02.21.14

Links 21/2/2014: Screenshot Galleries

Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• Robolinux 7.4.1

• SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3

• Bridge 2014.02 GNOME

• GParted 0.18.0-1 Screenshot Tour

• Slackel 6.0 Beta 1 (Openbox) Screenshot Tour

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Police and Army: Not Protecting and Not Serving Ordinary People

Posted in News Roundup at 10:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Domestic and foreign abuses of power; examples from recent weeks for police and from the past 24 hours for the army/secret agencies

Police

• No bond for elderly Sebring woman who repeatedly fed bears

  Neighbors say Mary Musselman has been feeding backyard animals as long as they can remember.

  “She fed the squirrels, the birds, strays and that was in the community. She’s just always been that kind of soul,” says neighbor Patty Palmer.

• Stop Resisting Execution: Cold-Blooded Arizona Cops Assassinate Suspect with His Hands in the Air

  For absolutely no reason other than “because they could”, cops in Pinal County, Arizona executed a suspect who was standing there, not near any of the officers, with his hands in the air, offering no threat whatsoever. Without trial, judge, or jury, they simply assassinated the man, as his family looked on in horror. Warning: There is some graphic violence in the video below.

• Woman Collapses in Courthouse, Dies, Attorney Says She Was Stressed By Commando-Style Raid on Her Home, Husband’s Arrest

  Stacey Feigel’s husband, Sheldon, is facing multiple felony counts related to an alleged scam involving filing fraudulently for adverse possession on abandoned homes. While arriving in court for a hearing, Stacey collapsed from a “cardiac event” (according to the coroner) and died. Attorney Mark Coleman suggested stress from the raid and arrest could have led to her death.

Panic

• Noam Chomsky: Why Americans Are Paranoid About Everything (Including Zombies)

  I’ve never seen a real study, but my guess is that it’s a reflection of fear and desperation. It’s a very frightened country. The United States is an unusually frightened country. And in such circumstances, people concoct either for escape or maybe out of relief, fears that terrible things happen.

• Former CIA operative: Shoe bomb technology getting better

• US Officials Warn of Airline Shoe Bomb Threat

Foreign Policy

• New Jet-Powered Drone Can Kill 1,800 Miles From Home Base

  The U.S. may be forced to withdraw troops completely from Afghanistan by the end of the year. That’s bad news if you’re the CIA and your lethal drone flights over neighboring Pakistan rely on the close proximity of Afghan airstrips.

  Not surprisingly, the defense industry has already produced a solution: a new jet-powered drone that can range 1,800 miles from the nearest base.

• Drone attacks

  As Spencer Ackerman, National security reporter, said “it’s just so little transparency and so much opacity when it comes to Drones, belonged to CIA; if it were military then you could at least get the insight as how it works and debate about whether it should run this way”. With his comment on Drones dilemma, CIA is not required to give any information on any drone operations. They do not officially discuss drone programme, as Spencer Ackerman mentioned.

• Why a Pakistani reporter is suing the CIA for murder

  Kareem Khan’s son and brother died in a US drone strike. His lawsuit has made waves in Pakistan and overseas, and he was recently detained for nine days.

• Valley View: Drone strikes have psychological and moral impact

  A year ago, 8-year-old Nabeela ventured outside while her 68-year-old grandmother picked vegetables in their family garden. Moments later, the grandmother was blasted to pieces by two U.S. drone missiles. Nabeela and other nearby grandchildren were injured when the exploding missile lodged shrapnel in their bodies.

  No one is alleging the grandmother did anything wrong. Her fatal “mistake” was living in North Waziristan, a region in Pakistan pummeled by U.S. drone strikes (Amnesty International, Nov. 13).

• Report: U.S. drone strike may have killed up to a dozen civilians in Yemen

  A U.S. military drone strike in Yemen in December may have killed up to a dozen civilians on their way to a wedding and injured others, including the bride, a human rights group says. U.S. officials say only members of al-Qaida were killed, but they have refused to make public the details of two U.S. investigations into the incident.

• The American on Obama’s ‘Kill List’ Doesn’t Pose An Imminent Threat

  Last week I wrote about the news that the Obama administration is considering whether to assassinate another American citizen in a drone strike. The Associated Press reported the target is an American citizen and member of al-Qaeda, “and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year.”

• The Men We Kill, and the Men We Don’t

  The story told by the report is one of disputed identity. Anonymous US officials have said all of the twelve men killed were militants traveling with Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, allegedly a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the primary target of the strike. Officials say al-Badani was wounded, and escaped. Relatives of the dead say they didn’t know him.

• Jon Stewart Calls Obama the ‘Barry Bombs of Drone Strikes’

• Jon Stewart: President Obama Is Like ‘Barry Bombs’ of Drone Strikes

• Jon Stewart Compares Obama’s Drone Program With Bush’s Torture Policy

• Lithuania opens probe into CIA ‘black site’ allegations

  Lithuanian prosecutors said on Thursday they have opened an investigation into claims that a Saudi terror suspect was held in an alleged secret CIA jail in the Baltic state, reports LETA/AFP.

• Lithuania prosecutors to reopen probe into alleged CIA rendition of Saudi terror suspect

• Kevin Costner’s ’3 Days to Kill’: CIA hitman as sitcom dad

  Sitcom and sadism mix uncomfortably in Luc Besson’s “3 Days to Kill,” starring Kevin Costner as a CIA hitman and absentee father.

• Why Amazon’s Collaboration with the CIA Is So Ominous — and Vulnerable

  As the world’s biggest online retailer, Amazon wants a benevolent image to encourage trust from customers. Obtaining vast quantities of their personal information has been central to the firm’s business model. But Amazon is diversifying — and a few months ago the company signed a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide “cloud computing” services.

  Amazon now has the means, motive and opportunity to provide huge amounts of customer information to its new business partner. An official statement from Amazon headquarters last fall declared: “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”

  The Central Intelligence Agency has plenty of money to throw around. Thanks to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we know that the CIA’s annual budget is $14.7 billion; the NSA’s is $10.8 billion.

  The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is bullish on the company’s prospects for building on its initial contract with the CIA. As you might expect from a gung-ho capitalist with about $25 billion in personal wealth, Bezos figures he’s just getting started.

• Former CIA official accused of misleading lawmakers on Benghazi

• Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden Criticize the “Decline” of US Democracy

• Chelsea Manning rewarded for integrity in intelligence

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Death of Privacy: Lync in PRISM, Intel Dodges Questions on Back Doors, WhatsApp Joins PRISM, Censorship/Surveillance

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News about mass surveillance and privacy, collected over the past 24 hours

Wintelligence

• Microsoft Lync gathers data just like NSA vacuums up info in its domestic surveillance program (as we noted days ago)

  Microsoft’s Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it’s based on the same type of information – call details.

• Writing The Snowden Files: ‘The paragraph began to self-delete’ (don’t use Windows)

  One day last summer – a short while after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source behind the momentous leak of classified intelligence – the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger got in touch. Would I write a book on Snowden’s story and that of the journalists working with him? The answer, of course, was yes. At this point Snowden was still in Hong Kong. He was in hiding. He had leaked documents that revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent GCHQ were surveilling much of the planet.

  [...]

  By September the book was going well – 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA’s close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. 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.

• Intel chief dodges NSA questions in Reddit AMA

  One Redditer asked the Intel chief how the NSA revelations have impacted how Intel looks at hardware security, another asked for a response to questions of the security level of Intel processors. Krzanich issued no response to either question.

Lawsuits

• Lots to see in battle of surveillance lawsuits

  The legal fight against National Security Agency surveillance is shaping up to be a titanic clash, with pugilistic litigants trading charges and countercharges of bad faith and misinformation.

• NSA Spying Leaves Law Firms Vulnerable To Litigation

  A recent report that the National Security Agency spied on Mayer Brown LLP has stoked fears that client communications and data at a host of law firms may be vulnerable to prying eyes, leaving attorneys susceptible to lawsuits claiming they failed to take reasonable steps to protect sensitive information.

• Minn. man claims ‘victory’ over NSA after feds drop bid to block parody merchandise

• NSA lawsuits may lead to expansion of spying program

  Call it the law of unintended consequences: Lawsuits brought forth by National Security Agency spying revelations may actually prompt the agency to expand its controversial program — at least in the short term.

• NSA Phone Dragnet Lawsuits May Keep Old Data Alive

PR

• FBI director on NSA controversy: ‘Government operating as it was designed’

  While many Americans are still reeling from several controversies surrounding the federal government, a top-ranking official stopped by the Sooner State to provide his view on some of the incidents.

  FBI Director James Comey spoke with the media about some of the skepticism surrounding the government.

• NSA Official Warned About Threat 17 Years Before Snowden

  Seventeen years before Edward Snowden began releasing secret documents on U.S. electronic spying, an analyst with the National Security Agency foresaw just such a threat.

• Declassified Photos Give An Inside Look At The Ultra-Secret NSA

  The original members of the NSA are seen below in this photograph from 1935. At the time the organisation was called the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service and was responsible for Army communications security.

Paranoia

• Why AT&T’s Surveillance Report Omits 80 Million NSA Targets

  AT&T this week released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the U.S. government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans.

  AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information — spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants — in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts.

  There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks.

• The NSA once banned Furbies as a threat to national security

  In 1999, after the Furby craze put tons of these talking toys beneath American Christmas trees, the NSA issued a memo banning them from its offices in Fort Meade. Because the commercials advertised Furbies as “learning” English over time, the folks in charge believed that Furbies contained an internal recording device, and they feared the toys would spill secrets in their cutesy voices. According to a 1999 BBC News article, anyone who came across a Furby on NSA premises was instructed to “contact their Staff Security Office for guidance.”

Politics

• Rand Paul: The NSA is still violating our rights, despite what James Clapper says

• NSA snooping must not disrupt global Internet governance model, warns EU politician

  Europe must ensure that fears of NSA-style government snooping do not disrupt its multi-stakeholder Internet governance model.

  That’s the verdict from this year’s FTTH Conference in Stockholm, as Sweden’s minister for information technology and energy, Anna-Karin Hatt, spoke candidly about the importance of securing a democratic future for the web.

  “We are all stakeholders in the development of the Internet, with legitimate interests and points-of-view that we want to – and need to – be able to pursue and protect,” she said.

  Hatt added: “The only logical way to continue developing the Internet is to protect and develop the multi-stakeholder model of decision-making we already have – a model that has been tried and proven to work.”

  “The revelations of the capacities and activities of the NSA is not a reason to abandon our multi-stakeholder model.”

• Mikulski Denounces Bill That Would Deny NSA ‘Material Support’ in Maryland

  Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., isn’t pleased with a bill pending in her state’s legislature that would prohibit state and local support for the National Security Agency.

  The legislation was proposed Feb. 6 by eight Republicans in the 141-member Maryland House of Delegates and would deny the NSA “material support, participation or assistance in any form” from the state, its political subdivisions and companies with state contracts.

• 15 Ways to Make Sense of Calls for NSA Reform

New PRISM Additions

• Facebook to buy WhatsApp for 16 Billion

Induced Censorship

• Surveillance and Pressure Against WikiLeaks and Its Readers

• Venezuela’s Internet Crackdown Escalates into Regional Blackout

  For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state’s censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from cable networks, to the targeted blocking of social networking services, and the announcement of new government powers to censor and monitor online.

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Links 21/2/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 7:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 21/2/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 21/2/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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‘Cloud’ Watch: ownCloud, CloudStack, OpenStack, Hadoop and More

Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ‘Cloud’, ‘stack’, and all that hype over servers which mostly run Free software and GNU/Linux

Oprating Systems

• As the desktop moves to the cloud, Microsoft is running behind again

  And what’s funny is that Microsoft, the company that lays claim to the desktop in business with the Office/Windows franchise is getting left behind by the likes of Google and Amazon.

• January 2014 Web Server Survey

• 10 Reasons Why Ruby Hosting is Best on OpenShift

  The idea of PaaS came from the Ruby land and nowadays the market there is quite saturated. OpenShift came from a polyglot by design and Ruby is very well supported. Let’s take a look why OpenShift is a great option for a Ruby developer.

• Red Hat Advances OpenShift Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service

  Red Hat is officially releasing the next generation of its on-premises OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud solution. OpenShift Enterprise 2.0 brings new data center and networking features that expand on the initial promise of the first release of the OpenShift Enterprise platform in 2012.

• Dell and Red Hat Could Co-Engineer Success in the Cloud

  As 2014 gets underway, one of the biggest stories in all of open source has to be the transformation going on at Red Hat as it moves from being squarely Linux-focused to becoming a big player in the cloud computing space. As The Register notes, the company has “scraped up its Linux, virtualization, OpenStack and cloud management businesses into a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) unit.”

ownCloud

• Getting to Know ownCloud

  As the new year begins, many people are focused on cloud computing, and that includes people who are focused on building out their own individual cloud environments. As we covered here, you can go beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, an open source platform that lets you set up your own cloud computing instance, which means you don’t have to have your files sitting on servers that you don’t choose, governed by people you don’t know.

• ownCloud 6 Community Edition Officially Released with Innovative Features

  ownCloud, Inc. is proud to announce today, December 11, that the Community Edition of its highly anticipated ownCloud 6 open source DIY (Do It Yourself) cloud server software is now available for download/upgrade with an improved design.

• ownCloud 6 Community Edition Officially Released with Innovative Features

  ownCloud, Inc. is proud to announce today, December 11, that the Community Edition of its highly anticipated ownCloud 6 open source DIY (Do It Yourself) cloud server software is now available for download/upgrade with an improved design.

• I have been fooling around

  My conclusion is clearly ‘enthusiasm’. I will certainly be using ownCloud as my private cloud server from now on and I can see some very cool ideas coming in the future. I’m exited about WebODF working with ODF documents using JavaScript and I can see many useful things to use it for. I can clearly see ownCloud useful for small business and e.g., schools and NGOs.

• Open Source ownCloud Project Puts IT in File Synchronization Control

  One of the most obvious reasons that services such as Dropbox or Box are so popular with end users is that most internal IT organizations simply haven’t had a way to offer that capability. End users were acquiring mobile computing devices by the millions and they simply needed a way to share files.

CloudStack

• ShapeBlue Offering Commercial Support for Apache CloudStack

  It’s been nearly two years since Citrix contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation, a move that gave the platform a leg up in the competitive open source cloud computing race. And, CloudStack continues to gain rapid adoption with large scale deployments around the world. In October, Apache announced the arrival of version 4.2 online, as we covered here.

• Announcing Apache CloudStack 4.2.1

OpenStack

• Red Hat, With Dell, Could Provide Much Needed OpenStack Direction

• Dell pushes enterprise with OpenStack deal

  Dell’s Director of Cloud and Big Data solutions answers questions “why OpenStack?” and “Why partner with Red Hat to offer OpenStack solutions?”

• OpenStack’s New Icehouse Version is Coming in April

• How OpenStack parallels the adoption of Linux

  In spite of its considerable momentum, there are still skeptics about whether OpenStack will ultimately succeed. My colleague tackled some of that skepticism in a blog post last year and I’m not going to rehash those arguments here. Rather, I’m going to make some observations about how OpenStack is paralleling, and will likely continue to parallel, the adoption of another open source project that I think we can all agree has become popular and successful—namely Linux. [1]

• Short Stack: How OpenStack should engage AWS, OpenStack grows up

• OpenStack Retools to Engage More Cloud User Feedback, Interoperability

  How do you get more users to contribute ideas to an open-source cloud effort? The OpenStack Foundation has a plan.

• Analyzing how contributions to OpenStack can be made easier

• What do you know about OpenStack?

  OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. Backed by some of the biggest companies in software development and hosting, as well as thousands of individual community members, many think that OpenStack is the future of cloud computing. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit which oversees both development and community-building around the project.

• IBM Delivers Jumpgate, an API Bridge Between OpenStack and Public Clouds

  IBM has jumped through a number of hoops with its cloud computing strategy in the past couple of years. The company–which had been firmly in the OpenStack camp–eventually decided to spend billions to buy SoftLayer for its cloud computing infrastructure tools and services. Since then, it has committed billions more to its SoftLayer investment, and many have seen IBM as having completely dropped its original commitment to OpenStack.

• Short Stack: Data as a Service takes off, top OpenStack vendors jockey for position

• Open Stack Adoption Fun Facts & Surprises

Hadoop

• Enterprises Ask More from Hadoop, Need More Skilled Practitioners

  At enterprises around the world, as the Big Data trend spreads out, you can hardly talk technology anymore without the conversation focusing on Hadoop, the star open source framework for drawing insights from large data sets. We’ve also reported that the job market is very healthy for people with Hadoop and Big Data skills.

• Cray brings Hadoop to supercomputing

  Cray has released a package designed to allow XC30 users to easily deploy Hadoop

• Why elephants never forget big data

  Hortonworks is down at the watering hole, blowing its trumpet and enjoying a period of positive development.

  Just in case you missed the elephantine reference, Hortonworks (named after the elephant in Horton Hears A Who!) is a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the open source platform for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers.

• The Questions for Hadoop Moving Forward

  In the beginning – October, 2003 to be precise – there was the Google File System. And it was good. MapReduce, which followed in December 2004, was even better. Together, they served as a framework for Doug Cutting’s original work at Yahoo, work that resulted in the project now known as Hadoop in 2005.

  After being pressed into service by Yahoo and other large web properties, Hadoop’s inevitable standalone commercialization arrived in the form of Cloudera in 2009. Founded by Amr Awadallah (Yahoo), Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Jeff Hammerbacher (Facebook) and Mike Olson (Oracle/Sleepycat) – Cutting was to join later – Cloudera oddly had the Hadoop market more or less to itself for a few years.

Misc.

• Elasticsearch Couples Analytics to Big Data Search

• HP vs AWS : An open source battle for two worlds

• OpenSaaS and the future of government IT innovation

• 2014 Technology Predictions Series: Think Big Analytics on Big Data

• Are Cloud Operating Systems the Next Big Thing?

  You may have heard the new buzz word “Cloud Operating System” a few times in the last few months.

• Time for Netflix to Embrace Open Source Cloud Partners?

• A timely call for a secure yet open cloud

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02.20.14

Security News: Education, DDoS, Linksys, SpamAssassin Release…

Posted in News Roundup at 12:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Some security-related news of interest

• Security technology to help students in future careers

  The same applies to TrueCrypt and GPG — the more people who use these tools “the safer we all are,” Judd said. The NSA, for example, may notice an encrypted email and try to decrypt it, but there’s a possibility it may just include lunch plans, he said.

• Dear Asus router user: You’ve been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw

  An Ars reader by the name of Jerry got a nasty surprise as he was browsing the contents of his external hard drive over the weekend—a mysterious text file warning him that he had been hacked thanks to a critical vulnerability in the Asus router he used to access the drive from various locations on his local network.

  [...]

  Taken together, the attacks are a sign that routers and other Internet-connected devices are being subject to the same in-the-wild attacks that have plagued PCs—and in some cases Macs—for years. Readers are advised to lock down their routers by installing any available firmware updates, changing any default passwords, and ensuring that remote administration, Cloud, and FTP options are set to off if they’re not needed.

• Massive DDoS Attack Leveraged Network Timing Protocol: CloudFlare

• Yubico Extends Two-Factor Authentication to CERN

• Bizarre attack infects Linksys routers with self-replicating malware

• Subject: ANNOUNCE: Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.0 available

• Top spam-killer server program SpamAssasin gets new release

  If you really hate spam, and you run your own e-mail servers, you’ll be glad to know that Apache has released a new version of its award-winning, open-source anti-spam program SpamAssassin.

• Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures – Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

• GoDaddy owns up to role in epic Twitter account hijacking

  GoDaddy has acknowledged that one of its employees fell victim to a social engineering attack allowing a hacker to take over a customer’s domain names and eventually extort a coveted Twitter user name from him. PayPal, which the victim claimed also played a role in the attack, denied the accusations.

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