election ‘Moment of Truth‘ event has fallen squarely along ideological lines.
The media have yet to give any serious consideration to the possibility of any new political paradigm outside of the left-right sphere in which they remain firmly entrenched. The results are predictable and must be challenged.
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Earlier this year, we noted a somewhat ridiculous and cynical attempt by some German newspapers to demand payment from Google for sending them traffic via Google News — and not just a little bit, but 11% of gross worldwide revenue on any search that showed one of their snippets. There were a few issues that we noted here: first, anyone not wanting to appear in Google News can quite easily opt-out. Second, Google News in Germany doesn’t show any ads. Third, those very same newspapers were using Google’s own tools to appear higher in search, suggesting that they certainly believed they were getting value out of being in Google’s index.
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A year ago, Techdirt wrote about a new unit set up by the City of London Police to tackle crimes involving intellectual monopolies. Since then, there have been a flood of posts about its increasingly disproportionate actions, including seizing domain names, shutting down websites, inserting ads on websites, and arresting someone for running an anti-censorship proxy. This makes a PCPro interview with the head of that unit, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Fyfe, particularly valuable, since it helps shed a little light on the unit’s mindset.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World Program, “an educational web series making computer science fun and accessible to all”. If it had been just that, I might not have been interested.
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Ugh, here we go again with the Windows versus Linux desktop blather. I hate having to wade through this stuff, but it’s necessary because articles like this continue to promote the idea that the desktop is of primary importance to Linux and that simply isn’t true. Usage habits have shifted considerably from desktop computers to mobile devices.
Linux will always be around on the desktop, it may or may not have a sizable percentage of market share, but it will always be there as an alternative to Windows and OS X. And Windows 10 (or 11 or 12 or 13) isn’t going to change that, no matter what Microsoft does to improve its desktop operating system.
The real action is in mobile devices and in that arena Linux has utterly smashed Windows and Microsoft into oblivion. You see Linux in Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, Kindle ebook readers and in many other devices. The article grudgingly notes the success of Linux in mobile at the very end but otherwise seems totally focused on a pointless desktop horse race between Linux and Windows.
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Server
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With CloudOpen Europe now less than two weeks away, we took another look at the data from the recent open cloud survey, conducted by Linux.com and The New Stack. Three surprising conclusions emerged that aren’t necessarily obvious on a quick read through the survey results.
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One company looking to benefit from this trend is Cumulus Networks. Cumulus does not produce or sell hardware, only a network operating system: Cumulus Linux. The Debian-based OS is built to run on whitebox hardware you can purchase from a number of partner Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs). (Their hardware compatability list includes a number of 10GE and 40GE switch models from different vendors.)
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The most obvious of these is the Linux operating system, used by almost all HPC systems. MPICH, OpenMPI, and their variants are examples of other open source tools that “facilitate scalable, distributed computing and have supported decades of research, including spinning off multiple derivatives that have made their way into commercial offerings by big name vendors such as Cray, IBM, and Intel,” says Schroeder.
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Kernel Space
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Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I’m also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won’t be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won’t be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn’t work, the number of fucks I’ll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.
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DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, “MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.”
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The primary reason behind using a procedural language like C for writing the Linux kernel was efficiency. However, this resulted in higher degree of dependencies (or coupling) among different parts of the Linux kernel and makes it difficult to maintain. A touch of object-oriented design may make things easier.
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Graphics Stack
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At FOSDEM on the 31st of january and the 1st of February 2015, there will be another graphics DevRoom.
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For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.
Using the Mesa 10.3 packages that recently landed in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn are some fresh benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 14.10 state but with switching to the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 4770K system with Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and 140GB Western Digital WD1500HLHX HDD. Ubuntu 14.10 was in its updated state as of a few days ago with Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.0, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, xf86-video-intel 2.99.914, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11. Mesa 10.3.0 was present while as said we upgraded to the Linux 3.17 Git kernel as Ubuntu 14.10 by default is shipping with Linux 3.16; there’s a few DRM driver improvements in 3.17 worth testing.
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One of the most frequent reasons we here when it comes developers not getting involved with the open-source Linux graphics driver development (or even just driver bug-fixing) comes down to the high barrier to entry due to a lack of comprehensive documentation, etc. As one step towards improving the driver documentation situation, Daniel Vetter has begun a long process of documenting the Intel (i915) DRM/KMS kernel driver.
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So far it looks like there’s just 2~3 women interested in the X.Org program but there’s also a lot of other projects involved for Phoronix readers that were assigned female at birth or anyone who identifies as a woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth.
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Benchmarks
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With the very latest development packages for Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21, here’s some new Linux benchmark results when running from the Core i7 5960X platform and using the new MSI X99S SLI PLUS.
The MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard played well with both Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 that are powered by the modern Linux 3.16 kernel. As a quick comparison just for kicks I ran some benchmarks using all of the same hardware and the stock settings for each of F21 and Ubuntu Utopic on this system with the latest packages as of yesterday~today.
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For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that’s what most Q4’2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here’s a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.
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Applications
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This is an overview of document viewers and e-book readers for Linux, but also several CHM viewers. Currently there are 8 applications reviewed here. Notice that I didn’t include ChmSee in this review, since it was announced that it is no longer maintained, and as such it doesn’t come included in the latest Ubuntu repositories (14.04).
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Calibre, the document viewer and organizer (also called an e-library), has received another major update today, just one week away after the 2.4 version was published on September 25. This version brings three new features and includes many bug fixes for the popular document viewer.
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Fotoxx is a free, open source Linux photo editing application that is appealing to both beginners and advanced users. A new update has been made available by the developer, bringing even more features and options.
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Proprietary
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Back in August I wrote about new software that claims to be 4.5x faster than QEMU for running Intel x86 binaries on ARM. That software is available today.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When you’re dealing with audio files, you’ll run into a few problems every so soften. This is especially true with voice recordings and audio that was converted to a digital format from a cassette tape or a vinyl record.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine development team was able to produce a new experimental release today. 1.7.28 bringing many new features and as many as 21 bugfixes.
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Games
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Pier Solar and the Great Architects is a 2D RPG originally made for the Sega Megadrive that went to Kickstarter to fund a HD version. The game is now available on Linux thanks to those who helped fund it.
I think it looks absolutely beautiful and it’s fantastic games like this are still being made.
The reviews are positive, so it’s looking like it’s being well received so far. They are putting up a demo too, but it seems it isn’t all there yet as it doesn’t download anything for me yet.
With 50+ hours of game-play this could be quite the winner. Lots of places to explore and lots of NPCs to talk to.
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This is now the second Linux port to use Virtual Programming’s eON porting technology and it works really well with Stronghold 3 Gold.
Before anyone decides to complain about it not being a fully native port, eON has come on immensely since The Witcher 2′s first version, and it shows. I’ve personally tested this port and found it to be acceptable, so I imagine a lot of others will.
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Here is the latest instalment of Steam’s Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.
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Play Linux is built on top of Ubuntu and because it utilises the Cinnamon desktop it is easy to install and easy to use.
Play Linux needs something to set it apart from Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Zorin and the way it is trying to do this is by providing the applications people want that aren’t ordinarily installed such as Steam, PlayOnLinux, Spotify and Minecraft.
I found Play Linux to be fairly stable although I had a few minor issues such as Spotify not working and my keyboard layout defaulting to US English despite choosing UK English during the installation.
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Just a few minutes ago Urban Terror 4.2.20 was released with a rather long list of bug fixes to the new mod introduced in 4.2.19, Freeze Tag.
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Just a few hours ago, the third installment of the Stronghold series, Stronghold 3, has been released on Steam for Linux too.
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Satellite Reign was funded on Kickstarter to create a game inspired by the classic Syndicate and it looks fantastic in the new footage.
The Kickstarter finished last year hitting a tidy £461,333. Linux wasn’t even a stretch goal which was fantastic to see at the time.
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I remember the days of old when “Linux has no games!” was a common argument against using it. Now with developers flocking to put Linux versions of games up on Steam we are seeing over 700!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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First of all, this post is not meant to criticize Qt in any way, just to raise some thinking points for people who create libraries.
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OSMhyd showing hydrants in Wennigsen (Deister) I’m one of those persons that always prefers a native application over some web stuff. Usually this comes from some things I want to have, may it be speed, offline capabilities or just hacking possibility. So as a long-time user and contributor of OpenStreetMap as well as an active firefighter I of course know about OpenFireMap. And of course I want a local version of it.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.14.1 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
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Muon has been a project that I’ve been very eager to port and iterate for a longtime. I’m happy with the 2.0 series, lots of changes were made and it has served us well. More importantly though, we have a solid technology to keep pushing our work on.
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Looking for the answer to a 64-bit build question I ran into a news item titled “The Unicorn Getting Interested in KDE“. Since I never saw an unicorn before this made me curious.
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I have been working on better ways to write asynchronous code. In this post I’m going to analyze one of our current tools, KJob, in how it helps us writing asynchronous code and what is missing. I’m then going to present my prototype solution to address these problems.
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Qt Developer Days Europe is next Monday to Wednesday in Berlin. It features tutorials and talks on making the most of the Qt toolkit most KDE Software is based upon. Since Qt opened up its development process a large part of KDE Frameworks development has been to ensure close cooperation between the two projects. This has succeeded spectaularly well and at this Qt Dev Days an incredible over 50% of the speakers are active or past developers with KDE.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.14 is now out. It’s a release full of polish from the desktop environment once preferred by most Linux distributions—and almost a story of redemption. After arguably losing its way around GNOME 3.0, GNOME is back with a vengeance.
GNOME Shell has matured immensely since their immature launch. Thanks to solid releases like GNOME 3.14, GNOME will once again be the default desktop on Debian, pushing out Xfce. GNOME 3’s “classic mode” offers enough familiarity to be the default desktop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, too.
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The open-source GNOME 3.14 desktop release is the second major update to the popular Linux user interface in 2014. Version 3.14, which the GNOME Project released Sept. 24, follows in the footsteps of GNOME 3.12, which debuted March 26. As was the case with GNOME 3.12, as well as GNOME 3.10, the emphasis is on the refinement of features and function as opposed to any larger-scale desktop overhaul. That doesn’t mean that there are not a whole lot of changes in GNOME 3.14. According to the GNOME Project, the new release includes 28,859 changes that 871 contributors made. While many of the changes are bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements, there are also a number of user-facing feature and function improvements. GNOME 3.14 offers a renewed emphasis on multi-touch capabilities, including improved gesture support. Window animations have also been improved giving the overall desktop more polish and refinement. Within GNOME, the included bundled applications also have been updated with the new release. Among the updated applications is the Maps tool, which now gains an integrated navigation capability. eWEEK looks at new and enhanced features in the GNOME 3.14 release.
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Ok, that’s just about it for the features of the manual partitioning tool. The next two screenshot shows what happened when I tried to install Netrunner Rolling 2014.09.1 on real hardware. The computer is an all-in-one system with a 320 GB hard drive. I had two Linux distributions installed in dual-boot mode on the hard drive, but the computer is my crash-and-burn system, so I didn’t have to keep whatever data was on it.
Everything I’ve written so far about the computer should tell you that it has existing partitions on it. However, when I started the installer and navigated to the manual partitioning tool, it failed to detect any partitions on the hard drive. In other words, it detected it as a brand new drive. I wasn’t about to create new partitions manually, so I tried the default automatic partitioning option.
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New Releases
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The developers from Black Lab have made available a new version of their Professional Desktop series. The 6.x branch is now out and packs a ton of new features. It’s designed more for stability than anything else and that can be easily observed from what packages have been included.
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OpenWrt is a GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices that has been designed to work on routers and a number of other platforms. It’s been under development for a long time and now the final version, 14.07, has been released.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has released Storage Server 3, which has 200 percent more storage capacity and better Hadoop integration, among other features. The company also plans to keep Inktank Ceph around for now.
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Here’s a list of activities and bugs fixed the KDE team has been working on the past month.
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Fedora
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Overall everything I’ve tried works fine. I like to get started with new Fedora releases as early as possible in the development cycle so I can help report any bugs I find (in Fedora provided packages) and be up-to-speed with all of the new features on release day so I can deploy to other machines immediately. I’ve been doing it that way for several releases now. I do really appreciate all of the work the Fedora developers put into each release.
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Debian Family
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Exactly 15 years ago I uploaded to Debian the first release of my whois client.
At the end of 1999 the United States Government forced Network Solutions, at the time the only registrar for the .com, .net and .org top level domains, to split their functions in a registry and a registrar and to and allow competing registrars to operate.
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Derivatives
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Knoppix, a bootable Live CD/DVD made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by automatic hardware detection and support for a large number of hardware devices, is now at version 7.4.2.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Netflix recently got in touch with the Ubuntu developers to ask them to update a library in the latest 14.04 LTS release that would allow for native playback on that platform. Now, it looks like they are also working on an app for Ubuntu Touch.
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The Ubuntu Touch platform is preparing for its release in December and it really needs a powerful ecosystem of apps to succeed. A Canonical representative has revealed just how fast a developer can submit an application to the store and how fast it will be available for download.
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This is a very useful method to employ if you forget your password and need access to the operating system
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Back in July 2013, Canonical proposed a new type of smartphone, an extremely powerful device that would be built with the best the industry had to offer at that point. It’s safe to say that it attracted a lot of attention and that people keep wondering if there still is a chance to see something like it.
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Ubuntu MATE is a new flavor based on Ubuntu that will see an official launch alongside all the other regular ones on October 23, and it’s very likely that it will steal the show.
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system has just received a new RTM branch and the developers are working hard to provide a stable and good operating system. We’ve put together a video tour of Ubuntu Touch.
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IBM today is expanding its POWER8 server lineup as part of the company’s continuing effort to provide a competitive alternative Intel x86-based server systems.
The Power8 silicon and server system first debuted in April. One of the new systems is the IBM Power S824L server.
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Flavours and Variants
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The 2013, or Luna, version of Elementary OS is a very solid Linux distro. Its pending replacement, Elementary OS Freya version, will push the unique desktop design to a new level of dependability. However, one question left unanswered is whether this new Linux distro will give seasoned Linux users enough configurability to be more than just a pretty desktop face.
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Elementary OS is a Linux distribution that has been making waves as of late. For a lot of people, including our own Akshata, it made them switch to Elementary OS full-time from Windows. However, the latest stable release, “Luna”, is becoming quite old. Now, we’re getting a glimpse at the first beta of the next released, codenamed “Freya”.
What’s new in Freya, and is it worth upgrading or switching to it from other distributions? Let’s take a look.
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elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution that you will either adore or on the other hand, find isn’t for you. Fast, tight and favouring beauty and a logical simplicity over the ability to customize every little thing, eOS takes a different approach to many Linux distributions. In this article we shall take a look at elementary OS Freya Beta 1, a preview of the upcoming Freya release.
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Atmel is sampling a Linux supported, Cortex-A5 based SAMA5D4 SoC that bests the earlier SAMA5D3 with new NEON, L2 cache, 720p decode, and security features.
Atmel announced the SAMA5D4 system-on-chip at ARM TechCon 2014, which is underway this week in Santa Clara, Calif. The SAMA5D4, builds upon the foundation of the earlier SAMA5D3 SoC, and similarly uses ARM’s Cortex-A5 processor. It supports Internet of Things (IoT) applications including control panels, communication gateways, and imaging terminals, says Atmel. The SAMA5D4 is supported with an Atmel Xplained development kit, as well as a mainline Linux BSP, with Android support coming in December.
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Google Glass wasn’t the first eyewear computer, but it achieved several technological breakthroughs, especially in its sleek, lightweight construction. The much maligned device has spawned a growing industry of head-mounted smart eyegear. Our slide show of 11 Android and Linux eyewear devices includes simple Bluetooth accessories for notifications, full-fledged industrial headgear, sports gear for bikers and skiiers, and even a motorcycle helmet (click Gallery link below).
Like Glass, eight of the 10 other devices listed in our slide show are based on Android, while two — Laforge’s ICIS and Tobii Glasses 2 — use embedded Linux. Almost all the devices are open for pre-orders at the very least, and most are shipping, although sometimes only in beta form. Several are OEM-focused devices. Glass only recently became publicly available for $1,500, and sales are still controlled by Google, with restrictions in terms of age (18+) and a requirement that you live in the US or UK.
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The world’s favorite abortive mobile operating system, webOS, refuses to go away quietly. After being open-sourced by HP and then sold off to LG, webOS is now apparently returning to mobile devices in the form of a new LG SmartWatch. A developer website hosted by LG teases a software development kit for a webOS SmartWatch, while the familiar Bean Bird from LG’s webOS TVs also shows up, this time supporting a classically styled analog wristwatch.
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LinkSprite unveiled a “pcDuino Acadia 1″ SBC that runs Linux or Android on a 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 Quad SoC and features eMMC flash and dual microSD slots.
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Using input device / control events in the Tizen Linux they were able to control mouse and keyboard events. You can charge the Tizen phone when it is place inside the robots head, and notifications messages are displayed in the robots LCD screen. You can also perform file transfers between devices and even use the robot as a media output device.
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We have discovered another Linux computer module, the HummingBoard from Israeli firm SolidRun.
The HummingBoard allows you to run many open source operating systems – such as Ubuntu, Debian and Arch, as well as Android and XBMC.
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Phones
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Android
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By all accounts, Android L’s release is coming soon, perhaps even this month (or in November). We’ve known for months what Google wants its next mobile OS version to look like, since the company’s already presented its new Material Design. But what about the different phone makers? They’ve so far gotten used to modifying the looks of stock Android quite a lot, so it’s interesting to see how they’ll approach this version.
And now we can get a look at what Samsung’s interpretation of Android L will look like, as someone got their hands on a pre-release build of the new OS for the Galaxy S5. This build is said to be very slow and buggy, so there’s clearly a lot of work that Samsung still has to do (and this is the reason why it hasn’t been made available for download).
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A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google tried to buy Cyanogen, Inc, the maker of the custom Android ROM CyanogenMod. According to the report, Cyanogen’s chief executive told shareholders that Sundar Pichai, the head of Chrome and Android at Google, met with the company and “expressed interest in acquiring the firm.” The report says Cyanogen Inc. declined the offer, saying that it was still growing.
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I have somewhat mixed feelings about Android One, but I can completely understand why Google has created it and why it’s so important to them. It might help them maintain and grow profits by making sure that their applications and services are in as many Android devices as possible. Google is a publicly traded company so they have a responsibility to maximize profit for their shareholders.
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Nvidia announced that its Tegra SoC will run Android on a newly tipped Honda Connect IVI system in 2015 Honda Civic, Civic Tourer, and CR-V cars in Europe.
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A startup that distributes smartphone software based on Google’s Android mobile operating system recently drew attention from Google’s rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo. Now it’s gotten Google’s attention, too.
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As you may have noticed, the Next Big Thing is the Internet of Things. It’s certainly true that in addition to computational capabilities, connectivity is also being added to an ever-wider range of everyday objects. On the other hand, in the light of Snowden’s leaks about pervasive surveillance of our online activities, you might have thought people would be a little more cautious about wiring up even more of their lives.
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In a discussion that will sound familiar to Australian readers, US military development agency DARPA wants to create provably-secure software.
According to Threatpost, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar told a Washington Post security conference that embedded systems are among the kinds of applications for which it’s feasible to create such OSs.
[...]
In July of this year, NICTA open-sourced the code for its seL4 microkernel, identifying DARPA among the software’s users.
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An open source approach to software-defined networking (SDN) moved several steps closer this week to becoming a de facto standard. Here are the details.
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Zentyal is one solution. Zentyal Community Edition is a free, open-source all-in-one server that includes all of the features listed above. Plus, you get Samba4 integration, so it’s a perfect replacement for that aging Active Directory server. One of the best parts about Zentyal is that you can take advantage of less powerful hardware. Even though there’s a graphical interface, the server is fully administered via a web browser (which means you can manage it from anywhere on your network).
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ARM hasn’t been paying attention. While the rest of the world has turned to open source for essential infrastructure software, ARM’s Mbed operating system for the Internet of things (IoT) is proprietary, with just enough open source sprinkled in to attract developers.
ARM insists this is necessary to prevent Mbed from becoming fragmented, which is a reasonable concern. What may not be reasonsable, however, is relying on a proprietary operating system to dominate IoT.
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Ericsson is resurrecting its WebRTC-based browser, Bowser, to help spark the development of more websites and apps that embrace voice, video and messaging features.
WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) is a technology designed to help developers add real-time communications features to Web browsers and apps via JavaScript APIs.
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The type of license you choose for your open-source project is paramount. Some licenses are very rigid, while others are more flexible. It is advisable to tap into the developer community for their feedback to find out what will work best for your target audience.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Google has has achieved more success than many people thought it would with its Chromecast dongle, which performs many of the tasks that set-top boxes do, but the Chromecast dongle is headed for some competition. And, given the historical competition between the Chrome and Firefox browsers, it’s fitting that the dongle that is poised to compete with Chromecast is based on the Firefox OS.
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SaaS/Big Data
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TokuMX is a MongoDB distribution from TokuTek, a company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA).
TokuMX is a drop-in replacement for MongoDB, the most popular NoSQL database. It is to MongoDB what MariaDB is to MySQL.
TokuMX is said to offer 50x performance improvements and 90% reduction in database size over MongoDB. And it has support for ACID transactions and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC).
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Interested in building an open source cloud using the latest and greatest that OpenStack has to offer? You’re not alone. We’ve collected some of the best howtos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection. Take a look, get ready to learn, and when you get stuck, remember that he official documentation for OpenStack is your friend, too.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Seriously? Quickly, am I the only one who laughs when I hear the words Oracle OpenWorld spoken aloud, the name of Oracle’s conference now being held in San Francisco? Can I at least see a show of hands of people who find this expo’s name even the slightest bit ironic?
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BSD
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GhostBSD 4.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64 and i386 architectures, it GhostBSD 4.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via SourceForge or TorrentFTP as described in the section below.
MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISOs and memory stick images are included the bottom of this message and in Download page.
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GhostBSD 4.0 highlights include replacing GCC with the LLVM/Clang compiler by default (as many other BSDs are also doing), make has been replaced by NetBSD’s bmake, pkg is now the default package management utility, NetworkManager is enabled by default, and MATE is now the default desktop environment. This is a pretty big shake-up for the GhostBSD 4.0 release codenamed Karine.
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Public Services/Government
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The German city of Hamburg should do like Munich, and switch to open source, says the city’s Alliance ’90/The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). Switching to free and open source software enables innovation and increases security, and the city administration should emphasise this when selecting ICT solutions. “We want to lead by example”, says Farid Müller, spokesperson for the party in Hamburg. “We want an exit strategy for proprietary software used by Hamburg’s administration.”
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Hamburg’s local Green party has expressed that it wants to see the city follow the lead of Munich by adopting free and open source software. Citing innovation and increased security, the Greens want to make sure that the city has an ‘exit strategy’ from using proprietary software.
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An open source solution developed for the government of South Tyrol (Italy) to automatically test government websites and services is now also being used to probe sites of the region’s tourism sector. The software will help avoid double bookings and lower the costs of building and maintaining tourism portals, the government expects.
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The Italian city of Genoa will continue to use open source where possible, says the city councillor responsible for IT, Isabella Lanzone. A pilot with Linux PCs is underway and the city is also gradually moving to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools that is being installed side by side with a aged version of the ubiquitous proprietary alternative.
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Openness/Sharing
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A new Google project aims to create nothing less than an open standard for the entire “Internet of Things,” which the company’s Chrome team is calling the Physical Web.
The idea is to create a comparatively simple system, using a subscribed discovery service, of beacons broadcasting URLs to smartphones in a given area, allowing users to interact with vending machines, posters, and bus stops in a location-aware, organic way, using only Bluetooth and web technology – no specialized app required.
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Open Hardware
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A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.
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Arduino may be known for revolutionizing open source hardware platforms, but this week enters the 3D printer market with the small and (relatively) affordable Materia 101. Produced in partnership with fellow Italian company Sharebot, the printer is targeted towards educators, beginners, consumers, and makers.
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Programming
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Frank Karlitschek, the founder of the ownCloud project, is making the case that PHP isn’t that bad of a scripting language and should be taken to the next level with its shortcomings addressed so it can regain some of its popularity.
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Former close associates from within Kagame’s inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda’s economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda’s president.
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Science
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When a honeybee stings, it dies a gruesome death. The bee’s stinger is structured in such a way that once it punctures human skin, the bee can’t yank it out without self-amputating. As the honeybee tries to pull out the stinger, it ruptures its lower abdomen, leaving the stinger embedded, pulling out instead a string of digestive material, muscles, glands and a venom sac. What results is a gaping hole at the end of the abdomen.
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The person who runs the American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market lobbying group that opposes policies to fight climate change, is not sure whether humans actually cause climate change, according to an interview with the National Journal published Wednesday.
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Security
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Many Phoronix readers likely heard of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and other hosting providers rebooting their clouds in recent days as a result of a Xen security issue. If you’re not yet familiar with this XSA-108 security issue, our friends at Xen Orchestra have a nice write-up covering the issue.
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It hasn’t been a good year for open source. Not for its generally golden reputation for software quality and security, anyway. But in a rush to lay blame for the Bash Shellshock vulnerability (and previously for Heartbleed) some, like Roger Grimes, want to dismantle some of the cardinal tenets of open source, like the suggestion that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Months before the U.S. started bombing Syria, American commandos made detailed plans to hit al Qaeda planners there. But the targeting packages weren’t even sent to the White House.
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Inspectors had found that outdated tools were being used to dismantle ammunitions and that explosives were not being stored properly, the labour ministry said. It has now closed the plant, where 150 people worked.
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America has been at war since the “War that will end all wars” or World War I…
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KILIS, TURKEY- Syrians fleeing their homes have suffered nearly four years of devastating civil war and now a U.S.-led coalition is launching airstrikes on jihadists in their country. But at least 20 non-combatants appear to have been killed in the early raids and civilians seeking sanctuary in Turkey are asking why.
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Islamabad High Court (IHC) has directed the petitioner to attach all the record of decisions given by Peshawar High Court and IHC in drone attack cases with the petition filed by him for registration of murder case against former president Pervez Musharraf in respect of people killed in drone strikes.
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A petitioner Mian Zahid Ghani here on Wednesday filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court (IHC) for the registration of an FIR against former President General (retd) Pervez Musharraf for allowing US drones to operate in Pakistan.
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Stephen Harper’s heritage minister, Shelly Glover, says the Islamic State “are people who are violent and brutal and they have decapitated journalists, they have raped and brutalized women. That is all we need to know…” in order to start bombing. With respect, let me suggest what else we might need to know.
Harper himself, who’s been channelling his inner Churchill (“when we think something is necessary and noble we don’t sit back and let others do it”), lacks Churchill’s direct experience of war. When he was young, in Sudan, Churchill felt the “exhilaration” of being shot at and missed. He didn’t experience the obverse (being killed) but that’s what made a lot of upper-class Brits effective officers and war-makers: their snobby sense of invulnerability.
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The Obama Administration has acknowledged that its strict policy of preventing civilian deaths does not apply to American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
The statement confirming the loosening of high standards pertaining to minimizing collateral damage comes amid reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a Syrian village.
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A familiar critique of corporate media is that journalists too often avoid discussing one grim reality of US wars: the innocent civilians who die from American bombs and missiles. But one Fox News regular isn’t ducking the issue: Not only is he not afraid to talk about civilians deaths in Syria–he complains that there aren’t enough of them.
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The North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, Chapter 45 of Veterans for Peace and the House of Peace will sponsor a protest against the U.S. use of drones to attack and kill and for surveillance in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other parts of the world 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the intersections North Main, South Main, Central and Market streets Saturday, Oct. 4.
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In a perverse way, maybe it’s progress that the US is now admitting that it doesn’t really care about how many civilians it kills in its efforts to “decapitate” a few suspected terrorist leaders.
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The statement coincided with the heaviest attacks so far in the air war in Syria and Iraq, with US and allied countries launching 24 strikes, 12 in each country on Tuesday, with British warplanes making their first attacks.
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Yahoo News reported Tuesday that Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told the news outlet that a standard imposed last year by President Obama, which requires “near certainty” that civilians will not be harmed in drone strikes, does not apply to the expanding war on Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Iraq and Syria.
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A man convicted on several charges resulting from a drone protest last year was sentenced in DeWitt Town Court Wednesday evening.
Jack Gilroy, 79, was sentenced by Justice Robert L. Jokl Jr. to 90 days incarceration in the Onondaga County jail and three years probation in Broome County, where he resides. Jokl also fined Gilroy $1,000.
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Peace activist Mary Anne Grady-Flores is out on bail pending an appeal of her conviction for violating a court order of protection set up for the commander of Hancock National Guard Air Base in Dewitt. She was arrested in February while protesting at the base, where weaponized drones are piloted by remote control to target and kill people on the ground in Afghanistan.
She has been an activist for decades and now sees the connections among many injustices. “The issue of what’s being done to people of color here and around the world, and to the poor, it’s all related,” she said. “Drone warfare intersects with the militarization of the police. [Using drones] is the same as us being global cops.
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Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner charged in an emotional address that domestic and US interests were pushing to topple her government, and could even kill her.
Domestic business interests “are trying to bring down the government, with international (US) help,” she said.
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Ashraf Ghani, the newly inaugurated Afghan president, has signed a bilateral security agreement(BSA) with the US to allow US troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014 when the present agreement will expire.
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The very first act of the unity government of Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah was to soothe frayed American nerves and sign the Bilateral Security Agreement. Hamid Karzai, erratic to the very end, had eventually left the decision to his successor. This is why the US was so involved in hashing out an agreement between Ghani and Abdullah over the disputed election. It was worried about the possibility that the agreement would not be signed before the troop withdrawal began at the end of the year. The BSA itself, and a similar agreement with Nato, is hardly what either Afghanistan or the US needs. It would extend what is already the longest war the US has ever fought by another 10 years. US troops, ostensibly staying on to train the Afghan army and security forces, will still control all their bases in the country. Most scandalously, these troops will have immunity from prosecution under Afghan law. It was that very point which scuppered a similar agreement when the US withdrew from Iraq – and it should have signalled the death of the BSA too. US troops have killed and tortured their way through the country, indefinitely holding thousands of Afghan citizens in secret prisons without charge. They can now continue doing that with impunity till 2024.
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I won’t say that drones have not killed militants. But was that worth taking hundreds of other lives? Was there no other alternative? North Waziristan is an area where there is no major war or military offensive going on. They could have used assassins with precise ground intelligence to find militants without indiscriminately bombarding areas and causing civilian causalities. Such attacks are helping create dozens of suicide bombers, including young girls and women. These attacks are also creating local facilitators, collaborators and sympathizers against those who are supporting or siding with this senseless war on terrorism.
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American drone strikes have killed over 2000 people, many of whom were civilians and children.
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Transparency Reporting
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A few days ago, we wrote about the CIA redacting information regarding the price it paid for a single Amiga computer back in 1987. After such news reports came out, the CIA admitted that this was an error and shouldn’t have been redacted. Of course, the only reason the documents with that information came out in the first place was because of the efforts of former CIA agent Jeffrey Scudder, who had come across a bunch of classified documents internally that he realized should no longer be classified. Based on that, he filed a FOIA request for those documents — leading the FBI to come after him and end his CIA career (despite his actions being entirely legal).
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The inspector general for the CIA conducted a review of whether the agency was keeping information secret that should be public and found “no instances of over-classification.”
The Reducing Over-Classification Act, signed into law on October 7, 2010, requires the inspector general for each United States department or agency with an officer who makes classification decisions to evaluate whether information is being appropriately classified. The inspector general is also to assess policies, procedures, rules, regulations, etc, to reduce “persistent misclassification of material.” This is to be done in “consultation” with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).
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Finance
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Naturally, the most striking feature of this particular fat finger is its size: $600 billion, bigger than Sweden’s economy ($552 billion). The second unusual aspect is that this error cancelled sales by mistake, rather than make them. That was fortunate for the company concerned, since it probably limited the damage caused.
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As for being “against doing programs for the poor,” that was one of the knocks on Ryan’s budget proposals that made him a national star even before he was named Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate. This characterization of Ryan’s policies was, as his critics often pointed out, accurate; his plans called for deep cuts in spending paired with tax breaks for the wealthy.
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Privacy
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The ECtHR has recognised the importance of this case by giving it priority status. The case is currently adjourned pending judgment in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) case brought by other human rights NGOs. We expect it to proceed in 2015 following the judgment in the IPT case.
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The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.
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After enduring a tumultuous cooling period in August, Darkcoin’s prospects were beginning to look up. Kristov Atlas’ review of Darkcoin’s source code was mostly positive, and developer Evan Duffield announced Darkcoin would soon become open-source. Moreover, the Darkcoin price increased during the first half of September. After declining a bit from its mid-month highs, the Darkcoin price rallied before Darkcoin’s open-source release. However, the Darkcoin price has declined since the actual release. Nevertheless, Darkcoin investors should not panic-sell yet.
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Norwegian Nobel Committee will soon decide this year’s winner of the peace prize from a list of nominees including Edward Snowden, Jose Mujica and the International Space Station partnership. Who would you add to the list?
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More law enforcement officials are coming forward to express their dismay at Apple’s and Google’s decision to encrypt cellphones by default. And the hysteria seems to be getting worse. As was recently covered, FBI director James Comey stated that no one was above the law, while failing to realize there’s actually no law preventing Apple or Google from doing this.
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Civil Rights
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Numerous alternative media outlets, including WikiLeaks, have pointed out the connections between Occupy Central and the United States government through an organization called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). I am not surprised at this, nor do I welcome it, given the United States’ questionable record (to put it nicely) at bringing “democracy” to countries where it has intervened in the past. It is most likely in Hong Kongers’ best interests that the US withdraw its monetary support for Occupy Central, as unlikely as this is to happen.
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Sparking a controversy, singer K.J. Yesudas on Thursday resented women wearing jeans, saying this went against Indian culture.
“Women should not cause trouble to others by wearing jeans,” Mr. Yesudas said at a function organised by a voluntary organisation in connection with Gandhi Jayanti celebrations in Thiruvananthapuram.
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Amiran Natsvlishvili is not complaining about the kidnapping. Nor about the brutal beatings, or the huge ransom his family had to pay for his release. The former managing director of a state car plant in Georgia is not bitter, either, about the accusations of embezzlement and misuse of public funds.
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The European Commission, NATO’s neighbour in Brussels, has a code of conduct barring former commissioners from lobbying the EU’s executive body for 18 months after leaving office.
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America’s forever war has come to this — the front lawn of the White House may become a kill zone. That’s crazier than whatever prompted Iraq war veteran Omar J. Gonzalez to jump the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue two weeks ago, running for the Oval Office.
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A radical Muslim cleric who bought plane tickets for three of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers was communicating with the FBI for years afterward as a likely informant.
Newly released internal documents indicate that Anwar al-Awlaki, also known as the “bin Laden of the Internet,” was emailing and leaving voicemails with an FBI agent in 2003 and 2004, after having been captured at JFK International Airport in 2002 but released at the instruction of the agency.
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Earlier this year, I published an article called “Folk International Law,” in which I argued that there were many unappreciated and little understood costs to the convergence of LOAC and international human rights law. I suggested that the legal debate over targeted killing had driven US-based human rights advocates to contribute to and participate in a bizarre legal admixture of IHRL, IHL and jus ad bellum in order to attempt to impose some legal regulation on the seemingly extra-legal lethal strikes on targets outside of situations of armed conflict. I suggested that many lawyers seeking to influence the Obama administration’s decisions had accepted an approach to global NIAC that treated distinct bodies of international law as a policy toolkit that could be used to create “folk international law” norms that were not recognizable to most international lawyers outside of the immediate US conversation.
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Summer 2014: a year since George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin. Another summer of violence and justification: US shells incinerating Palestinian children, devastating UN refuges in Gaza, pounding Afghan villages, again. Another trial of another white man who says he was scared, who had to defend himself with a blast of ammunition against an unarmed black teenager – a womanchild this time, 19, in Michigan this time, shot through a locked screen door. Another police killing on the front pages of the New York tabloids: a big man, a black father, put in a choke hold, kneed in the back as he gasped for air, as he told cops he couldn’t breathe; extinguished for passing a cigarette to someone on a street in Staten Island. He may have been selling looseys, police said, and he refused to submit; they had to bring him down. Then they watched as he expired. “The perpetrator’s condition did not seem serious,” one stated.
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Dozens of soldiers were killed and more than 70 wounded in car bomb attacks and clashes between troops and Islamists around Benghazi airport, a Libyan army spokesman said today, as the UN threatened sanctions.
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Is the Obama regime preparing for mass arrests of American civilians? Some indicators suggest this is a real possibility.
It has all the laws it needs to imprison anyone should it plan to make mass arrests (thanks, Congress, for the unconstitutional Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act).
It has illegally compiled lists of some 8 million names, (thank you, FBI and NSA).
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Okay, so we thought the response from San Diego’s District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis was pretty bad to the revelations about ComputerCOP. After all, she was responding to the news that she had purchased and distributed dangerous spyware masquerading as software to “protect the children” — and the best she could come up with was that her “security” people still thought it would protect kids? But apparently Damanis has nothing on Sheriff Mike Blakely of Limestone County, Alabama.
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Limestone County’s Sheriff is clashing with an activist group over a new computer program to protect children online.
Sheriff Mike Blakely started offering the program “Computer Cop” for parents to better protect their kids from predators or inappropriate websites.
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