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04.11.15

Links 10/4/2015: Linux 4.0 Imminent, ZFS On Linux Improved

Posted in News Roundup at 12:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opportunities and challenges of Open Source in Enterprise

    Today, open source is pervasive in enterprise IT, forming the foundation of many cloud services and applications.

    The open source community represents a vast pool of collaborative intellectual property, and it has become a fundamental part of businesses around the world and in Australia and New Zealand.

    “Open source is a great fit for any organisation that is looking to innovate more rapidly and effectively, and to save costs and increase the bottom line,” says Colin McCabe, senior manager, Services and Training, Red Hat.

  • Coders: 5G networks and open source code

    This week on Coders, RCR CEO and Editorial Director Jeff Mucci digs into evolving 5G cellular standards, software and proof of concept deployments with co-host Victor Agreda.

  • Couchbase CEO: the real rationale for enterprise open source

    Open source allows for a more natural adoption approach within the enterprise. It is free and generally easy to download, install, and get started with. This allows easy exploration of and experimentation with new technologies and allows enterprises to get comfortable with the software on smaller, non-mission-critical projects before any financial commitment is required.

  • Sirius: an Open Source Competitor to Siri, Cortana, Google Now

    Sirius is an open source, customizable system that can be commanded through vocal input. It has been built by University of Michigan researchers and is similar to Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Now. According to University of Michigan, Sirius “is designed to spark a new generation of intelligent personal assistants” for wearables and other devices.”

  • How the Syria Airlift Project is Using Open Source Dronecode for Humanitarian Aid

    In March of 2014 I found myself on the Turkish-Syrian border, doing research among Syrian refugees. The stories I heard were horrific. Mass sieges were in effect; the Syrian government and brutal militias were starving out entire neighborhoods, and the government appeared to be deliberately targeting hospitals and doctors. Smuggling medical supplies into opposition-held areas was punishable by torture and death. Syrians were besides themselves, trying to find some way to get food and medicine into these besieged areas. They asked me why the US did nothing.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Web Store Gives Bad Extensions the Boot

        Google has given its Chrome Store a spring cleaning, ridding it of more than 200 browser add-ons and extensions that may have been delivering spyware and malware to users. “Obviously, they need to put more work into screening of uploads to the Chrome Store if it should be considered a trusted source,” noted Martin Zetterlund, founder of ScrapeSentry.

      • Google Chrome Will Soon Work Better For Linux HiDPI Systems

        A few months back I wrote about the poor state of Chrome/Chromium HiDPI support on Linux but fortunately with the latest unstable web browser code these issues appear to have been resolved.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • A community distribution of OpenStack

      In this interview with Red Hat’s Alvaro Lopez Ortega, we learn a little bit about RDO, a community distribution of OpenStack which is designed to make it easy to install on operating systems like Fedora and CentOS. Alvaro is presenting at OpenStack Live next week, where he’ll share both some technical details on RDO as well as a little bit about the community that makes it happen.

    • Connectors to Hadoop Promise to Simplify Big Data Tasks

      Over time, it only had to become easier to leverage the open source Hadoop project, which has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend. At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store.

    • First OpenStack Kilo RCs Debut

      The first Release Candidate (RCs) for the upcoming OpenStack Kilo release are now out. I’ve seen the RC for Nova (https://github.com/openstack/nova/tree/proposed/kilo), and the RC for Trove at: https://github.com/openstack/trove/tree/proposed/kilo with more set to follow.

    • PLUMgrid Launches Cloud Networking for OpenStack Kilo

      The OpenStack Kilo milestone release is several weeks away, but networking vendor PLUMgrid is already prepared for it. This week, PLUMgrid announced the release of its ONS (OpenStack Networking Suite) 3.0, compatible with OpenStack Kilo. The new ONS 3.0 platform also provides new tools for enabling networking in OpenStack clouds.

    • Piston Pivots Beyond OpenStack with CloudOS

      One size rarely fits all. That’s a lesson OpenStack vendor Piston Cloud Computing is showing it understands quite well with its CloudOS 4.0 release. Prior to CloudOS 4.0, Piston’s primary cloud server platform was called Piston OpenStack, with the most recent update being the 3.5 release, which debuted in September 2014.

    • 55.555 downloads of ownCloud in a box

      Recently I passed a magic number with my ownCloud in a box appliance. It hit the five fives, 55.555 total downloads, on SUSE Studio. It is the most popular download there. I would never have imagined that so many people would be interested in it and use it when I started with this. Amazing.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • ODF in the age of Big Data

      One may notice that the points listed above loosely match the main points usually mentioned when discussing the benefits of ODF in the more standard settings of the desktop. This is not surprising, but it was not necessarily intended; if anything this is a testimony to the value of a standard like ODF and its importance. The key point here is that when it comes to the cloud and big data, ODF is both a factor of transparency and innovation. This is something worth promoting and is a potential path to renewed success of ODF in the future.

    • One year old: Document Liberation Project

      The Document Liberation Project only was founded last year officially and now can see at least it’s first birthday. Not yet picked up much steam from new contributors so far, but then already serving e.g. users of Calligra, with libraries like LibRevenge, LibOdfGen, LibWpd, LibWpg, LibWps, LibVisio, LibEtonyek etc., to read in data from files in WordPerfect, MS Works, MS Visio, and Keynote formats.

  • CMS

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • JavaScript All the Way Down

      JavaScript originally was developed at Netscape in 1995, first under the name Mocha, and then as LiveScript. Soon (after Netscape and Sun got together; nowadays, it’s the Mozilla Foundation that manages the language) it was renamed JavaScript to ride the popularity wave, despite having nothing to do with Java. In 1997, it became an industry standard under a fourth name, ECMAScript. The most common current version of JavaScript is 5.1, dated June 2011, and version 6 is on its way. (However, if you want to use the more modern features, but your browser won’t support them, take a look at the Traceur compiler, which will back-compile version 6 code to version 5 level.)

Leftovers

  • The Trouble With SEO

    Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m writing an 800 word article about Microsoft — which I’ve been known to do on occasion. Well, to make sure that search engines understand that the article is about Microsoft, I have to name the company, and frequently, within the article. According to SEO experts, I would need to use the word “Microsoft” at least eight times within the article to obtain a keyword density of one percent — just to make sure the search engines understand that this article is indeed about our buddies in Redmond. I’d also need to make sure that the title also contains the word “Microsoft,” as search engines give extra weight to keywords included in the title.

  • No, Rand Paul didn’t ‘storm out’ of an interview

    You’ll notice that both Paul and Lewis agreed to one more question, and Paul left when Lewis asked a second “last question.” But that Paul walked off quickly and that the lights were turned off made it look that he left in the middle of it. Optics!

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Treating Jack Straw Differently

      A UKIP candidate has been obliged to report to the police for breaking the law on “treating” for providing sausage rolls at an event. Yet Jack Straw at elections in 2005 and 2010 held rallies for the Muslim community in Blackburn at which the Labour Party provided hundreds of voters with full sit down meals, free of charge, and Police refused to take any action – indeed they were protecting the event. This is yet another example of the political elite being above the law.

    • In FBI Terrorism Sting Against Mentally Ill Kansas Man, Informants Built Bomb & Provided List of Materials

      In a terrorism sting operation, the FBI arrested a twenty year-old man from Topeka, Kansas, who United States government officials claim attempted to “detonate a vehicle bomb at Fort Riley military base near Manhattan, Kansas.” He also apparently suffers from mental illness.

      John T. Booker Jr., who also goes by the name Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

      “Thanks to the efforts of the law enforcement community, we were able to safely disrupt this threat to the brave men and women who serve our country,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin declared. “Protecting American lives by identifying and bringing to justice those who wish to harm U.S. citizens remains the National Security Division’s number one priority.”

      But, according to an affidavit [PDF] by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in Topeka, Booker had no direct interaction or communication with any terrorists or terrorist organizations prior to the FBI targeting him. He had obtained no explosives to carry out any sort of attack. He lacked the resources or capabilities act and told one of the informants in the case that he wanted to join the Islamic State but “didn’t know anyone who could help him do so.”

      An informant (CHS 1) introduced Booker to a second informant (CHS 2), who claimed to be a “high ranking sheik planning terrorist acts in the United States.” CHS 1 provided the list of materials that Booker needed to have in order to build a vehicle bomb. The two informants built the vehicle bomb, not Booker.

    • Army Recruit Charged With Helping ISIS Watched by FBI, Given Clearance by Army

      A Kansas man arrested and charged Friday morning for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State was under surveillance by the FBI last year when he checked himself into a mental institution and was not regarded as an immediate threat, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

      In fact, the U.S. Army had approved the new recruit for a Secret clearance.

      John T. Booker Jr., who also goes by the name Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was arrested Friday and charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and planning to destroy property with an explosive.

    • Exclusive: U.S. expands intelligence sharing with Saudis in Yemen operation

      The United States is expanding its intelligence-sharing with Saudi Arabia to provide more information about potential targets in the kingdom’s air campaign against Houthi militias in Yemen, U.S. officials told Reuters.

    • Secrecy Shrouds Unknown Role Of Top UK Government Official

      The British government is refusing to disclose the job title and taxpayer-funded salary of one of the most senior law enforcement officials in the United Kingdom, claiming the details have to be kept a secret for security reasons.

      Cressida Dick (pictured above) was formerly one of the highest ranking officers at London’s Metropolitan Police, the largest police force in the U.K., where she headed the Specialist Operations unit and oversaw a controversial criminal investigation into journalists who reported on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents.

    • Trapped in Yemen, Americans File Lawsuit Against US Government

      Despite the ongoing danger to their lives, Awnallah says that his family has received no assistance from the U.S. government. “[My family] has tried to get in touch, but no one is helping them,” he said. “They are asking me all the time if they are going to die here.”

      On April 9, Awnallah’s family and dozens of other Yemeni-Americans filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of American citizens trapped in the country. Citing Executive Order 12656, which obligates “protection or evacuation of U.S. Citizens and nationals abroad” in times of danger, the lawsuit further alleges that the U.S. government’s refusal so far to conduct evacuation operations in Yemen represents the continuation of longstanding policies that effectively deny full citizenship rights to Yemeni-Americans.

    • If Chuck Schumer kills the Iran nuclear deal, he should not be Senate minority leader

      The framework for the Iranian nuclear deal is about as good as anyone could reasonably expect. If it were solely up to the negotiators, it would likely be finalized in June. But they are not the only players, and it’s become clear that the biggest danger to the deal are hawks in Iran and the U.S.

  • Finance

    • Greens throw support behind Tax Dodging Bill

      In the wake of the HSBC, Swiss Leaks and LuxLeaks tax avoidance scandals the Green Party has pledged to introduce a Tax Dodging Bill in the first 100 days after the election. The campaign for such a Bill is being widely supported by a network of NGOs, cooperatives, faith groups, MPs and Unions [1].

    • Big tech companies lack one thing – shame

      Like, do these adults — at least physically, the three are in that stage of life — have no shame? Tony King of Apple, Maile Carnegie of Google, and Bill Sample of Microsoft were not in any way fazed by the fact that the companies they head locally cheat on their taxes.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Media

    • CNN Wants to Believe: White House ‘Russian Hackers’ Go From Suspects to Perps

      Unnamed “investigators”–who may come from the “FBI, Secret Service [or] US intelligence agencies,” we learn earlier in the piece–“believe” there are “tell-tale codes and other markers” that “point to” Russian government employees–how much fuzzier does evidence get? Yet immediately CNN is talking about the “Russian hack” as though it’s proven fact,,,

    • WSJ Ignores Conservative Spending Behind WI’s New Judicial Amendment, Remembers To Blame Soros

      In its analysis of an unprecedented change to how the chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is selected, The Wall Street Journal ignored the significant financial contributions a right-wing group made in support of the move, which would strengthen conservative control of the court before it examines possible illegal campaign coordination between that same group and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). Instead, the editorial board focused on the fact that the current chief justice has a lawyer who is on the board of directors of a judicial election reform group founded by George Soros.

    • Hillary Clinton Team Holds Off-The-Record Journalist Dinner Ahead Of 2016 Announcement

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign team held an off-the-record dinner Thursday night in Washington, D.C., for roughly two dozen journalists and staff members at John Podesta’s house, according to sources familiar with the matter.

      The dinner signals that the Clinton team is trying to engage with top reporters in the days before the Democrat’s expected announcement of a 2016 presidential run. It also suggests the new campaign team is looking to change course from the toxic relationship with the press that plagued the 2008 race. The Clinton team is also holding a private event in New York on Friday night for journalists, according to sources.

    • Attorney Responds To Times Of Israel Genocide Post: ‘I Didn’t Write That S**t’

      Lawyer and writer Josh Bornstein demanded an explanation from The Times of Israel on Thursday after the site published an op-ed under his name that advocated genocide of Palestinians.

      The post, which sparked outrage across social media and was quickly taken down by the site, called Palestinians “cockroaches” and said that Israel should “exterminate them.”

      The Times of Israel tweeted that it was “looking into” the post and noted that it did not endorse its content. The article ran under Bornstein’s byline, although several people noted that it looked nothing like anything else he had ever published.

      At about 6 p.m.. EDT, Bornstein took to Twitter from his home in Australia to clarify that not only had he not written the “racist” pro-genocide post, but that he had never started an account at the Times in the first place.

      “I didn’t write that shit,” he said. He noted he was a “secular atheist,” contrary to the religious tone of the piece. He later added that he suspected the site was hacked.

      Bornstein said he wanted an explanation from the Times of Israel.

  • Censorship

    • China’s Great Cannon

      On March 16, GreatFire.org observed that servers they had rented to make blocked websites accessible in China were being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. On March 26, two GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org also came under the same type of attack. Both attacks appear targeted at services designed to circumvent Chinese censorship. A report released by GreatFire.org fingered malicious Javascript returned by Baidu servers as the source of the attack. Baidu denied that their servers were compromised.

  • Privacy

    • Git Success Stories and Tips from Tor Chief Architect Nick Mathewson

      Tor, the free and open source software for anonymous web communications, has been using the Git revision control system for more than six years. The tool is so ingrained in the project’s development that Director and Chief Architect Nick Mathewson’s daily work flow is built around Git, he says.

      “Git’s the eighth version control system I’ve had to use, and the first one I’ve seriously trusted,” Mathewson said. “Many thanks to the Git developers for all their hard work.”

    • Privacy International calls on Europe’s top human rights court to rule on British mass surveillance

      Privacy International and several other human rights organisations are taking the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights over its mass surveillance practices, after a judgement last year found that collecting all internet traffic flowing in and out of the UK and bulk intelligence sharing with the United States was legal.

      The appeal, filed last week by Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International, Liberty, and other partners, comes in response to a ruling in December by the UK’s surveillance court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, dealing with the industrial-scale spying programmes TEMPORA and PRISM revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Our SecureDrop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS

      We’re happy to announce that sources can now access our SecureDrop document-submission website using HTTPS. Although SecureDrop connections were already encrypted previously, our new setup provides leakers with additional assurance that they are connecting with the authentic Intercept SecureDrop and not an impostor.

    • A Guide to the 5+ Known Intelligence Community Telecommunications Metadata Dragnets

      I’ve been laying this explanation out since USA Today provided new details on DEA’s International Dragnet, but it’s clear it needs to be done in more systematic fashion, because really smart people continue to mistakenly treat the Section 215 database as the analogue to the DEA dragnet described by USAT, which it’s not. There are at least five known telecommunications dragnets (some of which appear to integrate other kinds of metadata, especially Internet metadata).

  • Civil Rights

    • Montreal professors stare down riot cops

      It’s been a tough week for the student movement in Quebec. A fractious congress that resulted in the resignation and firing of the entire executive of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, the largest student federation in the province, led into a week where schools already on strike have struggled to win votes to maintain that strike, and few if any new schools have joined them. Facing a growing consensus that the strike should be postponed until the fall in order to join public sector unions in a common front, striking students are vulnerable.

    • Greenpeace bank accounts frozen by Indian government

      The Indian government has frozen bank accounts of Greenpeace after accusing the international environment campaign group of encouraging “anti-development” protests in the emerging economic power.

      The Union Home Ministry on Thursday suspended the official registration for foreign funding of Greenpeace India for six months and froze seven bank accounts connected with the organisation, The Hindu, a local newspaper, reported.

      Samit Aich, the executive director of Greenpeace, said the move was “an attack on democracy”.

    • Middle school student charged with cybercrime in Holiday

      The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office has charged Domanik Green, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School, with an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access, a felony. Sheriff Chris Nocco said Thursday that Green logged onto the school’s network on March 31 using an administrative-level password without permission. He then changed the background image on a teacher’s computer to one showing two men kissing.

    • New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Signs Civil Forfeiture Abolition Bill

      A quick and happy update from New Mexico: Gov. Susana Martinez (R) has signed HB 560, which I detailed here, into law. New Mexico has thus effectively abolished civil asset forfeiture by requiring a criminal conviction before the government can seize property.

04.09.15

Links 9/4/2015: SalentOS, Semplice Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • NCR Launches Android-Based Thin Client ATMs

    A few years ago NCR took a fresh look at ATM operations. Cloud computing was becoming more powerful and NCR decided that banks could achieve significant efficiency by moving to a thin client ATM. It chose Android as its first operating operating system but may consider others in the future.

  • Dell will sell a bigger version of its flagship Android tablet

    You might not think of Dell as a big name in tablets — not on the level of, say, Apple or Samsung. In fact, though, the once-stodgy PC maker sells one of our favorite Android tabs, the Venue 8 7000, which won a Best of CES award and earned a strong score of 84 in our review. Now, the company is back with a 10-inch edition (the Venue 10), and it’s basically a blown-up version of the original, just with some improved ergonomics.

  • Dell & Red Hat revamp open stack private cloud solution
  • Linux Users’ Group will hear about new software

    On Monday, April 20, the Linux Users’ Group of Davis will offer a presentation on KDE Connect, software that lets a phone and computer easily share files, control each other and more.

    For example, users can receive their phone notifications on their computer, use their phone as a remote control for their desktop, and easily share photos and other files between devices without using cables.

  • Snoop Dogg Using Linux While Being Chased by a Stormtrooper Is Real

    The Instagram account of Snoop Dogg is a mishmash of ideas and various aspects of the artist’s life, but it’s also a personal account. This is where he decided to post a screenshot from a game (GTA IV most probably) of him using a Linux-powered laptop.

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

      Canonical, through John Johansen, announced today, April 8, that new kernel updates for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) are available to users via the default software repositories of the respective distributions.

    • Linux Foundation to Host Open Encryption Project

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it will host the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and its Let’s Encrypt project, a free, automated and open security certificate authority for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt allows website owners to obtain security certificates within minutes, enabling a safer web experience for all.

    • Linux Foundation Adopts Website Security and Encryption Platform

      The Linux Foundation will now host the Internet Security Research Group and its Let’s Encrypt platform, which provides secure, open SSL encryption for websites.

    • The Linux Foundation Starts Open Source Encryption Project

      As part of an effort to make encryption a standard component of every application, the Linux Foundation launched its open source Let’s Encrypt project along with its intention to provide access to a free certificate management service.

    • Linux Foundation to host open encryption project

      The Linux Foundation is to host an open encryption project aimed at providing a free and easy way to protect the huge amount of data passed over the internet every day.

      This data includes usernames and passwords, credit card data, cookies, and other types of sensitive or personal information.

    • Linux Foundation’s new mission: Cheap, easy Web encryption

      The Linux Foundation is lending support to the Let’s Encrypt project, to make it both free and simple for any Web server to encrypt connections

    • ‘Let’s Encrypt’ Will Try To Secure The Internet

      The Linux Foundation has lined up financial support for a group producing an easier way to encrypt Web site and mobile device traffic.

    • Linux Foundation Takes Web Security and Encryption Platform Under its Wing
    • Open Source Encryption For Everyone [Ed: but to make encryption work one must use it on top of a Free software stack]

      This version of the software is designed for Windows desktop computers, but further versions for other operating systems and mobile devices are in the pipeline. The research team is also working on various add-ons, including one that supports ad hoc encryption.

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org Foundation + SPI Merger Fails

        After almost two years of the X.Org Foundation’s Board of Directors pursuing a merger with SPI, the 2015 X.Org Elections have ended and the results were sent out to X.Org members last night.

      • Catalyst 15.3 Beta Backported To Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

        While AMD has yet to make the Catalyst 15.3 Beta Linux graphics driver available for download from their web-site, they released the driver to Canonical and as such this new AMD Linux driver has been available in Ubuntu 15.04 for a few weeks. Canonical is now back-porting this proprietary driver back into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Calligra 3.0 Is Being Ported to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Here’s What It Looks Like

        A Calligra developer wrote an interesting post on his blog informing users about the progress made on porting the KDE’s number one office suite to the next-generation KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 technologies that are being used in the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

      • First success in Calligra’s 2nd port to Qt5 & KF5

        Last month, in March, with the 2.9.0 release done, we Calligra developers followed our plans and started a branch named “frameworks”, to work on version 3.0, to be the first version based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Calligra 3.0 should not see any new features, the focus is purely on getting the port to the new platform done without any regressions.

      • KDE Plasma 5.3 Beta to Be Released Next Week, Adds Powerful New Features

        The great team of developers behind the KDE Project met in February 2015 in the Blue Systems office in Barcelona, Spain, to discuss and plan the upcoming features that will be implemented in the highly anticipated KDE Plasma 5.3 release.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Partner Conference 2015: Day 1 Roundup

        Open Source software developer Red Hat (RHT) is hosting its annual North American Partner Conference this week in Orlando, where more than 350 partners are gathered to hear company executives discuss the past fiscal year and to learn more about what is in store for resellers in 2015.

      • Red Hat reveals opens source challenges and opportunities

        Red Hat senior manager, Colin McCabe, has laid out the opportunities and possibilities businesses should consider when deciding on implementing and open source solutions.

        “Open source is a great fit for any organisation that is looking to innovate more rapidly and effectively, and to save costs and increase the bottom line,” he said.

        “At Red Hat, we’ve been working for over two decades to maintain the open source model. It’s in Red Hat’s DNA to unravel complex technology challenges ranging from Cloud applications to content management using open source solutions. Red Hat is part of different open source communities and works on a variety of projects.

      • Red Hat Announces Winners of Red Hat North American Partner Awards

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of its annual Red Hat North American Partner Awards. The winners were announced last night at an event held during the Red Hat North American Partner Conference in Orlando, Fla.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 22 Beta To Be Delayed By One Week

          While Fedora developers did a good job getting out the Fedora 22 Alpha on time, the beta release of Fedora 22 will come at least one week late.

          At today’s Go/No-Go meeting it was decided F22 Beta isn’t ready to ship next week but will have to be delayed by one week at least to take care of unresolved blocker bugs. This beta delay pushes back all future F22 milestones — including the release of F22 final expected to take place in May.

    • Debian Family

      • DPL elections for 2015 are going on

        The Debian Project Leader electsions are going on. This is the yearly election for the leader, where members of the project vote for a new leader for a year. The debate this year seemed to me to be quite quiet, and voting activity seems to not be very high, either. Pity. Many years ago, the election period used to be quite energetic, bringing up some quite good viewpoints.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • DigiKam 4.9.0 Released With Bug Fixes, Install In Ubuntu/Linux Mint

            digiKam is an Open-Source project Photos management software, specially for KDE but you can use it on Ubuntu or others distros too. In digiKam photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections. Developers recently released digiKam 4.9.0 with 33 bug fixes. Developers main focus is on digiKam 5.0 release, as it is supposed to be a major release of digiKam.

          • Linux AIO Ubuntu Updated to Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Adds Ubuntu MATE

            We were recently informed by Željko Popivoda, the developer of the Linux AIO project that builds all sorts of Live DVDs with multiple editions of an operating system, that there’s an update for the Linux AIO Ubuntu Live DVD.

          • Canonical and Bq Set Up Automated Power Testing to Improve Battery Life for Ubuntu

            Canonical has a series of automated testing methods for Ubuntu Touch which helps them weed out most of the bugs and problems before publishing updates for the operating system, and now they have set up a new lab that should find apps that are draining the battery.

          • Interview with Elizabeth K. Joseph of the Ubuntu Community Council

            I work as a systems administrator and frequently write and speak about my work in that role. My current position is with HP on the OpenStack Project Infrastructure where we maintain dozens of static systems that developers interface with for their work on OpenStack and a fleet of hundreds of worker servers that run all of the tests that are done against the code before it’s merged. This infrastructure is fully open source, with all of our system configurations, Puppet tooling and projects we used available via git here. Since I have a passion for both systems administration and open source, it’s been quite the dream job for me as I work with colleagues from around the world, across several companies.

          • Ubuntu OSes Patched Against Libtasn1 Exploit

            Details about a Libtasn1 vulnerability that was affecting Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS have been published in a security notice by Canonical.

          • Ubuntu Web Browser Shows Just How Well Convergence Is Working – Video

            Canonical has been talking about convergence for a while now, but it’s still difficult to explain it to new users without some visual aid. A new video has been posted showing the Ubuntu web browser, an application developed initially for the phone OS, running in the desktop edition Ubuntu 15.04.

          • Dueling NUC mini-PCs run Ubuntu on Broadwell

            ZaReason and System76 have each launched Intel NUC style mini-PCs running Ubuntu on 5th Gen. Intel Core “Broadwell” processors, starting at about $500.

          • Meizu MX4 Ubuntu hands-on review

            The Ubuntu MX4 is yet to receive an official price or release date, but our opening impressions of it are very positive.

            Featuring a premium design, innovative operating system, and decent internal specifications the MX4 looks like a great smartphone.

            We also have to praise Canonical for the great work it’s done over the past year to improve Ubuntu mobile’s stability and performance, and can’t wait to test the OS more thoroughly.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • SalentOS 14.04.2 Is Based on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS and Offers a Modern Openbox Desktop

              Gabriele Martina announced on April 8 the immediate availability for download of the SalentOS 14.04.2 Linux distribution based on the upstream Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system from Canonical.

            • Linux Mint 17.2 Codenamed A Religious Name ‘Rafaela’

              After a successful release of Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ and Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ here is a preparation for another successful release Linux Mint 17.2. On April, 8 Clem posted news on blog.linuxmint.com saying the next release Linux Mint 17.2 has been codenamed ‘Rafaela’. Here is what Rafaela means. Tell us Is it religious?

            • Linux Mint 17.2 Will Be Named “Rafaela”

              Recently, the developers have announced that Linux Mint 17.2 (based on Ubuntu Trusty) will be named “Rafaela”, the tradition being to use feminine names. The codenames of major releases use the next letter, from the alphabet, while the point releases’ names start all with the same letter.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • New Atom SoC will target IoT devices, says Intel

      At IDF Shenzhen, Intel announced plans for a rugged IoT version of the Intel Atom x3 SoC, with built in cellular radios, and both Linux and Android support.

      At the Intel Development Forum (IDF) in Shenzhen, China, Intel announced a future Internet of Things version of its new Atom x3 (Sofia) system-on-chips, some of which are built by China-based Rockchip. Intel announced the Atom x3 at Mobile World Congress in early March along with the more powerful, 14nm fabricated “Cherry Trail-T” Atoms, the Atom x5 and x7.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • NEW Native WhatsApp clients hits the Tizen Store, Goodbye ACL WhatsApp Messenger

          We were overjoyed to see a high profile messaging app like WhatsApp available on the Tizen Store at launch for the Samsung Z1. Now it seems the WhatsApp Android App, which used Open Mobile’s ACL technology to run on Tizen, has served its purpose and a Native App has launched today with WhatsApp Messenger being replaced.

        • Samsung 2015 Tizen TV range now available at Curry’s in the UK

          Currys electronics, a UK online and In-store retailer has now got the Tizen based Samsung 2015 TV range In stock and available to buy right now!!! It seems it is only the larger branches that currently have some stock of the UE65JS9000 65″ at £3,999 and UE55JS9000 55″ at £3,099.

        • [Application] Application SecretVault Samsung Z1 Tizen Smart Phone

          Have you ever passed your phone to someone for them to use, only to see them going through your private pictures? This is something that seems more common in the Indian sub-continent and it is VERY annoying. To the rescue we have the SecretVault App that allows you to easily hide your pictures, Videos, Audios, and any other files that you do not want others to see.

      • Android

        • Google, Intel vow to speed up delivery of Android updates

          It usually takes months for mobile devices to get Android updates, but Intel and Google want to slash the wait time.

          Tablets and smartphones made as part of a new Intel mobile-device development program will be able to receive new Android versions and features in two weeks via over-the-air upgrades.

        • AT&T’s Samsung Galaxy S5 gets Android 5.0 Lollipop
        • Exclusive: Google is close to making Android Wear work on the iPhone
        • Which smartwatch sucks least? Apple Watch, Android Wear, Pebble, Samsung Gear?

          Reviews of Tim’s Apple Watch are pouring in, mixing like oil and water. Most reviewers agree that Apple’s new shiny timepiece isn’t fully perfected. That being said, the chief contention among reviews relate to degree and magnitude of imperfection. In other words, many reviewers can’t agree on (if or by) how much the Apple Watch sucks.

        • Google Boasts Android Wear Watch Bands Available From Clockwork Synergy, E3 Supply Co., And Worn & Wound

          Apple has spared no opportunity to advertise how customizable its debut smartwatch is, thanks to the promised number of bands wearers will be able to swap in and out. Unsurprisingly Google wants to take some of the wind out of those sails. The company has taken this moment to highlight a set of straps available for various Android Wear devices from the likes of Clockwork Synergy, E3 Supply Co., and Worn & Wound.

        • Watch Wars: Apple Watch vs. Android Wear

          The Apple Watch hits stores in just two weeks, and based on the reviews, it’s both an impressive bit of modern technology and a beautiful piece of jewelry. But the Apple Watch isn’t the only smartwatch on the market.

          Apple’s nemesis, Google, already has its own watch operating system, Android Wear, and companies like Samsung, LG, and Motorola make smartwatches that run it. What’s more, these Google watches are less expensive than the Apple Watch and come in a host of different styles.

        • Android 5.1 Lollipop Update For Nexus 5 Rolls Out To More Users; Nexus 4, 7, 9 Confirmed Next By Google

          The Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Nexus 5 is finally starting to roll out to additional owners of the smartphone almost a month after being initially announced by Google.

        • Sony Begins Xperia Z2 And Z2 Tablet Android Lollipop Global Rollout

          As previously announced, Sony has started pushing Android Lollipop out to Xperia Z2 and Z2 tablet devices all over the world. These updates are going out in phases and vary according to your region and carrier, so you still may have to exercise patience a bit longer.

        • Google is bringing back month view to its Calendar app for Android

          As it turns out, Google has been listening to your feedback and has decided to reintroduce month view to its Calendar app. Since Google updated the Calendar app alongside the jump to Android 5.0 Lollipop, many users have been begging the company to bring back the month overview so they can see more events at one time.

        • New Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Release Imminent

          A new Nexus 7 Android 5.1 update has been confirmed thanks to Google’s Android Open Source Project and it’s probably not the one that many Nexus 7 users were expecting.

        • Logitech Keys-To-Go now available for Android, Windows
        • Sony Xperia Z Ultra GPe now receiving OTA update for Android 5.1

          While Sony is gearing up to release its fourth Xperia Z phone, some phablet fans are still sitting pretty with the original’s larger-than-life cousin, the Xperia Z Ultra. For those who opted to keep things pure, the GPe variant was the way to go. Fortunately, Google hasn’t forgotten about the largest phone to have been offered with stock Android, as the just a few days after Android 5.1 hit LG’s G Pad 8.3 GPe, it’s now time for the Z Ultra GPe to receive the latest Lollipop build.

        • This brilliant free Android app will change the way you use your phone

          Multitasking is great, but smartphones will never offer a multitasking experience on par with desktop devices because they just don’t have enough screen real estate. That doesn’t mean switching back and forth from app to app is the only way to go on mobile phones, however, and a great Android app called Flynx has come up with a simple and elegant solution that you really have to check out.

        • Firefox for Android passes 100 million downloads four years after launch

          Mozilla announced Firefox for Android hit a big milestone today: 100 million downloads. The figure is confirmed on Google Play, where the app now shows the installs category is in the “100,000,000 – 500,000,000″ range.

        • Amazon Prime Instant Video finally comes to Android tablets

          For the longest time, Amazon enticed users to choose the Fire tablet with exclusive access to Prime Instant Video; despite the fact that Fire devices run a version of Android, purely Android tablets were denied the benefits of their modified brethren. Yesterday, though, that finally changed — Amazon unceremoniously made the Prime Instant Video app available to all Android tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

  • ScrollBack, a refreshing new community management tool

    ScrollBack is a new, open source community management tool that offers the extensive reach of social media, the engagement and archival abilities of forums, and the interactive and real time experience of chat.

  • Google open-sources Santa Claus

    For those of you who are more “bah humbug” than “pass the eggnog”, Santa Tracker offers an online method of tracking Santa’s fictional progress through the logistical chore of stuffing soon-to-be-ignored amusing plastic tat down the chimneys of the world’s best-fed and most-privileged children.

  • Open source won, so what’s next?

    Twenty years ago, open source was a cause. Ten years ago, it was the underdog. Today, it sits upon the Iron Throne ruling all it surveys. Software engineers now use open source frameworks, languages, and tools in almost all projects.

  • Does open source contribute to a more open society?

    Many companies say they love open source, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean they use a lot of software other people have written? Does it mean they like that they don’t have to pay for things? Or do they understand that loving open source also means contributing back to the community the code came from?

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • CMS

    • Git Success Stories and Tips from Drupal Core Committer Angie Byron

      The Git revision control system is “at the center” of Drupal’s hyper-collaborative community says Drupal core committer Angie Byron. The open source content management platform has 37,802 developers with Git commit access, and about 1,300 actively committing each month, she says.

    • Open source is key to the future of CMS development

      Open source will remain the best way to achieve a better developer experience, and as it grows in popularity, engaging with neighbor technology will become easier. Reusing existing components and becoming more distributed will be less complex. Thanks to open source, developers are able to work faster and more efficiently, which is good for business. But this is just the beginning. Open source has taken the CMS development experience to a whole new level, and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon.

    • FBI Warns That WordPress Faces Terrorist Attack Risk

      The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an alert on April 7 about the potential danger of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists abusing vulnerabilities in the open-source WordPress blog and content management system software.

  • Funding

    • What’s so special about Google Summer of Code?

      Google has a program for their employees called 20% time that allows them to work on a side project one day a week. It’s how Carol Smith came to manage their Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program over 5 years ago. That, and learning about the job from the program manager at the time, Leslie Hawthorn, who later left Google in 2010, opening up the job for Smith.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Updates Its ACPICA Implementation

      DragonFlyBSD developers have updated their ACPI power management implementation against Intel’s ACPICA code as of yesterday.

      With this commit pushed out today, it syncs the ACPICA code in the DragonFlyBSD kernel against Intel’s newest reference code. This contains the first part of upstream DragonFlyBSD support, the Windows 10 _OSI string was added, printf issue fixes, and other changes.

      Details on the ACPI Component Architecture can be found at ACPICA.org.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Greece holds public consultation on re-opening of national TV network

      The Greek government has held a three-day public consultation on the re-opening of the public TV channel ERT. The consultation was opened on the national open government portal, opengov.gr, on March 9 and closed on March 12 at 10.00. In total, 583 comments were added by Greek citizens.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities

      A security flaw in New South Wales’ Internet voting system may have left as many as 66,000 votes vulnerable to interception and manipulation in a recent election, according to security researchers. Despite repeated assurances from the Electoral Commission that all Internet votes are “fully encrypted and safeguarded,” six days into online voting, Michigan Computer Science Professor J. Alex Halderman and University of Melbourne Research Fellow Vanessa Teague discovered a FREAK flaw that could allow an attacker to intercept votes and inject their own code to change those votes, all without leaving any trace of the manipulation. (FREAK stands for Factoring RSA Export Keys and refers to the exploitation of a weakness in the SSL/TLS protocol that allows attackers to force browsers to use weak encryption keys.) But instead of taking the researchers’ message to heart, officials instead attacked the messengers.

    • as always bundling fixes is bad

      I figure 24 hours is about the amount of time it takes from a security patch to be released until weaponized exploits show up. After that, if you’re not patched, you’re living dangerously, depending on the nature of the bug. Bundling new features with a high risk of regression with security fixes means users wait to upgrade.

      The iOS 8.3 update is 280MB. It can’t even be downloaded over the air, only via wifi. Security patches are important enough that they should always be made available separately. Then I could download them, even OTA, without fear of regression.

      What aggravates me most is that this is business as usual. As always. We’re training people not to patch. Users should be embarrassed to admit they’re running unpatched software; instead it’s regarded as the prudent choice.

    • Google Lets SMTP Certificate Expire

      The certificate was issued by Google Internet Certificate Authority G2, which issues digital certificates for Google web sites and properties.

    • Data security warning after conference breach

      Experts have repeated conference data security warnings after it was revealed the personal details of thousands of conference delegates may have been leaked in Australia after a data breach.

    • Linux Australia gets pwned, rooted, RATted and botted

      Linux Australia had a bit of a nightmare Easter Weekend.

      While the rest of us were loafing at the beach, the Penguinistas from Down Under were owning up to a pretty extensive cyberintrusion.

      The team has published a decent document setting out what happened, and it went something like this:

      Crooks broke into the organisation’s Conference Management server.
      Crooks got root on the server.
      Crooks installed a remote access Trojan (RAT) for later.
      Crooks rebooted the server and activated the RAT.
      Crooks “logged in” again and installed zombie malware, also known as a bot.
      While the crooks had access, a conference database backup took place to the server.

      Ironically, the backup that was intended to deliver one leg of the “security trinity” (availability) ended up hurting one of the other legs (confidentiality).

    • 2FA with (Free) IPA. The good, the bad and the ugly

      All your systems are Fedora 21, RHEL 7.1 or Ubuntu 14.02 all is working fine as the included SSSD is new enough to handle 2FA. All kerberized services can be used with 2FA w/o logging in again during the validity of your Kerberos ticket. Very convenient, very secure.

      [...]

      2FA works well, convenient and secure in a datacenter and office environment. Notebooks are fine as well as long as there is a network connection available. The mobile world (Smartphones and Tablets) is not yet ready for 2FA. Some issues can be worked around (with some drawbacks) while others render 2FA not usable at all (offline usage).

      Hopefully there will be some smart solutions available for mobile usage soon, as mobile usage causes the most of the security headaches.

    • Thursday’s security updates

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Real Nuclear Threat in the Middle East

      This is something out of Alice in Wonderland. The Islamic Republic of Iran, born in 1979, has not attacked another country. (With U.S. help, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.) In contrast, Israel has attacked its Arab neighbors several times its founding, including two devastating invasions and a long occupation of Lebanon, not to mention repeated onslaughts in the Gaza Strip and the military occupation of the West Bank. Israel has also repeatedly threatened war against Iran and engaged in covert and proxy warfare, including the assassination of scientists. Even with Iran progressing toward a nuclear agreement, Israel (like the United States) continues to threaten Iran.

    • NRA Annual Meeting To Enmesh Gun Extremism With GOP Presidential Hopefuls
    • Pakistan court says former CIA station chief will face charges over drone strike

      The former head of the CIA in Pakistan should be tried for murder and waging war against the country, a high court judge ruled on Tuesday.

      Criminal charges against Jonathan Banks, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad, were ordered in relation to a December 2009 attack by a US drone which reportedly killed at least three people.

    • Pakistani Court Orders Ex-C.I.A. Officials Charged Over 2009 Drone Strike

      A Pakistani court on Tuesday ordered criminal charges to be filed against a former C.I.A. station chief and a former C.I.A. lawyer over a 2009 drone strike that killed two people.

    • 560 dead amid fears of humanitarian collapse in Yemen

      As tons of desperately needed medical supplies await clearance to be flown into Yemen, aid workers warned Tuesday of an unfolding humanitarian crisis, saying at least 560 people, including dozens of children, have been killed, mostly in a Saudi-led air campaign and battles between Shiite rebels and forces loyal to the embattled president.

      More than 1,700 people have been wounded and another 100,000 have fled their homes as fighting intensified over the past three weeks, the World Health Organization said.

    • Al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen exploits chaos to rebuild, officials say

      The CIA’s drone base in the rippled surface of the Saudi Arabian desert has undergone major renovations over the past few years. Satellite imagery shows dozens of additions that appear to include living quarters, a new clamshell hangar for hiding aircraft and neat rows of freshly planted palm trees.

    • The Unreal Secrecy About Drone Killings

      Last year, after concluding that many passages in the document “no longer merited secrecy,” the Second Circuit published a redacted version of the Justice Department’s July 2010 Office of Legal Council memo that approved the “targeted killing” of Anwar al-Aulaqi. The court’s view was that government officials had already disclosed much of the information they were trying to withhold. In speeches, media interviews, and congressional testimony, officials had acknowledged the government’s role in the strike that killed al-Aulaqi, explained the purported legal basis for the strike, and invoked still-secret OLC memos to reassure the public that the strike was lawful. Having done all of this, the court said, the government couldn’t plausibly claim that the entirety of the July 2010 memo was still secret, and it couldn’t lawfully withhold the entirety of the memo under the Freedom of Information Act.

      From one perspective, the Second Circuit’s ruling was a victory for transparency. Human rights groups and media organizations had been calling for the release of the legal memos underlying the targeted-killing program; thanks to the Second Circuit’s ruling, one of those memos — arguably the most important one — was made public. From another perspective, the court’s ruling wasn’t very significant at all. The ruling didn’t expose secrets. By its own terms, it exposed facts and legal analysis that had already been disclosed.

    • Government’s Assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki Used “Significantly Different” EO 12333 Analysis

      Jameel Jaffer has a post on the government’s latest crazy-talk in the ongoing ACLU and NYT effort to liberate more drone memos. He describes how — in the government’s response to their appeal of the latest decisions on the Anwar al-Awlaki FOIA — the government claims the Court’s release of an OLC memo does not constitute official release of that memo. (Note, I wouldn’t be surprised if the government is making this claim in anticipation of orders to release torture pictures in ACLU’s torture FOIA suit that’s about to head to the 2nd Circuit.)

      But there’s another interesting aspect of that brief. It provides heavily redacted discussion of the things Judge Colleen McMahon permitted the government to withhold. But it makes it clear that one of those things is a March 2002 OLC memo that offers different analysis about the assassination ban than the analysis used to kill Anwar al-Awlaki.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange on the NSA, Edward Snowden and the Fight Against Government Surveillance

      The AMA saw Assange fielding questions alongside Sarah Harrison, Renata Avila and Andy Müller-Maguhn, who were all representing the Courage Foundation, an organization which runs the official defense funds of whistleblowers. Assange spoke of how he believes the NSA leaks impacted society and its relationship with the government, along with outlining his thoughts on how the public can help protect whistleblowers, and offering his opinion on whether or not the average Joe’s and Jane’s can have any influence on how the government operates in regards to the privacy of its citizens.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Gatwick oil find ‘could produce billions of barrels’

      An oilfield near Gatwick airport could hold up to 100bn barrels of oil, according to a British exploration firm, in possibly the biggest onshore oil discovery in England since the 1980s.

      UK Oil and Gas Investments revealed it had found a “world-class potential resource” after drilling 3,000ft below ground in West Sussex. However, UKOG said only 3-15% of the total would be recovered, based on similar finds in the US.

    • As Colombian Oil Money Flowed To Clintons, State Department Took No Action To Prevent Labor Violations

      For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life.

  • Finance

    • Hollywood Swinging Hard for Trans-Pacific Partnership

      Hollywood moguls and the vast majority of leftist entertainers have joined forces in a last-ditch effort to bully wavering Democratic lawmakers into backing President Obama’s fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the centerpiece of what he calls his “pro-trade agenda.”

    • WikiLeaks Disclosure Shows U.S. Airlines Received Billions in Subsidies

      WikiLeaks did more than expose governmental eavesdropping and foreign policy blunders: A 2009 data dump is shedding new light on the spat between Delta, United, and American and the three largest Gulf carriers over government subsidies and Open Skies agreements.

      The Business Travel Coalition, which backs retaining Open Skies agreements and is seeking to counter the U.S. carriers’ charges that Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad received $42 billion in unfair government subsidies, uncovered a U.S. congressional report, disclosed by WikiLeaks in 2009, that documents how U.S. aviation, including commercial airlines, the FAA, and airports, received $155 billion in federal direct spending from 1918 to 1998.

    • Op-Ed: What you don’t know about the Transpacific Partnership
    • What happens to democracy in a cashless society?

      Last month I was asked to speak at a conference in the City of London on the ethical issues surrounding new payment systems. The audience was packed with people working on innovative things like payment apps for smart phones and ‘contactless payments,’ where you can just wave a card or a phone over a terminal.

      Their new financial technologies are rapidly changing the way we pay for everything. This may be convenient, but as wand-waving and other high-tech alternatives to cash become the only ways to pay for anything, what happens if the wand loses its magic? What are the costs of becoming entirely dependent on technology in a cashless society?

      [...]

      This uncertainty is related to a second issue—that of anti-competitive practices. Visa and Mastercard already account for over 80 percent of the credit card market worldwide, and well over 90 per cent in many countries. The Financial Times refers to this situation as “a well-protected oligopoly” and so, for them, a good investment. Yet it also represents a hitherto unimaginable degree of control over the means of payment. Even if policies are adopted to diversify this market or—if that doesn’t work—to break up these oligopolies directly, such unprecedented levels of control raise a third area of concern in the form of peoples’ rights to privacy.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • Three Fake Myths–and Two Actual Ones–About TPP Trade Pact

        The proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are doing everything they can to try to push their case as they prepare for the fast-track vote before Congress this month. Roger Altman, a Wall Street investment banker and former Clinton administration Treasury official, weighed with a New York Times column, co-authored by Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

        They begin by giving us three “myths”–all of which happen to be accurate depictions of reality. The first “myth” is that trade agreements have hurt US manufacturing workers and thereby the labor market more generally. Altman and Haas cite work by MIT economist David Autor showing that trade with China has reduced manufacturing employment by 21 percent, but then assert that the problem is trade not trade agreements.

      • Hillary Clinton hires a Google exec as the first woman to manage technology for a presidential campaign

        Hillary Clinton is betting that if Stephanie Hannon can handle natural disasters, she can certainly handle a controversial presidential campaign.

        Hannon, Google’s director or product management, has left the Internet giant to take over as the chief technology officer for Clinton’s still unannounced presidential campaign.

      • Clinton Hires Google Exec As Chief Tech Officer – WikiLeaks Shows Us Why

        Hillary Clinton has hired Stephanie Hannon, Google’s director of product management for civic innovation and social impact, as chief technology officer for her potential presidential campaign, fueling accusations from Julian Assange that Google is in bed with the US government.

  • Privacy

    • The FBI used to recommend encryption. Now they want to ban it

      The FBI wants to make us all less safe. At least that’s the implication from FBI director Jim Comey’s push to ban unbreakable encryption and deliberately weaken everyone’s security. And it’s past time that the White House makes its position clear once and for all.

      Comey was back before Congress this week – this time in front of the House Appropriations Committee – imploring Congressmen to pass a law that would force tech companies to create a backdoor in any phone or communications tool that uses encryption.

    • U.S. directs federal agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

      A DEA official said, “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”

    • Facebook’s Deepface Software Has Gotten Them in Deep Trouble

      In a Chicago court, several Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against the social media giant for allegedly violating its users’ privacy rights to acquire the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world.

      The court documents reveal claims that “Facebook began violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (IBIPA) of 2008 in 2010, in a purported attempt to make the process of tagging friends easier.”

    • A chat client which protects you from NSA’s snooping

      Have you been trying to convince friends and family to use encryption in light on the NSA revelations and had little success? Otr.to is a newly released web based chat client that requires no installation and offers OTR encryption via JavaScript libraries. With no installs necessary, sending encrypted messages to your least technical friends should be a lot less challenging.

    • Ajusto app that watches your driving habits leads to privacy concerns

      Desjardins Insurance has launched a smartphone app that tracks driver behaviour in return for the promise of substantial savings on car insurance, the first of its type in Canada, the company says.

    • The Woman Who Hacked Hollywood

      It’s been almost ten years since Laura Poitras’ name has been on the NSA Watch List. Every time she returns to her home country, security agents wait for her, somewhere between the gate of the plane and the US Immigration booth. They take her away to a room, confiscate her gear, her notebooks, and her videos. They question her and copy her hard drives. This has happened to her at least forty times since 2006.

    • Aboard Flights, Conflicts Over Seat Assignments and Religion

      Francesca Hogi, 40, had settled into her aisle seat for the flight from New York to London when the man assigned to the adjoining window seat arrived and refused to sit down. He said his religion prevented him from sitting beside a woman who was not his wife. Irritated but eager to get underway, she eventually agreed to move.

    • John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden: Pseudo-satire in defense of NSA surveillance

      Comedy host John Oliver conducted an interview with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow recently that was broadcast Sunday on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” In the process, Oliver exposed his solidarity with the American state and its vast, illegal spying operations. He took the opportunity of the conversation to come out harshly against Snowden’s decision to leak large quantities of NSA documents.

      Pushing for a confession that his actions were potentially “harmful,” the British-born Oliver demanded to know whether Snowden had personally read every single document contained in the files that the former NSA employee transferred to journalists beginning in the summer of 2013.

      “I have evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive. I do understand what I turned over,” Snowden replied.

      “There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents. Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents, the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver retorted sarcastically. He went on, “You have to own that. You’re giving documents with information that could be harmful.”

      Oliver repeated the favored arguments of the Obama administration and intelligence establishment to the effect that the preservation of “national security” required the elimination of civil liberties, such as Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary searches and seizures.

    • CISA Hack of the Day: White House Can Already Share Intelligence with the State Department

      In about 10 days, Congress will take up cyber information sharing bills. And unlike past attempts, these bills are likely to pass.

      That, in spite of the fact that no one has yet explained how they’ll make a significant difference in preventing hacks.

      So I’m going to try to examine roughly one hack a day that immunized swift information sharing between the government and the private sector wouldn’t prevent.

    • The US Gov Can Download the Entire Contents of Your Computer at Border Crossings

      Hundreds of thousands of travelers cross US borders every day. And none of them—save the precious few with diplomatic immunity—have any right to privacy, according to Department of Homeland Security documents recently obtained by MuckRock.

      The US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Privacy Impact Assessment for the Border Searches of Electronic Devices outlines the finer points of border officials’ authority to search the electronic devices of citizens and non-citizens alike crossing the US border. What becomes clear is that this authority has been broadly interpreted to mean that any device brought into or out of the country is subject to the highest level of scrutiny, even when there is no explicit probable cause.

      Based upon little more than the opinion of a single US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer, any device can be searched and its contents read. With approval from a supervisor, the device can be seized, its contents copied in full, or both.

    • Fixing the FISA Court by Fixing FISA: A Response to Carrie Cordero

      Finally, we must briefly push back on Carrie’s statement that “changing FISA’s standard to a ‘significant purpose’ . . . has been overwhelmingly understood as an important substantive correction.” We may be traveling in somewhat different circles, but that hasn’t been our experience. Rather, among colleagues in our field, this change is widely viewed as the moment in which FISA became an existential threat to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in ordinary criminal cases. The “correction” that’s needed is to restore the primary purpose test.

    • Stop making the NSA the bogeyman of privacy

      I mention this because a lot of people seem concerned that the “cyber threat sharing” bills in congress (CISA/CISPA) will divulge private information to the NSA. This is nonsense. The issue is private information exposed to the FBI and other domestic agencies. It’s the FBI, ATF, or DEA that will come break down your door and arrest you, not the NSA.

    • U.S.: Azano Is a Supervillain … Who We Let Deal Surveillance Equipment

      Federal prosecutors have portrayed wealthy Mexican businessman José Susumo Azano Matsura as a supervillain who was always one step ahead of the law. For two decades, prosecutors said, federal agents investigated Azano for drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion and tax fraud to no avail before he was popped last year on charges he illegally donated to San Diego politicians.

      But the relationship between Azano and the U.S. government is more complicated than the Justice Department has let on.

    • Senate creating secret encyclopedia of US spy programs following Merkel eavesdrop disclosure

      Trying to get a handle on hundreds of sensitive, closely held surveillance programs, a Senate committee is compiling a secret encyclopedia of American intelligence collection. It’s part of an effort to improve congressional oversight of the government’s sprawling global spying effort.

      Sen. Dianne Feinstein launched the review in October 2013, after a leak by former National Security Agency systems administrator Edward Snowden disclosed that the NSA had been eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. Four months earlier, Snowden had revealed the existence of other programs that vacuumed up Americans’ and foreigners’ phone call records and electronic communications.

      “We’re trying right now to look at every intelligence program,” Feinstein told The Associated Press. “There are hundreds of programs we have found … sprinkled all over. Many people in the departments don’t even know (they) are going on.”

      Feinstein and other lawmakers say they were fully briefed about the most controversial programs leaked by Snowden, the NSA’s collection of American phone records and the agency’s access to U.S. tech company accounts in targeting foreigners through its PRISM program. Those programs are conducted under acts of Congress, supervised by a secret federal court.

    • Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

      A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

      Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

    • Baltimore police often surveil cellphones amid US secrecy

      The Baltimore Police Department has used secretive cellphone surveillance equipment 4,300 times and believes it is under orders by the U.S. government to withhold evidence from criminal trials and ignore subpoenas in cases where the device is used, a police detective testified Wednesday.

      The unusual testimony in a criminal case marked a rare instance when details have been revealed about the surveillance devices, which the Obama administration has aggressively tried to keep secret. Citing security reasons, the government has intervened in routine state public-records cases and criminal trials, and has advised police not to disclose details.

    • Why Don’t Surveillance State Defenders Seem To Care That The Programs They Love Don’t Work?

      He also details some of the over-inflated claims of other surveillance programs in the past — all of which were later shown to be false. But, the article doesn’t really attempt to answer the question — just raise it. In the past, we’ve noticed that the entire concept of a cost-benefit analysis seems antithetical to the way the surveillance state does business. But why is that?

    • Baltimore PD Has Deployed Stingray Devices Over 4,300 Times, Instructed By FBI To Withhold Info From Courts

      Say what you will about the Baltimore PD and its cell tower spoofers (like… “It would rather let accused criminals go than violate its [bogus] non-disclosure agreement with the FBI…” or “It hides usage of these devices behind pen register/trap and trace warrants and then argues the two collection methods are really the same thing…”), but at least it’s making sure the hundreds of thousands of dollars it’s spent on the technology isn’t going to waste.

  • Civil Rights

    • To Catch a Torturer: My 28-Year Pursuit of Racist Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge

      On February 13, 2015, former Chicago Police Commander Jon G. Burge was released from federal custody, having served a little less than four years of his four-and-a-half year sentence for lying under oath about whether he tortured scores of African-American men during his time as commander. Less than a week before, I sat across from him in a small room in Tampa, Florida, questioning him, pursuant to a court order, yet again about his role in a torture case—this time, the case of Alonzo Smith, who was repeatedly suffocated with a plastic bag and beaten with a rubber nightstick in the basement of the Area 2 police station by two of Burge’s most violent henchmen after Burge informed him that they “would get him to talk, one way or another.”

    • Media Were Already Running With Police Fantasy When Video Exploded It

      The New York Times (4/7/15) released a video of a black South Carolina man Walter Scott being shot, casually and without apparent mercy, eight times in the back by white police officer Michael T. Slager. The media’s outrage after the video’s publication was righteous and swift. The state of South Carolina followed suit, filing murder charges against Slager. Indeed, the video offers no ambiguity whatsoever:

    • South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott

      A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

      The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

    • O’Reilly Cherry-Picks Debunked Statistics To Downplay Racial Disparities In Police Shootings

      Bill O’Reilly cited debunked statistics to claim that more white than black Americans are killed by police officers in the wake of the fatal South Carolina police shooting of an unarmed black man.

      A police officer was charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 7, as reported by The New York Times. The Times noted that “the shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.”

    • Time Peddles Old Stereotypes With Op-Ed on Iranian ‘Carpet Merchants’

      This series of ethnic stereotypes becomes Oren’s whole prism for interpreting the negotiations, which are “an ideal example of how not to buy a Middle Eastern carpet.” He argues: “The Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany could have offered the lowest possible price as their final bid—take it or leave it. Iran would have had little choice but to sell the carpet.”

      When the US and its negotiating partners “recogniz[ed] the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich and to maintain its nuclear facilities,” Oren scolds: “The haggling had scarcely begun and already the merchant profited.” Actually, the right to a peaceful nuclear program was guaranteed to Iran when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (FAIR Blog, 4/8/13), but there isn’t really a stereotype that involves the customers of a “merchant” agreeing to respect international law.

    • Violated At The Airport By TSA Thug Sharonda Juana Walker (not sure on the spelling of “Sharonda”)

      There’s not an ounce of probable cause to search me at the airport — as I was today at LAX. To violate my body. To touch my breasts. To grope my hair. To have the blue latex-gloved hand of Sharonda Juana Walker, feel inside my turtleneck.

      And no, I don’t go through the scanners, and the metal detector line wasn’t an option at just before 7 a.m., when I got to the airport to leave for…no, not an ISIS meet-and-greet but an evolutionary psychology conference in Boston. Apparently, the sparse traffic at the airport at this hour leaves them plenty of time to feel up travelers.

    • Walter Scott shooting witness Feidin Santana reveals how he captured the video that saw police officer Michael Slager arrested

      The witness hailed as a hero for capturing the shooting of Walter Scott on camera has come forward to speak publicly about the incident for the first time.

      Identified by NBC News as Feidin Santana, the man whose video made headlines around the world described the “emotional” moment he handed his vital evidence over to the Scott family.

      Mr Santana’s video showed 33-year-old Officer Michael Slager shooting Mr Scott in the back as he runs away, and the witness said he only came forward when the police’s version of events – that Mr Scott had seized control of the officer’s Taser – appeared in the media.

    • Don’t ask why Walter Scott ran, ask why he was killed in cold blood: opinion

      Anyone with a sliver of vision and a shred of morality can see this.

      South Carolina Patrolman Michael Slager cowardly hid behind his badge when he claimed he felt threatened by Scott after pulling him over for a faulty brake light. Slager alleged that Scott reached for the officer’s stun gun and his life was in danger – Slager said he had no other option but to kill Scott.

      Slager lied. Video evidence does not.

      That video showed the world that the real victim was Scott, who was shot in the back as he attempted to run from Slager. And the real criminal is Slager, a man who resorted to lethal force after a mere traffic stop.

      The facts are clear-cut and the video evidence is undeniable. So why do I keep hearing this statement?

    • Video of Shooting Caught Police Propaganda Machine in Action

      A video supplied to The New York Times, showing the shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott at the hands of a South Carolina police officer, appears on first viewing to be the latest example of an unarmed black person killed unnecessarily by a white cop.

      But it’s so much more than that. Because three days elapsed between the shooting and the publication of the video of the shooting, the Scott incident became an illuminating case study in the routinized process through which police officers, departments and attorneys frame the use of deadly force by American cops in the most sympathetic possible terms, often claiming fear of the very people they killed. In the days after the shooting, the police version of events — an utterly typical example of the form — was trotted out, only to be sharply contradicted when the video surfaced. In most cases like this, there is no video, no definitive, undisputed record of much of what happened, and thus no way to rebut inaccurate statements by the police.

    • DEA Global Surveillance Dragnet Exposed; Access to Data Likely Continues

      Secret mass surveillance conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration is falling under renewed scrutiny after fresh revelations about the broad scope of the agency’s electronic spying.

    • Former F.B.I. Agent Sues, Claiming Retaliation Over Misgivings in Anthrax Case

      When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case.

      Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.

      In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.

    • Times Of Israel Scrubs Another Pro-Genocide Post Against Palestinians

      It was a nasty kind of deja vu at the Times of Israel on Thursday after the website caused an uproar by publishing and then removing an op-ed calling for the mass murder of Palestinians.

    • How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I’m Trying To Get It Back)

      On a late spring evening eight years ago, police pulled over my mother’s 1997 Oldsmobile Aurora, in the suburb of St. Ann, Missouri, as she raced to pick up a relative from St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. “Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked. “No I don’t,” my mother answered. The police charged her with speeding, but she did not receive a mere ticket. Instead, an officer ran my mother’s name and told her that since she had failed to appear in court for driving without a license, there was a six-year-old warrant out for her arrest. “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” my mother said. The police arrested her and hauled her off to St. Louis County Jail, where authorities eventually allowed her one phone call, which she placed to my stepfather. He said, shaking his head, “I was surprised because I knew she didn’t have no warrants.”

    • Sweden keeps ban on spontaneous dancing

      Spontaneous dancing remains outlawed in Sweden except in venues with special “dance licences” after a majority in parliament voted down a move to free the feet.

    • Dick Cheney Gets Judy Miller to Serve as His Cut-Out, Again

      Particularly given that the only question of those I posed for my book that Miller did not answer was whether she saw Cheney on the trip to Aspen that she used to explain Scooter Libby’s Aspen letter, I find her admission that she did and does speak to Cheney — though had not, about the war — telling. (Remember, too, that Cheney did not release journalists he had spoken to to reveal him as a source in the way everyone else in the Executive Branch did.)

      Miller goes on to present a nonsense story about how Fitzgerald misled her and caused her to testify incorrectly, falsely testifying to the grand jury that Libby had told her Plame was at the CIA back in June. It doesn’t make sense — and doesn’t do anything to undermine the other evidence that would have been sufficient to convict Libby, notably Libby’s own notes and David Addington’s testimony as well as a second, far more important, meeting between Libby and Miller just days before Novak outed Plame.

      Maybe Miller just has no fucking clue what got presented at the trial?

      But having presented a flimsy excuse to question the verdict against Libby, Miller has presented others with an opportunity to point to another detail she includes in her book: that Fitzgerald offered to drop the charges against Libby if he would testify against Cheney. Again, that’s not surprising. Libby’s lies served to cover up Cheney’s orders to leak stuff to Judy Miller (not in the meeting she newly focuses on, but in the meeting during the week of Novak’s article).

    • America’s glaring double standard on terror: Why the Tsarnaev conviction is another black eye for Gitmo

      “Did the use of pressure cooker bombs,” the jury in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial was asked in several different ways on Wednesday afternoon, “cause the death of Martin Richard?”

      “Yes,” the jury declared Tsarnaev’s guilt in the murder of Richard, the 8-year old boy watching the race from the finish line killed in Tsarnaev’s attack on the Boston Marathon two years ago. “Yes,” the jury said, over and over. The jury gave the same response when asked about Tsarnaev’s responsibility for killing Lingzi Lu, a Boston University statistics student; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year old restaurant manager; and Sean Collier, an MIT cop, all of whom he and his brother killed. The jury found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts against him.

    • Desmond Tutu Calls for Justice for Jeffrey Sterling, Citing Petraeus Deal

      Last month, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote a letter to Leonie Brinkema, the judge in the Jeffrey Sterling trial, calling on her to prove cynicism wrong in her sentencing of Sterling. The letter was docketed this week.

    • Whistleblower Watchdogs Ask President to Remove Zinsler

      We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to urge you to remove the Department of Commerce’s Inspector General, Todd Zinser. Through his actions both before his appointment as IG and since, Mr. Zinser has proven that he is not fit for the position.

      IGs are supposed to root out fraud, waste, and abuse—a job they would not be able to do without whistleblowers. If there is anyone in government who should understand the importance of utilizing and protecting whistleblowers, it is an IG.

      This is why it is particularly worrisome that there have been multiple allegations and investigations of Mr. Zinser’s own retaliation against whistleblowers. A 2013 report by the Office of Special Counsel found that Mr. Zinser had shielded two top deputies charged with threatening two employees with retaliation if they blew the whistle on mismanagement at the Commerce IG’s office.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Big Media Companies Insist That VPN Services Violate Copyright Law

        Back during the SOPA fight, in a discussion with someone who was working with the politicians pushing SOPA, I pointed out that such a law would encourage much more encryption — and the response was “that’s no problem, because we’ll just ban encryption next.” As stupid and impossible as such a statement is, it shows the mindset of some copyright extremists. Thus, it should be no surprise that they’re actually starting down just such a path in New Zealand. As we noted last year, Kiwi ISPs, frustrated that their users kept running up against geoblocks, have started offering VPN services that get around geoblocks as a standard feature there. Basically, this is nothing more than a recognition that the internet really is global and attempts to pretend otherwise are pretty fruitless.

04.08.15

Links 8/4/2015: SalentOS 14.04.2, XFS in Fedora Server 22

Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Carla Schroder, OwnCloud/Writer

    I adore Linux because I can do what I want on it. My first PC way back in 1994ish was an Apple something. It was fun, and then I got an IBM PC running Windows 3,1 and DOS 5. Windows was useless, so I spent a lot of time in DOS. Then I learned about Linux and never looked back. And Windows is still useless, and Apple is too confining. They both have their little walled gardens, and their primary purpose is lock-in and to keep selling you junk whether you want it or not, and whether or not it’s any good. They think they retain ownership of your stuff that you have purchased, which is a concept that needs to die.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • A conversation with Gene Kim on DevOps, waterfall development, and containers

      Gene Kim: It’s called “The DevOps Cookbook,” and it was actually supposed to come out before “The Phoenix Project.” The goal of the book is to put into context the cultural norms, principles, and observed patterns in high-performing organizations that enable fast flow of features from dev to ops while preserving world-class reliability and stability. For me, I think the big surprise three years into this project is that it’s as much about organizational learning as it is about key performance measures.

    • CoreOS moves tectonic plates, Docker may feel earthquakes

      Cloud is the next big front for some serious tech warfare and CoreOS just got the much needed ammunition.

      First things first. CoreOS is a company that offers a solution with the same name. And this solution is an extremely light and minimalistic operating system based on Google’s Chrome OS (or you can also call it a fork).

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Tovalds Talks About Git and Why the Linux Kernel Needed It

      Linus Torvalds is mostly known for developing the Linux kernel, but he’s also the one who made Git, the distributed revision control system that’s used today for numerous projects, including the kernel. The project just turned ten years old, and Linus made some comments about this fact.

    • Git Success Stories and Tips from Qt Maintainer Thiago Macieira

      Git has come a long way in the 10 years since Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the first version of the now-popular distributed revision control system. For example, the addition of pull requests came three years after the original release, according to Atlassian. And over time it has added more collaboration tools, code review tools, integration to continuous integration systems, and more, recalls Qt Project core maintainer and software architect at Intel, Thiago Macieira.

    • OpenDaylight Developer Spotlight: Radhika Hirannaiah

      Radhika Hirannaiah, is currently working as an intern at OpenDaylight. She received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University in 2014. Her interests include Software Defined Networking (OpenFlow, OpenDaylight etc), Voice over IP, wireless and working on open source software projects.

    • Systemd Adds Reboot To EFI Firmware Option

      Systemd’s logind and systemctl components have added support for rebooting to the EFI firmware setup. Running systemctl –firmware-setup (or accessing via systemd’s logind interfaces) will cause the system’s firmware UEFI setup utility to show at next boot as another alternative to just hitting DEL/F2 at boot time or newer distributions that add a boot menu entry to GRUB2 for EFI firmware configuration. Of course, this will only work for newer systems that were originally booted in the EFI mode.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • Linux 4.0 Hard Drive Comparison With EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS / NTFS / NILFS2 / ReiserFS

        It’s been a while since last running any Linux file-system tests on a hard drive considering all of the test systems around here are using solid-state storage and only a few systems commissioned in the Linux benchmarking test farm are using hard drives, but with Linux 4.0 around the corner, here’s a six-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.0 with a HDD using EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and even NTFS, NILFS2, and ReiserFS.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment EFL 1.14.0 Alpha 1

      The Enlightenment crew at Samsung have released their first alpha version of the upcoming EFL 1.14.0 library set.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • NetworkManagerQt 0.9.8.4 is out

        NetworkManagerQt is officially a Frameworks now. As a consequence the repository has been renamed from libnm-qt to networkmanager-qt and NMQt version number now follows Frameworks version number (currently 5.8.0).

      • Plasma Sprint 2015

        In February 2015 the Plasma developers met in the Blue Systems office in Barcelona to discuss and plan out where we would take Plasma over the duration of the next year. The sprint consisted of active Plasma developers and visual designers from around the world, from Canada to India.

      • digiKam 5.0 Is Being Ported to KDE Frameworks 5, to Be Released in July 2015

        The digiKam development team has announced a few hours ago, on April 7, the immediate availability for download of the digiKam Software Collection 4.9.0 image viewer and organizer application for the KDE desktop environment.

      • digiKam 4.9.0 Released
      • Plasma Theme Explorer
      • Plasma-nm 0.9.3.6 release

        We have released another plasma-nm version for KDE 4. It’s possible that this release will be the last one, because every distribution is now switching to Plasma 5 and given our irregular releases it’s possible that current distributions wouldn’t pickup the updated version anyway. I’ll keep backporting fixes from Plasma 5 to our KDE 4 branch if possible, so if you want to keep running on KDE 4 from some reason, you will still have a way how to get at least some fixes. There is also a new release of networkmanager-qt for KDE 4, which is required for below mentioned OpenConnect fixes.

      • Looking At Building The Linux Kernel With -O3 Optimizations

        A Linux user has started an LKML discussion over compiling the kernel with -O3 for driving performance improvements out of a more-optimized kernel binary.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ 3.16.1 Improves Client-Side Decorations Without a Compositor, Fixes Over 25 Bugs

        The GTK+ development team has announced the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance release of the GTK+ 3.16 GUI toolkit used in the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.

      • GNOME 3.16

        GNOME 3.16 was released last week and is the result of more than 30000 commits by over 1000 persons, I am always impressed by those numbers, thank you all!

      • GNOME’s GTK+ Finally Getting Close To Dropping Windows XP Support

        GNOME/GTK+ developers are finally preparing themselves to drop support for Microsoft Windows XP.

        While Microsoft no longer offers public support for Windows XP and most modern software has done away with XP support, GNOME’s tool-kit continues to support Windows going back to XP. It’s been discussed before about dropping XP and this discussion has resurrected once again.

  • Distributions

    • Material Design Inspired Papyros Still Alive, Looks Gorgeous

      Papyros is a new Linux distribution designed around a Material Design framework, and it promises to be one of the most interesting releases in the Linux ecosystem. After a month that brought no news about its progress, the devs explained that the project is not dead, but alive and kicking.

    • Update, OS to Soon Switch to Ubuntu 15.04 Base

      Ubuntu developers are preparing to launch the last OTA update for the current branch of Ubuntu Touch RTM, and they are also working to change the base of the system to 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

    • Reviews

      • An Everyday Linux Review Of openSUSE 13.2

        There are people out there that will want all of the verbose options, giving access to every available installation option but maybe there could be a general installer and a custom installer to make it easier for the masses.

      • Looking into the Void distribution

        Void is an independent distribution and offers a rolling release approach to package management. There are many Void editions we can download. There are Void images for the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi computers along with builds for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. In addition, there are spins of Void for specific desktop environments and we can download images for Cinnamon, Enlightenment, MATE and Xfce flavours. I decided to begin my trial with the 64-bit Cinnamon build of Void. The download for the Cinnamon image is 454MB in size.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Slackware Family

      • KDE 4.14.3 now also for Slackware 14.1

        The set has been spiced up with the latest Long Term Support (LTS) sources that I took from KDE Applications 14.12.3, specifically the newest versions of kde-workspace, kdelibs and kdepim. Essentially, I have used the exact same sources from which I built my KDE 4.14.3 packages for Slackware-current before.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Scientific Linux 7.1 to Be Unveiled on April 13, Release Candidate 2 Out Now

        Pat Riehecky from the Scientific Linux development team has announced today, April 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Scientific Linux 7.1 operating system.

      • 2015 Red Hat Summit Announced

        Besides the speeches, 170 1-hour breakout sessions are planned. Breakout sessions are presentations by industry experts on topical issues. Some speakers include Thomas Cameron, John Shakshober, and Matt Hicks. A Partner Pavillion will be open showcasing many of Red Hat’s partners and their wares. Labs will let attendees test out Red Hat’s latest tech. For those wanting still more add-ons include in-depth training courses with expert instructors and certification exams in Red Hat OpenStack. Developers can attend DevNation for “a week of keynotes, technical sessions, BoFs, evening programming events, and more” with folks from some of the top tech companies around.

      • Red Hat channel chief: Time to build an open source practice

        Speaking to ChannelBuzz.ca ahead of the company’s North American Partner Conference here, Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president of global channel sales and alliances at Red Hat, described a shift in the conversation his company and its partners are having with their customers. Gone are the days of convincing customers that open source is “for real” in the enterprise. Now everybody’s got an opinion on open source – not just Linux, but other major projects as well, most notably OpenStack. Now, they want to know more, and that means partners have to know more.

      • Fedora

        • Details Of DNF Succeeding Yum In Fedora 22 Still Being Discussed

          DNF is the next-generation Yum and after being available for the past few Fedora releases, with Fedora 22 it’s ready for prime-time. Kevin Fenzi last week started a mailing list thread about dnf replacing yum and dnf-yum. DNF is installed by default as part of the “core” group, DNF-Yum is also installed by default, Yum is still installed so if something still depends directly on it or a user manually wants it, and the Yum RPM package now requires dnf-yum.

        • Fedora Server 22 Is Using The XFS File-System By Default

          Using the XFS file-system as the default within an LVM has been part of the Fedora Server technical spec while with Fedora 22 it’s finally happened. The default layout for Fedora Server 22 installations is using XFS atop LVM while /boot is outside the LVM setup.

    • Debian Family

      • More arm64 hardware for Debian – Applied Micro X-Gene

        As a follow-up to my post about bootstrapping arm64 in Debian, we’ve had more hardware given to Debian for us to use in porting and building packages for arm64. Applied Micro sent me an X-Gene development machine to set up and use. Unfortunately, the timing was unlucky and the machine sat on my desk unopened for a few weeks while I was on long holiday in Australia. Once I was back, I connected it up and got it working. Out of the box, a standard Jessie arm64 installation worked using network boot (dhcp and tftp). I ran through d-i as normal and installed a working system, then handed it over to the DSA and buildd folks to get the machine integrated into our systems. Easy! The machine is now up and running as arm-arm-03.debian.org and has been building packages for a few weeks now. You can see the stats here on the buildd.debian.org site.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Oxide Vulnerabilities Closed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

            Canonical revealed details about Oxide vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This update brings a few fixes, but it’s nothing all that important.

          • Ubuntu 15.04 Launches in Two Weeks, Will Be Based on Linux Kernel 3.19.3 After All

            Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is about to be released in a little over two weeks, and the developers have announced that they settled on Linux kernel 3.19.3, a couple of days before the kernel freeze.

          • Unity 7 Improvements Backported from Ubuntu 15.04 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

            Every once in a while Ubuntu developers made improvements to the Unity desktop environment, but that usually happens for new Ubuntu releases, like 15.04 for example. That doesn’t stop them from porting those improvements to older releases, such as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

          • Firefox 37.0.1 Has Been Added To The Default Repositories Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems

            Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Firefox 37.0.1 has been recently released, coming with important bug-fixes. Not long after that, Canonical has patched it and added it to the default repositories of all the supported Ubuntu systems.

          • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Gets `Always Show Menus` Unity Feature (Proposed Repository)

            The much requested Unity feature to always show the menus, which is already available in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet for almost three months, has been backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

          • There’s Yet Another Awkward Ubuntu Linux Tablet Announced

            In recent months we’ve covered an Ubuntu tablet with a 1TB hard drive, another sketchy Ubuntu tablet, and other awkward devices looking to ship Ubuntu in tablet/mobile form without any support from Canonical. There’s yet another tablet to talk about today.

          • Mailman Exploit Closed in Ubuntu 14.10

            Details about a Mailman vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS that has been found and fixed were published in a security notice by Canonical.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu-Based Nitrux OS Is Now Powered by Linux Kernel 3.19

              Uri Herrera from Nitrux S.A. recently announced the immediate availability of Nitrux OS 4.15 Linux operating system that is currently used in their NXQ mini PC unveiled a couple of months ago.

            • MintBox Mini News

              CompuLab is working hard on the MintBox Mini. SMT (Supervised Manufacturer’s Testing) was done, and they’re now soldering, testing, starting mechanical assembly and packing of the units.

            • Linux Mint 17.2 to Be Named “Rafaela”

              The name of the next Linux Mint 17.2 release has been chosen and it’s going to be “Rafaela.” The project continues with the feminine names, so the new code name should be no surprise.

            • Edubuntu – the Free and Open Source Software Liberian Educators and Policy Makers Should Consider for Liberian Schools

              Ostensibly, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have significantly permeated our society, yet their integration in our educational system has not been achieved. The glaring disparity among students who are ICT literate and those who are not, is evidence of this. Understandably though, there are several priorities and challenges that may be responsible for the slow progress in this area. Fortunately for us, we have a few Liberians in our educational system who possess the dynamism needed to bring significant changes. However, these changes must parallel those of the global community’s. In doing so, we will effectively be eliminating one of the barriers that young Liberians graduating from high school face when they submit applications for employment; the ubiquitous, “must be computer literate” listed as a job requirement. In today’s article, I will discuss how EDUBUNTU, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), can help us integrate ICTs in schools to achieve some level of equilibrium with regard to basic ICT literacy among Liberian students.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • SMARC module runs Linux on i.MX6, runs hot and cold

      Embedian has launched a SMARC COM that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX6, and offers up to 2GB RAM, 4GB eMMC, -40 to 85°C operation, and a Mini-ITX baseboard.

    • Phones

      • Jolla Communicator for Ubuntu Helps Users Control Their Jolla Smartphones

        The Jolla community has put together an application called Jolla Communicator that allows users to send and receive messages on Ubuntu, which connected to a Sailfish OS-powered smartphone.

      • Android

        • HTC One M8 Android 5.0 Lollipop Update Continues

          Back in January HTC announced they’d miss the deadline they set themselves for the HTC One M8 Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but since then we’ve received plenty of good news as it’s rolling out to multiple carriers in the United States. It first kicked off for owners back in January, and over the past few weeks has continued to arrive for more and more proud owners.

        • One Android fan’s righteous rant: He owns 6 Android devices and none of them have Lollipop yet

          We all know there are good reasons why Android will never be rolled out as efficiently as the way Apple rolls out new versions of iOS. That said, surely the process can be better than it is right now… can’t it?

        • Moto G Android 5.1 Lollipop Update Is Out And What To Expect For 2013 Moto X, Moto E And Moto G LTE

          Motorola has begun rolling out the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Moto G Google Play Edition (GPE), and it is possible that other versions of the phone could receive the update anytime soon.

        • Amazon Prime Instant Video comes to Android tablets with a catch

          Check the Amazon Instant Video splash page and you’ll see the news: You can officially stream videos from Amazon to your Google Android tablet. I say “officially” because tech savvy folks may have already sideloaded, or manually installed, the phone version some time ago. But for the mainstream masses who typically get their apps from the Google Play Store — a smart move for security reasons — this is new.

        • ‘Mortal Kombat X’ Available On iOS And Android, Launch Trailer Contains System Of A Down — Plus Full Roster Revealed

          The mobile companion game for Mortal Kombat X is available for download on both iOS and Android. Mortal Kombat X Mobile can be downloaded for free (with in-app purchases) on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, according to Hardcore Gamer. The Mortal Kombat X Mobile is the full Mortal Kombat X experience built for mobile devices.

        • Mortal Kombat X Mobile Android Release Date: iOS Version Is Live But When Will Fighting Game Appear In Google Play Store? [VIDEO]
        • A case to keep Android and Chrome OS separate

          There are many Android fans who aren’t enamored with Chrome OS. They cite lack of apps for the latter, and the wealth of features that make up the great utility of the former. There has long been speculation that Google will eventually merge the two platforms into one OS. I hope that never happens.

        • Apple Watch vs. Android Wear, Pebble and Samsung Gear

          What is a smartwatch, and what can it do? The Apple Watch arrives in a landscape filled with things for your wrist. How does it stack up? Great in some ways, and not so wonderfully in others. Let’s look at the closest competition and see.

        • Android 5.1 to hit Google Play Edition of HTC One M7 and M8

          Owners of the Google Play Edition of the HTC One M7 and M8 should stay tuned for Android 5.1.

          In a tweet late Tuesday, HTC vice president of product management Mo Versi said that “approval for both M8 & M7 GPE versions have been granted by Google for 5.1 OS. OTA out shortly!” That means an over-the-air update should reach both models soon if it hasn’t already. The Google Play Editions of such phones come with pure Android, which excludes any customizations typically made by the manufacturers.

        • Google highlights even more Android Wear watch faces, straps

          Itching to make your shiny new Android Wear watch really yours? You’re in luck — Google’s curating not only the best watchfaces to throw on your teensy wrist-display, but some of the handsome watchbands you should lash onto it too. Android Wear product manager Jeff Chang pointed out new (and mostly leather, sadly) straps available from E3 Supply Co., Worn & Wound and Clockwork Synergy in a post on the Official Android Blog earlier today. Thing is, you can’t actually buy these accessories straight from the Play Store proper — you’ll still have to mosey on over to each retailer’s site to lay claim to your next bit of wrist candy so the approach isn’t exactly as seamless as we would’ve hoped.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Animals Set FOSS Apart

    We’re going to take the scenic route in getting to the point today. If you don’t want to wait, you can go down to the bottom where it says, “The moral of the story…” But the point of today’s exercise is that we in the decentralized FOSS realm are a creative bunch, and in that creativity is our strength.

  • Etsy Owes Data Center Efficiency to Facebook’s Open Source VM

    Etsy attributes recent accomplishments in data center efficiency in large part to using the Facebook-developed, open source HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), according to software engineer Dan Miller on Etsy’s blog. Etsy is an extremely popular marketplace for handmade, vintage and unique items. The company is expected to IPO soon.

  • Open source risks being devoured by the very cloud to which it gave birth

    Open source, popular as it has been, has hardly killed off proprietary software. While margins and new license revenues have suffered across the enterprise software spectrum, it is the cloud, more than open-source software, that is to blame (or thank, depending on whose stock you own). Yes, open source built the cloud, but it is the cloud that gets all the credit (and cash).

  • Events

    • Empower developers with a mix of community, communication, and custom tools

      Open source developers can create an immense amount of value for any company that relies on open source software by giving it the ability to direct and influence aspects of the open source community. This allows the company to shape the tools they rely on and make them better fit company needs, a phenomenon otherwise known as “scratching their own itch.”

      Although an open source developer’s primary skill is writing good code, their value extends far beyond technical skills. Adopting open source practices requires participation in diverse communities that have a number of stakeholders who each have their own itches to scratch. Open source developers find themselves in a complex position that requires them to be experts not only in their technical field, but also in communication and collaboration.

    • DFN Workshop 2015

      To defend against targeted attacks based on spoofed emails he proposed to detect whether the writing style of an email corresponds to that of previously seen emails of the presumed contact. In fact, their research shows that they are able to tell whether the writing style matches that of previous emails with very high probability.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Dials Back on Firefox Opportunistic Encryption

        Mozilla issued the Firefox 37.0.1 update, which disables the opportunistic encryption feature that was just introduced in Firefox 37.
        Mozilla has had a change of heart regarding opportunistic encryption—for now. The company rolled out its open-source Firefox 37 Web browser on March 31, with one of the key new features being a capability known as opportunistic encryption. However, due to a security issue related to opportunistic encryption, Mozilla disabled the feature in the Firefox 37.0.1 update released April 3.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • NASA’s Chris Mattmann on Apache technology

      I’ve been involved in the ASF since 2005 when I got involved in the Apache Nutch project. I was a PhD student at USC taking Search Engines class and also working at NASA JPL. My final project in the class was an RSS parsing plugin (NUTCH-30) that got integrated. It was a budding, awesome community, and I got more and more excited after my patch and started helping out on the lists. I also saw a big use for Nutch and what eventually became Hadoop at NASA.

    • NASA, IBM Ask the World to Hack Space

      This weekend, NASA is hooking up with IBM’s BlueMix cloud platform in an unprecedented development effort. More than 10,000 developers, scientists, entrepreneurs and students in 62 countries will work in tandem on a code-a-thon aimed at building technology for space exploration. Here are more details.

    • PLUMgrid Delivers ONS 3.0 Suite for Driving OpenStack Clouds

      PLUMgrid, which focuses on virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack cloud deployments, has announced the latest SDN software PLUMgrid Open Networking Suite 3.0 for OpenStack with new operational tools, features for dynamic routing, and expanded service insertion for third party virtual, physical and container based appliances. Based on OpenStack Juno, PLUMgrid ONS 3.0 is Red Hat certified with RHEL OSP 6.

    • A case for predictable databases

      Barzan Mozafari, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), will be giving a talk on the predictability of performance in database systems at the OpenStack Live conference in Santa Clara, California on Tuesday, April 14.

  • Education

    • Open Source Picks Up the Pace

      This February, EBSCO Information Services announced plans to provide funding and technical assistance for contributors to the Koha open source ILS platform. Led by the Koha Gruppo Italiano (KGI)—founded by the American Academy in Rome, American University of Rome, and the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce—with development support from ByWater Solutions, Catalyst IT, and Cineca, the partnership will enable an upgrade of Koha’s core search engine to Elasticsearch, the popular open source, multitenant-capable full-text search engine.

  • Funding

    • Mourning Chris Yeoh

      It is my sad duty to inform the community that Chris Yeoh passed away this morning. Chris leaves behind a daughter Alyssa, aged 6, who I hope will remember Chris as the clever and caring person that I will remember him as. I haven’t had a chance to confirm with the family if they want flowers or a donation to a charity. As soon as I know those details I will reply to this email.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Cauldron 2015

      This year the GNU Cauldron Conference is going to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, from August 7 to 9, 2015.

      The GNU Cauldron Conference is a gathering of users and hackers of the GNU toolchain ecosystem.

      Meaning that if you are interested in projects remotely related to the GNU C library, GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger or any toolchain runtime related project that has ties with the GNU system you are welcome!

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open access: a national licence is not the answer

        “Open Access: Is a national licence the answer?” is a proposal by David Price and Sarah Chaytor of University College London for a mechanism to provide full access to everyone within the UK to all published research. It was published on 31 March 2015 by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) whose director, Nick Hillman, wrote the foreword.

  • Programming

    • Google makes Santa Tracker open source on GitHub — will you fork Santa Claus?

      April Fool’s Day is well behind us, so all the pranks should be over, right? I ask because today, Google announces that it is making its Santa Tracker project open source on GitHub. The fact that it is open source is great, but the timing is odd. The last thing I expected to read about in April is friggin’ Santa Claus, but here we are.

    • Google Opens Santa Tracker For Developers By Making It Open Source

      Christmas may be a distant memory by now and the thought of Christmas 2015 might seem just as distant, as April has only just begun. However, it seems Christmas is not too far away from Google’s mind today, as the Search giant have just opened sourced their popular Santa Tracker software. If you are unfamiliar with Santa Tracker, then it is rather self-explanatory. Each year, around about Christmas time, Google releases its Santa Tracker offering the ability to track Santa while he is out and about and delivering his presents to all the boys and girls. That said, the tracker software is not just for tracking Santa and this is why last year Google released the Tracker as early as December 1st.

Leftovers

  • Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People

    Performance on these kinds of questions is at best a discrete skill that can be improved through practice, eliminating their utility for assessing candidates. At worst, they rely on some trivial bit of information or insight that is withheld from the candidate, and serve primarily to make the interviewer feel clever and self-satisfied. They have little if any ability to predict how candidates will perform in a job.

  • Labour Appeals to Tories

    The Guardian has published an open appeal to Tory and Lib Dem voters to vote Labour in Dundee West. I think that tells you all you need to know about the Red Tories and their priorities. It is also a new low in journalism even for the fanatic and increasingly desperate Severin Carrell, who is a total disgrace to his profession. The costs of publishing the Guardian ought to be counted against Marra’s election expenses: this is not journalism in any sense, merely a puff piece for a candidate.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran

      Nasir al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the right to operate all of Iran’s railroads and canals, most of the mines, all of the government’s forests, and all future industries. The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of.” Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to rescind the sale the next year.

      [...]

      Our rhetoric on Iran seems nonsensical: Do U.S. leaders actually believe Iran would engage in a first nuclear strike on Israel or the U.S., given that would lead to a quick and devastating retaliation from those well-armed nuclear powers?

      Even conservative U.S. foreign policy experts know that’s incredibly unlikely. They’re not worried that we can’t deter a nuclear-armed Iran — they’re worried that a nuclear-armed Iran could deter us. As Thomas Donnelly, a top Iran analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, put it in 2004, “the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a nightmare … because of the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon U.S. strategy for the greater Middle East. … The surest deterrent to American action is a functioning nuclear arsenal.”

  • Finance

    • Fox News’ Smear Campaign Against The Poor Is Reflected In The GOP’s Latest Food Stamp Bills

      Fox News’ campaign of misinformation surrounding food assistance programs may be continuing to influence GOP legislation, as lawmakers in both Missouri and Kansas consider measures addressing “fake problems” within their state’s benefit programs.

      Republican lawmakers in Kansas recently introduced legislation restricting where recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, formerly known as “welfare”) can spend their money and what they can buy. The bill would limit the daily spending allowance to $25 and ban recipients from using benefits at psychics and tattoo parlors. Another measure, introduced by the House GOP in Missouri, will similarly limit how recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly knowns as “food stamps”) can use their benefits, prohibiting them from buying “steak, seafood, soda, cookies, chip[s], and energy drinks.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Rolling Stone and the Media’s Glass House

      There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they’re such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.

    • U.S. Propaganda 101: Illegally Invade Countries, Fund the Media, Call it “Independent”

      The author accuses news outlets of doing exactly what he himself and the U.S. mainstream media in general does when reporting about foreign policy issues such as Ukraine: they “systematically [regurgitate U.S. propaganda, spread] lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories.” The advantage they have is that they don’t need to translate anything. Apparently for Rohac an article written in Russian has to be Russian propaganda. It’s that simple: Russians are just not producing any honest journalistic content. This argument about texts being “directly translated from Russian sources” is not only weak, it is xenophobic.

  • Censorship

    • YouTuber Angry Joe Swears Off Nintendo Videos After The Company Claimed His Mario Party 10 Take

      Nintendo’s never-ending desire to control how YouTubers review its games or do “let’s plays” has been laughable from the start. From the trust-destroying agreement YouTubers had to enter into in order to get access to visual content to the beauracratic nightmare individuals had to wade through just to get a video approved for monetization, the whole thing started off on messy footing. And the biggest issue in all of this: Nintendo still can’t seem to grasp that these YouTubers are giving the company free advertising. Gamers love the kinds of videos these YouTubers produce. They use them to make purchasing decisions, to become interested in new games, and to fuel word-of-mouth advertising that no trumped up ad campaign could ever possibly hope to achieve. Why make any of that more complicated by creating an approval system for the videos? And, more importantly, why take away the incentive for fans to promote your games by demanding a share of their YouTube revenue?

    • Once Again, Political Speech Is Silenced By Copyright/ContentID

      This seems to happen every political season. When he was a Presidential candidate, John McCain got annoyed at YouTube taking down political videos based on copyright claims. During the last Presidential election, a Mitt Romney TV ad featuring President Obama singing an Al Green song was taken down via a copyright claim. And now, 2016 Presidential candidate Rand Paul has discovered that his announcement speech from Tuesday morning has been taken down.

  • Privacy

    • U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

      The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

      For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

    • Rand Paul Vows to Stop NSA Spying ‘on Day 1′ of Presidency

      Rand Paul’s campaign kickoff just concluded with a rousing speech by the libertarian-leaning U.S. senator from Kentucky in which he promised that his first act as president would be to stop the NSA’s illegal spying on American citizens. He vowed to win the White House while clutching the Bill of Rights in one hand and the Constitution in the other.

    • NSA whistleblower: We’ve been lied to

      Bill Binney, a former U.S. National Security Agency employee turned whistleblower, is on a mission to expose the agency’s domestic spying programs and violations of constitutional rights.

      In an interview with AJ+’s Dena Takruri, Binney discusses why he thinks President Barack Obama is “violating the public trust” and what Americans can do to protect themselves from unwarranted surveillance.

    • U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

      The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

    • If you called anyone overseas from 1992-2013, the DEA probably knew about it

      The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), under approval from the top echelons of the Department of Justice, ran a secret, extensive phone metadata bulk collection program for over two decades, amassing billions of records, according to a new report published Tuesday in USA Today.

      This database had previously been revealed to a lesser extent earlier this year, but neither its operational details nor its scope had been revealed until now.

    • Cell Phone Opsec

      Note that it actually makes sense to use a one-time pad in this instance. The message is a ten-digit number, and a one-time pad is easier, faster, and cleaner than using any computer encryption program.

    • Could your online porn habits be publicly released?

      Data brokers, which track browsing habits to sell to third parties, are not governed by any laws stating what can and can’t be done with the data. But they are not the same as hackers, who could theoretically access information about membership to porn sites. Vice said hackers would be more likely to sell the credit card information than release it online for no gain.

      Neither brokers nor hackers have a vested interest in creating Thomas’s nightmare vision of a searchable porn-user database. But that doesn’t mean the data isn’t out there. Even a browser in incognito mode will send tracking information to data brokers that according to one privacy researcher is “all sitting in a database somewhere”.

      Vice said that shouldn’t surprise internet users: “It’s a truth about the modern internet that just about anywhere you go, you’re being tracked.”

    • Post-Cryptanalysis, TrueCrypt Alternatives Step Forward

      TrueCrypt’s relative clean bill of health last week has now spawned a new focus on existing alternatives to the open source encryption software, namely VeraCrypt and CipherShed.

    • General Election Training: How can you campaign against mass surveillance?

      ORG supporters are invited to our General Election Training run by ORG staff on how we can make an impact this election! We’ll give you all the knowledge you need to be confident and effective digital rights activist this election.

    • Illegal downloading: Australia internet firms must supply data

      An Australian court has ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over details of customers accused of illegally downloading a US movie.

  • Civil Rights

    • Hologram replaces Edward Snowden statue in Brooklyn park

      Hours after police removed an illicit bust of Edward Snowden from its perch in a Brooklyn park on Monday, artists replaced it with a hologram.

    • Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech

      John Oliver’s Monday night interview of Edward Snowden — which in 24 hours has been viewed by 3 million people on YouTube alone — renewed all the standard attacks in Democratic circles accusing Snowden of being a traitor in cahoots with the Kremlin. What’s most striking about this — aside from the utter lack of evidence for any of it — is how identical it is to what Nixon officials said to smear the last generation’s greatest whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg (who is widely regarded by Democrats as a hero because his leak occurred with a Republican in the White House).

    • TSA’s Airport “Behavior Detection Program” Found to Target Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists

      The Intercept revealed last month that it is quite easy to be deemed a “suspected terrorist” at airports in the United States. A leaked checklist used by the Transportation Security Administration shows an expansive list of “suspicious signs” for screening passengers, including yawning, fidgeting, whistling, throat clearing and staring at one’s feet. All of these, according to the TSA, are considered behaviors that indicate stress or deception. Well now The Intercept has revealed who the program actually targets: not terrorists, but undocumented immigrants. Taking a five-week period at a major U.S. airport, The Intercept found that 90 percent of all those arrested were detained for being in the country illegally. Not a single passenger was arrested or suspected for ties to terrorism. The overwhelming detention of undocumented immigrants bolsters criticism that government screening programs have targeted passengers with racial profiling. We speak to the reporter who broke this story, Jana Winter.

    • Strikes Grow in China as Grassroots Labor Movement Takes Shape

      As the economic landscape in China continues to shift, an awakening working class is demanding fair treatment and higher wages—and the movement is picking up steam.

      The Associated Press on Monday highlighted the emerging resistance to workplace exploitation and authoritarian government policies that has steadily grown over the past four years, with numbers of strikers doubling annually since 2011 until they reached more than 1,300 last year.

    • NY Cops Used ‘Stingray’ Spy Tool 46 Times Without Warrant

      The police department in Erie County, New York fought hard to prevent the New York Civil Liberties Union from obtaining records about its use of a controversial surveillance tool known as a stingray.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ISP Pulls VPN Service After Geo-Unblocking Legal Threats

      Following copyright threats from large media companies a Kiwi ISP has taken down its VPN service. Lightbox, MediaWorks, SKY, and TVNZ had threatened legal action against services that bypass geo-restrictions on sites such as Netflix and Hulu. Other ISPs offering similar products are currently standing firm.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Australian public health advocates seek access to regional trade pact negotiations

      The peak lobby group for American pharmaceutical manufacturers has been given privileged access to negotiations for a major regional trade pact that could see the cost of medicines skyrocket in Australia.

      Public health advocates and business groups are concerned that pharmaceutical giants will be able to advance their commercial interests in the once-in-a-lifetime pact through their seat at the negotiating table, while the details are kept secret from the Australian public.

    • Health experts worried as Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations conclude

      The draft of the investment chapter published by Wikileaks last week outlines the controversial investor‐state dispute settlement mechanism which would allow foreign corporations to sue governments in offshore tribunals.

04.07.15

Links 7/4/2015: Dell XPS 13 With Ubuntu, digiKam Software Collection 4.9.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Calling all Kiwi developers: Ready to push the limits of Open Source?

    “To have GitHub cohost their first conference outside of the US in Wellington is a strong endorsement of our tech capability.”

  • Open for Thinking, Participation & Collaboration: Peter Kerr

    As a digital immigrant who has, without sometimes knowing why, gone down he android path for my devices, I’m inherently drawn to the open source philosophy.

    In a sense, at a time when public participation in democracy is lessening, it is events such as this that continue to hold the flame for non-secrecy and more sharing in society.

  • A better Internet of Things through open source culture

    Open source’s influence extends far beyond sharing code, but this aspect sometimes goes unappreciated. For example, I previously wrote about how the special way of developing and collaborating associated with open source has come to also reflect many DevOps best practices, from transparency to iterative fast releases. I’d argue that it is many of these same default behaviors that are helping to make the Internet of Things a hot topic today.

  • Events

    • North West Linux Fest

      Fedora Jam is coming to Linux Fest North West in Bellingham, Washington, April 24th to 26th. If you are a friend of Fedora, sign up on the wiki and participate in our booth. Or if you are a musician, come by to try out Fedora Jam, we will have a guitar, keyboard and other instruments to try out. We will have Fedora shirts at the Friday game night, show your Fedora pride during the fest.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Networking in the cloud is changing

      As part of the OpenStack Live conference next week in Santa Clara, California, she’ll be delivering a three hour tutorial on OpenStack networking architecture and concepts, along with her colleague Faan DeSwardt.

    • AtScale Launches, Bridging Hadoop and Popular Analytics Tools

      At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR are leading the pack among these Hadoop-focused companies.

  • Funding

    • The Open Source Funding Conundrum

      Every time I hear of another great open source project shutting its doors, I hold my breath in hopes it will be forked. Sadly though, this isn’t a great plan for all projects. Sometimes these projects are rich in users but poor in developers. In this article, I’ll explore this issue and what can be done to keep open source projects funded.

    • CoreOS Team Gets $12 Million to Offer DIY Google-style Infrastructure with Tectonic

      Google has a vested interest in CoreOS bringing Kubernetes to the enterprise, with Google Ventures investing $12 million in Tectonic.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Basque parliament adapts workflow to eID tool

      The Basque Parliament is planning to overhaul its workflow, wishing to increase its use of digital identity and electronic signature solutions. The Basque Parliament is using Sinadura, an open source eID tool developed by Zylk, a Bilbao-based open source IT service provider. The parliament now wants to combine this with more applications, the company says.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • All You Need to Know

    I see that in “journalists” questioning Blair, nobody asked the obvious question, which is who was paying for this particular speech.

  • STV Debate Unionist Fit-Up

    I wondered how on earth they got an audience so completely unrepresentative of Scottish opinion, and the answer was not hard to find. The audience has been selected “based both on current opinion polls and the last general election result.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • ​Monsanto lobbyist claims ‘safe to drink a quart of pesticide’ – but bolts when offered a glass (VIDEO)

      A lobbyist for Monsanto claimed that it was safe to drink “a quart” of the company’s Roundup pesticide, but pointedly refused to try even a sip when offered a glass during an interview with French TV before storming off the set.

      Patrick Moore told a Canal+ journalist that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most widely used weed killer, was not responsible for an increase in cancer rates in Argentina.

      “You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you,” he insisted.

      When the journalist informed him that a cup of the herbicide was prepared for him, Moore bristled, saying: “I’m not stupid.”

      But when pressed by the interviewer if the substance was dangerous, Moore replied: “It’s not dangerous to humans.” He added that many try to commit suicide by drinking Roundup, but “fail regularly.”

    • Paul blazes new path on pot

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is poised to become the first top-tier presidential candidate from either party to make marijuana reform a major campaign issue.

      Paul, who will announce his White House bid on Tuesday, has argued forcefully that states should be allowed to adopt their own policies on the use of medical marijuana without fear of federal interference.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Factual Errors in John Bolton’s “Bomb Iran!” Op-Ed in the New York Times – and Why You Should Care

      Last week, at a crucial moment in nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, the New York Times published an op-ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” As I pointed out at the time, the Times accidentally undermined him by linking one of his key claims to an explanation of why that claim was wrong. After I asked about it, the Times changed the link.

      Bolton’s many other factual mistakes, detailed below, have also not been corrected — on top of which, Bolton failed to make a relevant disclosure about his paid work for a group that advocates the overthrow of the Iranian regime. It’s worth dwelling on these problems a bit given that Bolton’s perspective has a significant constituency in Congress — which could still derail the accord the White House is closing in on with the Iranians.

    • The Obama Arms Bazaar: Record Sales, Troubling Results

      With the end of the Obama presidency just around the corner, discussions of his administration’s foreign policy legacy are already well under way. But one central element of that policy has received little attention: the Obama administration’s dramatic acceleration of U.S. weapons exports.

      The numbers are astonishing. In President Obama’s first five years in office, new agreements under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program—the largest channel for U.S. arms exports—totaled over $169 billion. After adjusting for inflation, the volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Wikileaks

      I had not realised that Julian had so much Scottish ancestry or quite so recently. After independence, he will definitely be entitled to a Scottish passport!

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Conservative Media Blame Environmentalists, Not Climate, For California’s “Man-Made Drought”

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board recently recycled many of the same claims it made in a 2009 editorial titled, “California’s Man-Made Drought.” Right-wing website Hot Air dubbed the drought “California’s ‘man-made’ environmental disaster.” And when potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina described the drought as “a man-made disaster” during an appearance on Glenn Beck’s radio show, Beck demanded to know why “we don’t hear that story on the news at all,” while Rush Limbaugh declared that “there is a man-made lack of water in California,” and “[Fiorina is] right.”

      No, these media figures haven’t suddenly seen the light on climate change. Instead, they’re using the historic drought as an opportunity to baselessly attack environmental policies.

    • Nuclear submarine on fire at Russian shipyard

      A fire has broken out at a Russian nuclear submarine during repair work at a shipyard in Severodvinsk. The cause of the fire is believed to be related to welding work on the sub.

      The United Shipbuilding Company confirmed the incident, adding that nobody was hurt in it. According to the the shipyard’s spokesperson, the submarine’s nuclear reactor was shut down and its weapons unloaded before the repair started.

    • Russian nuclear submarine catches fire at shipyard

      A Moscow radio station published a picture showing smoke billowing from the submarine.

    • Russian Nuclear Sub ‘On Fire In Dry Dock’

      A Russian nuclear submarine has caught fire in a shipyard, according to news agency RIA Novosti.

      The 500m-long (1,640ft6) 949 Antei was being repaired on in Zvyozdochka shipyard in Russia’s northern province of Arkhangelsk, according to Russian news agency reports.

    • Russian nuclear submarine catches fire in shipyard

      Russian news agency Interfax cited a separate source as saying there were no weapons on board the submarine and other news agencies said the fire had started during welding, causing insulation materials to catch fire.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Fighting Toddler ‘Porn Addiction,’ UK Lawmakers Demand Porn Sites Include Age Checks Or Face Closure

      The UK’s attempts to filter the Internet of all of its naughty bits are nothing if not amusing, whether it’s the nation’s porn filter architect getting arrested for child porn, or the complete and total obliviousness when it comes to the slippery slope of expanding those filters to include a growing roster of ambiguously objectionable material. The idea of forcing some kind of overarching structure upon porn consumption in the UK is another idea that never seems to go away, whether it’s requiring a “porn license” (requiring users to clearly opt in if they want to view porn) or the latest push — mandatory age checks.

  • Privacy

    • Microsoft drops Do Not Track default from Internet Explorer

      Microsoft has reversed its position on the contentious Do Not Track (DNT) browser feature, saying Internet Explorer will no longer send DNT signals to websites by default.

      “Put simply, we are updating our approach to DNT to eliminate any misunderstanding about whether our chosen implementation will comply with the W3C standard,” Microsoft chief privacy officer Brendon Lynch said in a Friday blog post.

    • Security Audit Of TrueCrypt Doesn’t Find Any Backdoors — But What Will Happen To TrueCrypt?

      Over the past few years we’ve followed the saga of TrueCrypt. The popular and widely used full disk encryption system got some attention soon after the initial Snowden leaks when people started realizing that no one really knew who was behind TrueCrypt, and that the software had not been fully audited. Cryptographer Matthew Green decided to lead an effort to audit TrueCrypt. A year ago, the team released the first phase, finding a few small vulnerabilities, but no backdoors and nothing too serious. This week the full audit was completed and again finds no evidence of any backdoors planted in the code.

    • Meet the privacy activists who spy on the surveillance industry

      On the second floor of a narrow brick building in the London Borough of Islington, Edin Omanovic is busy creating a fake company. He is playing with the invented company’s business cards in a graphic design program, darkening the reds, bolding the blacks, and testing fonts to strike the right tone: informational, ambiguous, no bells and whistles. In a separate window, a barren website is starting to take shape. Omanovic, a tall, slender Bosnian-born, Scottish-raised Londonite gives the company a fake address that forwards to his real office, and plops in a red and black company logo he just created. The privacy activist doesn’t plan to scam anyone out of money, though he does want to learn their secrets. Ultimately, he hopes that the business cards combined with a suit and a close-cropped haircut will grant him access to a surveillance industry trade show, a privilege usually restricted to government officials and law enforcement agencies.

    • DHS Seeks Increase in Domestic HUMINT Collection

      The Department of Homeland Security aims to increase its domestic human intelligence collection activity this year, the Department recently told Congress.

      In a question for the record from a September 2014 congressional hearing, Rep. Paul C. Broun (R-GA) asked: “Do we currently have enough human intelligence capacity–both here in the homeland and overseas–to counter the threats posed by state and non-state actors alike?”

    • Stop Taking Dick Pics, But Not Because of the NSA. (SFW)

      Let me make something clear: I am pro dick pic. I mean, who doesn’t love the occasional consensual staring contest with a one eyed bandit? When Edward Snowden told everyone to keep taking dick pictures on Last Week Tonight, he was making an important point. Governments are meant to be accountable to people and controlled by them in democracies. Leaving aside any specific analysis of how much or whether America is really a democracy, Snowden’s message is profound and valid. We should have that freedom, and we have it by practicing that freedom at our governments. But we should be on a dick pic strike nevertheless.

  • Civil Rights

    • Czech president says his ‘doors are closed’ to US envoy over Moscow WWII visit comments

      Previously, Zeman said that his visit to Russia would be a “sign of gratitude for not having to speak German in this country.” He also intended to pay tribute to the memory of 150,000 Soviet soldiers who died liberating Czechoslovakia.

    • Barrett Brown suddenly stripped of prison e-mail after talking to press

      Barrett Brown, the brash journalist and former member of Anonymous who was sentenced in January 2015 to over five years in federal prison, had his e-mail privileges suddenly revoked, seemingly for corresponding with journalists.

      On Sunday, Brown’s supporters published his account of the punishment, describing how he suddenly lost access to his prison-supplied e-mail account on March 31. In the ensuing days, Brown attempted to contact various prison officials to get further information, including someone named “Trust Fund Manager Coleman.”

    • Malaysia passes controversial anti-terror bill

      Malaysia has passed a controversial anti-terrorism bill, which the government says is needed to tackle the threat from Islamic extremists.

      The bill reintroduces indefinite detention without trial – something the prime minister had repealed in 2012.

    • Chelsea Manning and the Call of America’s Conscience

      April 5th marked the five year anniversary of WikiLeaks publication of the Collateral Murder Video. The footage of a secret US military video depicted an Apache helicopter killing Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. It provided an uncensored view of modern war for the world to see. The light that shone in the darkness was the conscience of a young woman. Chelsea Manning (formally Bradley Manning) is now serving 35 years behind bars for her great public service.

    • Assange, Manning Still Only Ones Imprisoned for Collateral Murder

      April 5 marked the five-year anniversary of the release of the Collateral Murder video by WikiLeaks. The shocking footage showed the entire world the 2007 US Apache attack helicopter airstrike on Baghdad that killed 12 people – including two Reuters staff members – and injured two small children.

    • Obama Executive Order prompts surge in bitcoin donations to the Snowden defence fund

      On 1 April 2015, Barack Obama signed into law an Executive Order “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities”

      Media reports speculated that the new powers granted by this Executive Order would enable executive authorities to confiscate cryptocurrency holdings and even prohibit donations to Edward Snowden’s defence fund.

      Since news of the Executive Order came to light, the bitcoin account for Edward Snowden’s official defence fund experienced a significant surge in donations , due at least in part to this post on reddit. We have received over 200 separate donations this month, including a single donation of 8.49 bitcoin, or over 2000 US dollars.

    • Obama reportedly criminalises “support” for “cyber-enabled activities”

      US President Barack Obama has issued an executive order authorising the Treasury Secretary to enact sanctions against those whom it deems to have “have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for” cyber-related crimes.

      Reuters reports that even US lawmakers consider the order “surprisingly broad”, and investigative journalists are concerned about its wide-ranging scope.

    • Historic child sex abuse: Young boys trafficked from Belfast to London, victim claims

      Vulnerable young boys were taken from a children’s care home in Belfast in the 1970s, trafficked to London and abused by powerful figures who were part of a Westminster pedophile ring, a victim has claimed.

      Richard Kerr, a victim of child sex abuse at the Kincora care home for boys, told Channel 4 News he also suffered abuse at London’s Elm Guest House and Dolphin Square.

    • Second Yemen war critic is arrested

      ANOTHER official at the National Democratic Assembly (Al Wahdawi) has been arrested for allegedly criticising military action in Yemen.

      Deputy secretary general Mohammed Al Motawa was yesterday accused of spreading false and malicious information about Operation Decisive Storm, led by Saudi Arabia and nine allied countries, including Bahrain.

      The coalition countries launched air strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen on Thursday after Shi’ite militias sought to topple the Yemeni government led by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

    • Pakistan Judge: Charge CIA Lawyer, Officer for Drone Strike

      A Pakistani judge on Tuesday ordered that criminal charges be filed against a former CIA lawyer who oversaw its drone program and the one-time chief agency operative in Islamabad over a 2009 strike that killed two people.

      Former acting general counsel John A. Rizzo and ex-station chief Jonathan Bank must face charges including murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court ruled. A court clerk and a lawyer involved the case, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, confirmed details of the judge’s ruling.

    • Ohio Democrat Teresa Fedor speaks out during abortion debate to reveal she has been raped – and is interrupted by laughter from Republicans

04.06.15

Links 6/4/2015: Krita 3.0 Plans, Intel’s PC-on-a-stick With Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Getting an inside track on open source

    Michael Bryzek saw open source playing a big role in his company’s IT infrastructure, right from the start.

    The CTO and co-founder of online retailer Gilt Groupe, Bryzek built the eight-year-old members-only shopping site using the Web framework Ruby on Rails, the Linux operating system and the object-relational database system PostgreSQL — all open-source tools.

    He says open source doesn’t have the “friction” — that is, sticking points like contractual limits — that typically come with commercial products. He also says his engineers can be more creative and innovative with open source.

  • Jay: A Decentralized and Open-Source Web Wallet for NXT

    Jay, a javascript wallet framework developed for NXT, has just released their open-source, trustless web wallet, which may be the easiest way to make NXT transactions yet.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Piston Unveils Piston CloudOS 4.0, focused on “the Modern Data Center”

      Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. has announced the availability of Piston CloudOS 4.0, which is billed as “an operating system for the modern data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment.” The platform can purportedly deploy OpenStack in minutes, and CloudOS 4.0 also lets users deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal, with forthcoming support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

    • Piston Cloud’s Smart Move to Build a Fungible Platform

      Piston Cloud Computing has announced a move beyond OpenStack for its Piston CloudOS 4.0, an operating system for the data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment.

    • Nebula, OpenStack cloud vendor, just shut down with no notice

      The company was founded in 2011 by Chris Kemp, who had been chief technology officer for IT at NASA where he helped create OpenStack. Kemp left NASA to push OpenStack forward. As Kemp explained to Tech Republic in the fall of 2014, “I wanted the project to live on beyond the work we were doing … I knew that if we could open-source this work under a very flexible open-source framework, and really get a community gathered around contributing to it, the project could live on.”

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Open Source Human Transformation: Hinduism’s gift to mankind

        At the outset, one needs to appreciate that the word “Religion” is related to the Abrahamic faiths more. Eastern spiritual traditions, which find their beginnings in Hinduism, are neither faiths nor religions. Hinduism is an amalgam of various spiritual traditions. The ways are different, the goals are different and the very way of looking at man, divine and life is different. Open Source, personal, subjective, experiential and not fixed in history via a person or event. Now, let us look at what is on offer from Hinduism. Something that is fundamental to human well being.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU remotecontrol

      Whatever you do…..don’t get beat up over your Energy Management strategy. GNU remotecontrol is here to help simplify your life, not make it more complicated. Talk to us if you are stuck or cannot figure out the best option for your GNU remotecontrol framework. The chances are the answer you need is something we have already worked through. We would be happy to help you by discussing your situation with you.

    • GCC 5 Is Coming This Month With OpenMP 4.0, Offloading, Cilk Plus & More

      GCC 5 is expected to be formally released later this month and it by far is looking to be the most exciting GNU Compiler Collection update yet! GCC 5 has amassed a ton of exciting open-source compiler features over the past year.

    • XKCD’s Comic About OSes Is Hilarious, Predicts Launch Date of GNU Hurd 1.0

      The XKCD webcomics are funny because they are usually right on the money, with just a side dish of ridiculousness. The latest one is called Operating Systems and encompasses everything that is done wrong in this world, with just a single drawing and small, smart text about Richard Stallman.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Govt makes a pitch for open source software in IT tenders

      With an aim to reduce project costs, the government has decided to give preference to open source software (OSS) over proprietary in e-governance procurements.

    • India backs open source software for e-governance projects

      Federal and state agencies must make it mandatory for suppliers to give OSS a preference over proprietary or closed source software while responding to requests for proposals. “Suppliers shall provide justification for exclusion of OSS in their response,” according to the policy statement posted to the website of the Ministry for Communication & Information Technology.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Students compete for a chance to have their Raspberry Pi code run in space

      As part of the mission’s education outreach program, children in UK schools will get the chance to write code to run their own applications in space. The Pis will each have a specially made sensor board attached in order to access data on the space station’s atmosphere. Schools will get the chance to run experiments in their own classroom and compare the results from space, or just make interesting applications to run on the space station. We’re really excited to see what the young minds of Britain come up with, and what they can learn from turning their ideas to a reality by programming the boards.

Leftovers

  • On Armenia centennial, US rockers hope music raises pressure

    One hundred years after the mass killings of Armenians, US band System of a Down is taking the fight for remembrance beyond politicians to the world’s music fans.

    The Los Angeles-area hard rockers, who have sold more than 40 million albums since the mid-1990s, are of Armenian descent and are preparing a European tour to culminate in a public concert on April 23 in Yerevan, the band’s first performance in Armenia.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Pentagon’s $10-billion bet gone bad

      Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were effusive about the new technology.

      It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country.

      If North Korea launched a sneak attack, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar — SBX for short — would spot the incoming missiles, track them through space and guide U.S. rocket-interceptors to destroy them.

    • Apparent Saudi Strike Kills at Least Nine in Yemeni Family

      At least nine people from a single family were killed when what appeared to be an airstrike by the Saudi-led military coalition struck a home in a village outside Sana, Yemen’s capital, officials said Saturday.

      Village residents gave a higher toll, saying that as many as 11 members of the Okaish family, including five children, were killed in the bombing on Friday. The airstrike may have been intended for an air defense base about a mile and half away, a Yemen Interior Ministry official said.

      Bombings attributed to the coalition have killed dozens of civilians since the start of the Saudi-led air offensive intended to cripple the Houthis, a Yemeni militia that has gained control of Sana and other parts of Yemen in the past eight months.

    • Manufacturing a ‘Good Adversary’ in Tehran

      The real story behind America’s 30-year Cold War with Iran

      [...]

      The real reason the Bush White House had abandoned the opening to Iran was that the CIA and the Pentagon desperately needed to replace the Soviet threat as justification for continuing Cold War levels of appropriations.

      To head off deep cuts in the CIA budget, the agency’s new director, Robert M. Gates, had identified Iran and the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a new threat. Just two weeks after Gates became director in November 1991, a “senior administration official” was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying that relations with Iran would remain in the “deep freeze,” because of Iran’s “continued support for international terrorism” and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

      That comment dovetailed with the argument Gates made in pubic testimony to fend off deep budget cuts. Testifying before the Defense Policy Panel in early December, just two days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gates said the “accelerating proliferation” of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems were “probably the gravest concern” among post-Cold War threats.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Judge Shoots Down ‘FOIA Terrorist’ Jason Leopold; Says ‘Panetta Review’ Documents Can Be Withheld In Full

      The CIA’s internal document designations seem to bear some resemblance to the NYPD’s use of its “SECRET” stamp — which is deployed arbitrarily and without oversight to declare certain documents out of the reach of Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. If the CIA feels exemption b(5) gives it the best chance to keep documents out of the hands of journalists like Jason Leopold. it can slap these designations on as many papers as possible and mention its predetermination in FOIA lawsuit declarations.

      Second, Boasberg’s refusal to challenge even a single exemption assertion by the CIA isn’t particularly good news, considering his recent appointment to the FISA court. While he has pushed back on government secrecy in the past, he’s also been just as likely to grant its wishes. Considering he’s replacing FISA Judge Reggie Walton — one of the few FISA judges to openly question surveillance tactics and hold the NSA accountable for its abuses — this latest decision seems to indicate his appointment is a downgrade in terms of government accountability.

  • Finance

    • George Will Revives Tired Canard That Reagan Created One Million Jobs In One Month

      But Will’s claim about Reagan’s job creation record is disingenuous. As Business Insider pointed out, Reagan’s so-called million job month in September 1983 was simply an outlier inflated due to nearly 675,000 striking communication workers returning to work…

    • The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

      ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

  • Censorship

    • Turkey reportedly blocks Twitter and YouTube

      Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is calling for a ban on social media once again.

      A spokesperson for this office said on Monday that a prosecutor has ordered Internet providers to block sites that include YouTube and Twitter, which is extremely popular in the country.

      The request comes after photos spread online showing militants holding a prosecutor hostage at gunpoint last week during a takeover of this courthouse office. Prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz, who investigated the death of a teenager who was hit by a police gas canister fired during nationwide anti-government protests in 2013, died last week in a shootout between police and the Marxist militants.

    • Turkish Censorship Order Targets Single Blog Post, Ends Up Blocking Access To 60 Million WordPress Sites

      A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.

    • Turkey Blocks Twitter, YouTube, Scores of Websites After Prosecutor’s Killing

      Twitter and YouTube are blocked once again in Turkey as of today, April 6, following the mass circulation of photos of a hostage crisis that ended with the death of a government prosecutor. According to Hurriyet Daily News, authorities have also blocked 166 websites that posted the photos.

      Although Facebook was initially blocked for the same reason, the block was lifted after the company complied with Turkish officials’ orders to remove the offending images.

  • Privacy

    • Blocking The Fields

      You now need an army of spies, analysts and police to watch the security cameras, check on the spies and watch for people jumping fences. This is not about the bad thing you first objected to any more. It’s now about jumping fences to get to places that have been made unreachable by them, checking on spies for telling lies, dealing with corruption among your informers, suppressing all the “SJW”s who whine about the loss of freedom and undermining your political opposition who are equally clueless about blocking fields but can see that what you are doing is hugely unpopular.

      Congratulations! Your attempt to stop something your supporters disapprove of by mandating the impossible has created a police state. It doesn’t matter how bad the thing you were trying to stop is; people probably agree that it’s a bad thing.

      By mandating the impossible, you caused collateral damage that outweighed any benefits, and by associating it with a thing no-one dares defend in public you were able to accidentally destroy society without opposition. And you didn’t notice because you never do for walks in the fields.

    • Why John Oliver Can’t Find Americans Who Know Edward Snowden’s Name (It’s Not About Snowden)

      On his HBO program last night, John Oliver devoted 30 minutes to a discussion of U.S. surveillance programs, advocating a much more substantive debate as the June 1 deadline for renewing the Patriot Act approaches (the full segment can be seen here). As part of that segment, Oliver broadcast an interview he conducted with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and to illustrate the point that an insufficient surveillance debate has been conducted, showed video of numerous people in Times Square saying they had no idea who Snowden is (or giving inaccurate answers about him). Oliver assured Snowden off-camera that they did not cherry-pick those “on the street” interviews but showed a representative sample.

    • Microsoft drops ‘do not track’ browser default to reflect ‘evolving industry standards’

      Microsoft has updated its ‘Do Not Track’ policy, which will no longer be a default setting in its browser, thus giving third parties like advertisers a free hand in deciding whether to track the user or not, unless the option has been turned on manually.

      The ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) setting in browsers specifies whether the user wants his or her browsing information to be available to third parties such as content providers and advertisers, who gather it so they can learn about a person’s interests and habits.

    • Exclusive: TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists

      A controversial Transportation Security Administration program that uses “behavior indicators” to identify potential terrorists is instead primarily targeting undocumented immigrants, according to a document obtained by The Intercept and interviews with current and former government officials.

      The $900 million program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, employs behavior detection officers trained to identify passengers who exhibit behaviors that TSA believes could be linked to would-be terrorists. But in one five-week period at a major international airport in the United States in 2007, the year the program started, only about 4 percent of the passengers who were referred to secondary screening or law enforcement by behavior detection officers were arrested, and nearly 90 percent of those arrests were for being in the country illegally, according to a TSA document obtained by The Intercept.

    • Artists secretly install Edward Snowden statue in Brooklyn park

      Dressed in reflective yellow construction gear while working under the cover of darkness early Monday, a small group of artists installed a tribute to NSA-leaker Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park.

      The Snowden bust stands atop a column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a site built to honor more than 11,000 American prisoners of war who died aboard British ships during the American Revolutionary War.

    • Artists secretly install Snowden monument

      A group of artists secretly installed a 100-pound sculpture of government leaker Edward Snowden in a New York City park early on Monday morning, though it was taken down by city officials later in the day.

      The handful of people wearing yellow reflector vests and hard hats snuck into the park and, in the predawn hours, attached the massive bust of a neatly coiffed Snowden wearing his trademark square-rimmed glassed onto the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Brooklyn, which honors soldiers imprisoned in the Revolutionary War.
      In a statement provided to city blog Animal, which also produced a short video about the installation, the activists said that the effort was meant to reinvigorate the focus on the leaker and the massive government surveillance that he exposed.

      “We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies,” they told the website.

    • Edward Snowden statue appears in Brooklyn overnight

      A trio of anonymous artists and helpers installed a bust of Edward Snowden in Brooklyn Monday morning.

      The 100-pound statue was hauled into Fort Greene Park just before dawn, according to ANIMALNewYork, which originally reported the story.

      The idea for the statue came from two artists and was made by a West Coast sculptor. Snowden leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to mainstream media in June 2013. He was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property and currently lives in Russia.

    • New York City Takes Down Edward Snowden Statue Erected By Guerilla Artists

      NYPD says the art prank is under investigation

      New York City has removed a statue of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden erected by a group of artists in a Brooklyn park.

    • John Oliver Asks Edward Snowden If The American Government Is Spying On Your Naked Photos

      “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” viewers got a surprise during Sunday’s show when the British satirist interviewed a man he described as “the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history:” NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

  • Civil Rights

    • Eight San Francisco police officers expected to be fired over racist, homophobic texts

      Eight San Francisco police officers implicated in sending and receiving racist and homophobic text messages have been suspended and are expected to be fired, according to news reports.

    • Barrett Brown, John Kiriakou & the Bureau of Prisons’ Deep Contempt for First Amendment

      The Bureau of Prisons’ contempt for the First Amendment has been on full display this week.

      Journalist and activist Barrett Brown pled guilty to offenses stemming from YouTube videos he uploaded containing a threat directed at the FBI, emails from hackers he redacted and laptops found in a kitchen cabinet that he hid from authorities. He was sentenced to five years and three months in jail on January 22.

    • Barrett Brown’s account of the arbitrary suspension of his e-mail

      On Tuesday March 31, I used the inmate computer system to send an email to a journalist of my acquaintance in which I inquired about getting him in touch with another inmate who was interested in talking to the press about potentially illegal conduct by BOP officials. When I tried to log in to the system one hour afterwards, I received a message reading: “Denied: You do not have access to this service.” I asked our Counselor Towchik about this and he called another office, from which he apparently received a vague explanation to the effect that they were “working on it”, which we took to understand that this was a system maintenance issue; he told me to return to his office later that afternoon. I did so, and he told me that several people were having issues with the system and that he would make further inquiries, and that if necessary he would bring the technical staff over to our unit the next day to discuss it with us, assuming the problem had still not been fixed. The next morning I reached my mother by phone and learned that apparently everyone on my message contact list had received an automatic email to the effect that my messaging privileges had been temporarily suspended, but I reassured her that it was merely a mistake. When I met again with Towchik, however, he conceded that the problem didn’t seem to be technical after all and that I should ask Trust Fund Manager Coleman about it at lunch. Failing to find Mr. Coleman, I met that afternoon with Unit Manger Ivory, who checked my files but could find no reason why my access should have suddenly been suspended and also advised me to meet with Mr. Coleman. At some point that day, my attempts to log in started to prompt a different message stating: “This account is on suspension until 4/1/2016 11:59:59 pm (from portal 16)”. At the next lunch period on Thursday, April 2nd, I was unable to locate Mr. Coleman, but laid out my problem to the associate warden who told me to return in five minutes, when Mr. Coleman would be present.

    • The Persian Paradox: Iran Is Much More Modern Than You Think

      People in the West tend to have a monolithic view of Iran. But there’s a lot more to the country than the mullah-led theocracy, and it often gets ignored. And national pride is alive and well.

    • Petition Against Obama Decree on Venezuela Tops 8m Signatures

      A petition launched in Venezuela opposing President Barack Obama’s latest sanctions and the labelling of Venezuela as a national security threat has topped 8 million signatures, it was announced Sunday.

      President Obama issued an executive order March 9 declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.”

      Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro thanked the supporters who backed the call for Obama to “repeal the decree” through his Twitter account.

      The signatures will be handed in during the Summit of the Americas which starts later this week in Panama and will be attended by all the nations in the hemishphere.

    • Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act

      On March 19th, there was a ruling [pdf] in a case in a federal district court in Vermont, brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Scribd, saying that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applied to the internet, and thus Scribd had to comply with the ADA. The specific concern is whether or not a website is a “place of public accommodation.” Three years ago there was a similar ruling against Netflix (also brought by the National Federation for the Blind), which we noted had some troubling aspects to it. Since then, there have been a number of cases that have gone the other way. And, indeed, just this week the 9th Circuit appeals court upheld a lower court ruling [pdf] saying that Netflix does not need to comply with the ADA.

    • Willie McRae

      The Scotsman claims that the police had first removed the vehicle and then replaced it, and this explains the mystery of why the gun was so far from the car after McRae’s remarkable two shot “suicide”. For me, that adds just another level of improbability to so very many. How, inside a car, you shoot yourself in the head in such a way that the gun falls out of the window, seems problematic. The car was crashed over a burn; how you order that with the suicide is peculiar.

    • A Non-Conspiracy of Douthat’s

      The “difficult and personal” decision of whether folks like these can decide if you can shop at a store or not.

    • School Teachers With Valid Work Authorization Labeled As “Illegals” By Fox News

      Fox News misleadingly slurred immigrants with legal permission to work in the United States as “illegals” during a segment highlighting attempts by disadvantaged school districts around the country to boost bilingual education initiatives.

04.05.15

Links 5/4/2015: Linux Australia Server Woes, MATE 1.10

Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Magic Lantern Brings Linux to Canon EOS Cameras

    On April 1st the Magic Lantern team announced a proof of concept that lets you run Linux on a Canon EOS camera. Because of the date of the post we’ve poured over this one and are confident it’s no joke. The development has huge potential.

  • Desktop

    • Lenovo ThinkPad T450s Broadwell Preview

      This is a “first impression” review. I’ve had the system in my hands for all of about twenty-four hours and am still exploring and forming more solid opinions. Also any problems I had likely do have solutions, but as I said: less than forty-eight hours of ownership so I haven’t had a chance to. Linux-centric system review will follow this weekend / next week.

    • A Million People Switched To GNU/Linux In Spain, France, and Germany Q1 2015

      A rise of 0.5% represents 1M increase in users, assuming share of page-views = share of desktop PCs = share of users.

  • Server

    • Linux Australia server hacked, personal information may have been stolen

      A public server belonging to Linux Australia, the umbrella group for Linux user groups in the country, were breached on March 22, and the personal information of members may have been stolen.

    • How Linux Australia Handled Its Recent Data Breach

      In an email, Linux Australia revealed that its servers where compromised during the morning of 22 March. Over the course of a few hours, the organisation believes its databases containing conference information were dumped to an external source. A “currently unknown vulnerability” caused a buffer overflow that allowed the hacker to acquire root access.

    • On featuring and writing clickbaity articles

      I think you do not even begin to understand the complexities of how communities in Linux interact with each other. I have friends across Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Debian and countless other distributions that I’ve acquired during the past 5 years of working on Kubuntu and KDE. Sure, from time to time we joke about the short comings of one another’s projects, but that’s what they are, jokes. We most certainly do not intend to belittle each others work and to be honest, I am quite happy that you’re not part of this community.

    • Have you heard of ONLYOFFICE? It’s like Google Docs, only it’s not from Google … and you might be able to run your own instance

      How could I have missed ONLYOFFICE? If not for this How to Forge article on installing it, I would have never known that it existed as a hosted alternative to Google Docs/Spreadsheets or that you can self-host the software, though I’m not sure how functional the roll-your-own version is at this point.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Torvalds’ temptress comes of age: Xfce 4.12 hits the streets

      Torvalds, in a now-deleted Google Plus post, had called Xfce “A step down from GNOME 2, but a huge step up from GNOME 3″.

      Xfce’s biggest problem seems to be that no one sticks with it. Torvalds soon moved back to GNOME and, after experimenting with Xfce, Debian also went back to using GNOME as the default for the upcoming Debian Jessie.

    • MATE 1.10 Desktop Environment Arrives with Better GTK3 Support

      MATE, one of the most lightweight and appreciated open source desktop environments used in numerous distributions of Linux, including Ubuntu MATE and Linux Mint, has reached today version 1.10.0, a released that introduces several new features and a great number of improvements.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krunner – The birth of a cyborg

        Krunner is exactly like that lovely, lovely 80s futuristic Dystopian sci-fi movie with Arnold and Jesse, except that is different in every single way. Now, for those of you who’ve fiddled with KDE before, possibly on a roof, hihi, then Krunner is not a stranger. It’s a familiar and useful application available in the desktop framework set of default tools. Only now we have Plasma at our disposal, and we need to give it a fresh new try.

      • The Space-Time Continuum of KDE’s Activities

        This is not about KDE e.V.’s new time travel program. This is about Plasma and its concept of Activities. They have been a topic of hot debates. Some people love them, some don’t care. Björn called for finding a new metaphor which better fits the mental model of the user, so that Plasma’s activities can appeal to a larger group of people. Here are my thoughts.

      • Work In Progress, all the way

        I must say KDE Connect is one of my personal killer features in our KDE eco system and if you haven’t tried it, you should. Really. It always makes me smile when someone tells me “sure I’m using KDE Connect” – my sister’s been over for lunch a few days ago and I spotted her phone on the “Available Devices” list. That was quite surprising, to say the least. However, it makes me sad to see how we suck at marketing. This made me think on how we could make KDE Connect an integral part of our user experience rather than a 3rd party kind of thing.

      • Some Skrooge news

        The next Skrooge version, initiating the 2.x naming scheme, will be based on kf5. Don’t expect too much in terms of functionalities or appearance, this is for some other time.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • MakuluLinux unity Desktop is Live !

        finally the long wait is over, The MakuluLinux unity desktop is now live and available for download, You can head over to the Unity section and check out the release notes and grab your copy from the download section. Hope you guys enjoy this release, a lot of hard work went into making this and I want to than all the testers for their hard work in helping making this release a unique one !

      • LXLE 14.04.2 & 12.04.5 Release Notes with Screenshots

        The next incremental update of LXLE has been released, ticking it up to 14.04.2 along with the last 32bit version of LXLE ever, which is based on 12.04.5. The 32bit closely mirrors the changes to the latest 64bit edition of the OS.

      • LXLE 14.04.2 and 12.04.5 Officially Released, the Last to Support 32-bit Architectures

        Approximately a month ago, we’ve reported that the Beta release of the Lubuntu-based LXLE Linux distribution was released introducing UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support in the 64-bit ISO images, and that they’ve decided to switch to SeaMonkey as the default web browser. Today, we announce that the final release of LXLE 14.04.2 is now available for download.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Debian Family

      • Improving creation of debian copyright file

        In my opinion, creating and maintaining Debian copyright file is the most boring task required to create a Debian package. Unfortunately, this file is also one of the most important of a package: it specifies some legal aspect regarding the use of the software.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • An Ubuntu Touch OTA Update Will Be Available Soon

            Canonical is about to release a new update for the Ubuntu Touch RTM branch, used on both Ubuntu Phones, created by Bq and Meizu, which will most likely bring improvements in battery life, among others.

          • Ubuntu Touch Has Over 1200 Apps And Scopes

            Despite the fact that Ubuntu Touch is a young platform, over 1200 apps are already available for the Ubuntu Touch OS, including some real important apps, like Telegram, Cut The Rope, Tox or GCompris.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny SODIMM-style module runs Linux on Cortex-A5

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Getting To Know Android: Lollipop Edition

          Android 5.0 Lollipop (known previously as just L) was the biggest change to Android since Ice Cream Sandwich. Frankly, I’d rank it as the biggest change to Android ever, for a variety of reasons.

        • OnePlus releases its own version of Android as a replacement for Cyanogen

          Last year, Chinese phone maker OnePlus tried to take on Samsung and HTC with a flagship-style phone at half the price. That device, the OnePlus One, ran a customized version of Android developed by Cyanogen, but now the company is ready to unveil its own software. After a couple of delays, OxygenOS is now available for OnePlus One owners to download and flash onto their smartphones.

        • OnePlus releases OxygenOS, its custom take on Android

          After a pretty sizable delay, OnePlus has at last released OxygenOS, its in-house version of Android 5.0 Lollipop. As promised back near the start of the year, this Cyanogen replacement is all about a “back to basics” approach that keeps things stock unless the startup thinks a new feature would be genuinely useful. Right now, that’s largely limited to features you already had on your One: you can draw Oppo-style gestures to trigger functions when the screen is off, switch between hardware and software navigation keys and customize your quick-access settings. OxygenOS isn’t for the faint of heart at this stage, since you’ll have to be comfortable with installing ROMs (and likely put up with early bugs), but it’s worth a shot if you want to catch a glimpse of OnePlus’ software future.

        • OnePlus’s Android Lollipop-based ROM, OxygenOS, is available to download now

          The China-based mobile phone manufacturer has been teasing OxygenOS since last year, after the company encountered issues when launching its One phone in India. It learned that Cyanogen, the organization behind CyanogenMod, had granted exclusivity to another manufacturer in the country, which ultimately expedited OnePlus’s development of OxygenOS.

        • Top Android news of the week: Samsung not working on update, unified mailbox, Asus on fire

          Asus has raised its sales expectations for smartphones to 30 million for this year. The company is on the rise in this category, given it only shipped 10,000 units in early 2014.

        • ASUS raises sales expectations to 30 million smartphones in 2015

          ASUS has been ramping up its mobile strategy in the past few months, announcing cost effective products in both the smartphone and wearables markets. As the new Zenfone 2 range makes its way out around the world, ASUS has just updated its sales expectations to 30 million units for 2015.

        • Android 5.1 L Update Release Date for Samsung Galaxy S4, S5, Note 4, Note Edge

          The Android 5.0 update (also known as Android L or Lollipop) has been very slow to roll out on Samsung flagship phones. Ever since it was announced in June of last year and officially launched in November of that year, its trickling down has been very slow, especially for those who are users of the Samsung Galaxy S5, the S4, the Note 4, the Note 3, and the Note Edge. There have been reports that Android 5.1 might be just as delayed as Android 5.0.

        • Amazon Prime Instant Video Now Supports Android Tablets

          Amazon doesn’t seem to particularly want Android users to enjoy its video streaming service. First it took its sweet time expanding the offering out from Fire and iOS devices. Then when it did finally bring the app to Android, it required installing the standard Amazon app, which then prompted you to install a dedicated Prime Instant Video app from the Amazon Appstore (Google Play, what’s that?). After that, it only ran on phones. Tablets, for the most part, were inexplicably left out.

        • Mailbox for Android version 2.0.1 update brings a Material Design refresh

          If you’re a fan of the “inbox zero” mentality when it comes to managing email, odds are you’ve tried Mailbox for Android. The app, which was an iOS exclusive for some time, makes it easier than ever to delete, snooze and archive emails with just a few swipes. When the application launched on Android, there were few differences between the iOS and Android versions, at least aesthetically speaking. But today that changes, as Mailbox is receiving quite the update to version 2.0.1 which brings a Material Design refresh to the app.

        • Why Android could kill Google’s struggling standalone Chrome apps

          But that positive news carries a darker undertone. Google’s “Chrome app” platform was already underperforming, and now developers have even less incentive to write Chrome apps when they can reuse their existing Android apps.

        • Sony Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact and Xperia Z3 tablet get Android 5.0 Lollipop update

          The Sony Xperia line will finally get the much awaited Android Lollipop 5.0 OS update after the company formally announced the rollout through Twitter.

        • Android 5.1 certified for Sony Xperia Z3 and Sony Xperia Z3 Compact?

          Sony might have taken a lot of heat for being so late to update its current flagship phone. But the manufacturer apparently isn’t taking any chances when it comes to Android 5.1. New firmware has been certified for both the Sony Xperia Z3 and Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. The new firmware version is 23.2.A.0.278.

        • Sony Xperia Z Android 5.0 Lollipop update: Teaser image hints at imminent release

          Sony has shared a teaser on its Sony Xperia Google+ page showing the Xperia Z with Android 5.0 Lollipop’s lock-screen notification feature and the tag “Coming Soon”, indicating that the Japanese company could release the new update to the first generation Xperia smartphone, ahead of the newer Z1 and Z Ultra models.

Free Software/Open Source

  • ONOS Blackbird Release Demonstrates SDN Control Plane Performance and Scale Leadership
  • ONOS ‘Blackbird’ Promises Carrier Grade SDN Option for Service Providers

    ONOS has announced the availability of the second release of its open networking operating system, Blackbird, promising to bring carrier grade Software Defined Networking (SDN) implementation option for service providers. The ONOS Blackbird release includes a set of metrics to effectively measure performance and other carrier-grade attributes of the SDN control plane.

  • 6 operating systems designed just for Docker and other container runtimes

    If you’re familiar with Unix-like free software operating systems, I’m sure you’ve probably lost count of the number of Linux distributions in active developments. I know, it’s a very long list, and growing.

    But get ready for the same trend on the container technology side, because the conditions that made it possible to have hundreds of Linux distributions – freely available source code, hordes of developers with time to spare and an itch to scratch – are also in play in the field of containerization.

    So far, I’ve been able to identify just six of such container-native operating systems, as they are called, but trust me, there will be many more to come.

    So here are six container-native operating systems that I’m aware of. If you know of any not in the list, please post a comment.

    Read more

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Mirantis Joins Open Source PaaS Project Cloud Foundry Foundation

      Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) project that acts as a middleware for OpenStack deployments. Mirantis is commited to supporting Cloud Foundry and partnering with distribution vendors in its ecosystem instead of building its own Cloud Foundry distribution.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

Leftovers

  • Teenagers have never been a smaller portion of our population

    The problem for teen density is that the rest of the country keeps getting older and the population keeps growing.

  • Fear in Chelsea on the campaign trail: third Clinton is Hillary’s secret weapon

    They called it “the Chelsea effect”. Senior advisers to Barack Obama coined the phrase during his 2008 campaign for president, after they noticed a surprising trend in the long and bitter battle for the nomination between the then-senator from Illinois and Hillary Clinton.

  • Here’s how to unlock four secret Easter eggs in Android

    Happy Easter!

    From wild pranks on April Fools Day to hidden tricks in its search engine, the Google team loves creating surprises for users. Here’s how to find Google’s Easter eggs, for the four latest versions of its Android operating system.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The Full Toxic Beauty Treatment?

      Most people visit hair and nail salons, at most, only for a few hours a month. Beauticians, however, work in these often toxic environments all day, every day, breathing in fumes and absorbing chemicals through the skin. Hair sprays, permanent waves, acrylic nail applications and other salon products contain ingredients associated with asthma, dermatitis, neurological symptoms and even cancer. Because these products are considered neither foods nor drugs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no responsibility to ensure the products are made safer.

    • First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims

      Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.

    • MN lawmaker wants to give veterans more ‘choices’

      Even more than measuring travel as the crow flies, what Congressman Walz finds illogical is using a medical facility incapable of providing the care a veteran needs, to deny that veteran access to the Choice Card program.

    • Justices Say Nonprofit Hospitals Can Be Liable for Injuries

      A nonprofit hospital that operates a free clinic on the side can be held liable for damages when people are injured on its property, the New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled.

      In a unanimous decision, the court said a nonprofit hospital is covered by the limited liability protections afforded to hospitals, which cap damages at $250,000, rather than the complete immunity afforded by the Charitable Immunity Act, even though it was engaged in a charitable act when the injury occurred.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Nicola Sturgeon speaks at anti-Trident rally and warns “future generations would never forgive us”

      First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has this afternoon spoken at the annual anti-Trident rally in Glasgow, urging people across the UK to seize the moment of the Westminster election to block the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons.

    • Iran, Stubborn History and a Toast to the Future

      Whatever the truth may be regarding the manner in which the release of the hostages was secured, the truth remains: The Iran Revolution happened, the Shah fell and fled, Khomeini rose, the US Embassy was sacked, the hostages were taken and subsequently freed, and since that time the United States and Iran have been in a de-facto state of war. After the hostages were home and President Reagan was installed, sanctions were levied against Iran – against its currency, its weapons program, and most notably its nuclear program – which have shattered its economy.

    • Not everyone on the right balks at Iran deal

      For the most part, commentary and analysis of the preliminary nuclear deal with Iran falls along predictable lines. On the one hand, we see President Obama’s policy backed by the American mainstream, many congressional Democrats, a variety of foreign policy experts, and most of our allies.

    • U.S. to Train Nazi Troops in Ukraine

      The Azov Battalion was founded and its members were selected by Andrei Biletsky, a Ukrainian nazi (that’s an ideological term, meaning racist fascist — not a term referring specifically to the first political party with that particular ideology, the National Socialist Party of Germany). When Britain’s Guardian interviewed members, the reporter was shocked to find that they’re nazis (“neo-Nazis”).

    • Manning Joins Twitter, Has More Than 1K Followers Before Posting
    • Chelsea Manning Joins Twitter From Prison & We Can’t Wait To See What She Has To Say
    • Chelsea Manning joins Twitter and gets over 1,000 followers before posting

      Chelsea Manning, the US soldier serving 35 years in military prison for leaking state secrets to WikiLeaks, has joined the social media site Twitter.

    • The lies still killing Gulf War vets

      More than 200,000 US troops sent to Iraq and Kuwait in January 1991 were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. The Department of Defense and CIA launched a campaign of lies and concocted a cover-up that continues today, notes

    • The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths

      Another widespread fallacy is that such neoconservatives as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz strong-armed an inexperienced president into taking the country to war. President Bush, as he himself famously asserted, was the “decider.” One could argue, however, that Hans Blix, the former chief of the international weapons inspectors, bears some responsibility. Though he personally opposed an invasion, Mr. Blix told the U.N. in January 2003 that despite America’s ultimatum, Saddam was still not complying fully with his U.N. pledges. In February, he said “many proscribed weapons and items,” including 1,000 tons of chemical agent, were still “not accounted for.”

      [...]

      By then, however, most Americans had concluded that no such weapons existed. These were not new chemical arms, to be sure, but Saddam Hussein’s refusal to account for their destruction was among the reasons the White House cited as justification for war.

    • The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight
    • Is US The “Good Guy” Imposing Sanity On Iranian “Bad Guy”?

      Ex CIA analyst Ray McGovern today points out that “The mainstream U.S. media portrays the Iran nuclear talks as ‘our good guys’ imposing some sanity on ‘their bad guys.’”

    • How the United States welcomed Nazis after World War II

      Years ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union had both experienced setbacks in their space programs, one of my professors suggested that our scientists and theirs may have flunked the same course at Heidelberg. It was no great secret that, in the waning days of World War II, the United States scrambled to capture German rocket scientists before the Soviets got them. Hitler’s rocket attacks on Great Britain had made clear that the Germans were far ahead of us in that technology. The Cold War was in its infancy, and the United States already foresaw using rockets to transport nuclear weapons.

      Of the more than 1,600 Nazi scientists brought to the United States, Eric Lichtblau, author of “The Nazis Next Door,” singles out Wernher von Braun as the preeminent catch. Infamous for having led development of the German V-2 rocket, von Braun ended up in Huntsville, Ala., helping develop the rockets that eventually took American astronauts to the moon. It was well known that the V-2s had been built by slaves, mostly prisoners of war, many of whom were abused, starved and worked to death. Von Braun did not deny his role in this, yet with the aid of Walt Disney, who on his TV show repeatedly turned to von Braun as an expert on space travel, the German emerged as an American hero.

    • Drone movie review

      “The robotic war is here, and the future of war could be an Orwellian version of Terminator.” This quote, taken from the director’s statement, best summarises the growing fear of future, and even contemporary, military combat. Documentary director Tonje Hessen Schei wants to bring to the forefront the secretive CIA drone war, and the impact this has on both the victims and the combatants.drone (1)

    • Why Iran Distrusts the US in Nuke Talks

      The Iranians may be a bit paranoid but, as the saying goes, this does not mean some folks are not out to get them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his knee-jerk followers in Washington clearly are out to get them – and they know it.

      Nowhere is this clearer than in the surreal set of negotiations in Switzerland premised not on evidence, but rather on an assumption of Iran’s putative “ambition” to become a nuclear weapons state – like Israel, which maintains a secret and sophisticated nuclear weapons arsenal estimated at about 200 weapons. The supposed threat is that Iran might build one.

    • Verbal outburst between Turkey and Iran

      Iran has been an important player in the region since the ousting of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 by a coup. The CIA much later acknowledged that the coup to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was nationalizing Iranian oil, was carried out under CIA direction.

    • US repair crew arrives to fix F/A-18s

      The US Marine Corps’ press office said the Tainan Airport is an US-approved divert airfield, but China’s foreign ministry said it had complained to Washington about the two US F/A-18s that landed in Tainan on Wednesday

    • Why arming U.S. allies can be like sending weapons to the enemy

      The United States has a long tradition of arming its allies to advance Washington’s foreign policy. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the U.S. the “arsenal of democracy” as he pledged thousands of ships, tanks and warplanes to countries battling Nazi Germany.

      Roosevelt’s characterization is no less true today. The U.S. government is sending large amounts of weapons to allies desperately battling Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria. Washington is also considering equipping the battered Ukrainian military, which has been fighting Russian-sponsored rebels in the country’s east.

      Broadly speaking, there are two ways the U.S. can arm an ally. America can donate, or sell cheap, the latest U.S.-made weaponry. Or it can send foreign-made weaponry — Russian usually — through a middleman.

    • Iran breakthrough provides no hint about fate of detained Americans

      Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who also had worked for the CIA, disappeared during a visit to Iran’s Kish Island more than eight years ago. While Iran has denied holding him, U.S. officials believe he has been in Iranian custody.

    • ‘Framework’ agreement with Iran sparks hope for jailed Americans

      Supporters of four Americans believed to be held in Iran are hoping the “framework” for a deal between the West and the Islamic Republic includes freedom for the U.S. citizens.

    • A Disappearance in Mexico

      The main part of the Samford event involved two parents of missing students addressing the crowd through an interpreter. At times breaking down in tears, they said their children had gone out to fundraise for their education. After fundraising, the parents explained, the students were attending protests in Iguala and hoping to travel to Mexico City. They were instead intercepted by the Iguala police and eventually handed off to the drug-trafficking organization called Guerreros Unidos, the parents said.

    • Honduran death squads kill four student protesters, including a 13-year-old

      The remains of 13 year-old Soad Nicole Ham were found in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa last Wednesday after a death squad kidnapped and murdered her for participating in recent student demonstrations against the country’s crumbling education system. A medical examination of the girl’s remains, which were discovered in a plastic bag on the street, revealed signs of brutal torture.

      Soad Nicole was the fourth demonstrator to be killed by death squads in Tegucigalpa last week. The bodies of Elvin Antonio López, Darwin Josué Martínez, and Diana Yareli Montoya—all between the ages of 19 and 21 and all actively involved in student protests—were also discovered in various neighborhoods of the city. Yareli Montoya, whose body was riddled with 21 bullets by masked attackers, took two painful days to die.

    • Cold War mystery: Israeli spies may have stolen US uranium to build the bomb

      In the 1960s, hundreds of kilograms of uranium went missing in the US state of Pennsylvania. Is it buried in the ground, poisoning locals – or did Israel steal it to build the bomb, Scott Johnson asks.

    • Another CFR-Rhodes Agent for Secretary of Defense

      In sum, nearly all US defense secretaries have been CFR members or analysts, some even high-ranking Council officials. At the same time, US defense secretaries and CFR agents have counseled one another and collaborated in efforts to shape the course of Western globalization. Given this ubiquitous exchange between the CFR and the office of United States Secretary of Defense, an Ashton Carter military should be expected to follow the CFR’s script.

    • “A Necessary, If Still Unpalatable, Potential Ally in Combating the Islamic State”

      It’s a good thing the Times is keeping the faith about the dangers of NSA surveillance, the moral necessity of closing Guantanamo, the crucial importance of accountability in drone strikes, and the urgency of a laser-like focus on CIA interrogations that took place more than a decade ago.

    • Iran Riches Coveted by Big Oil After Decades of Conflict

      The discovery of crude in 1908 laid the foundations for the company that would become British Petroleum and opened one of the richest opportunities that Western oil companies have ever enjoyed in the turbulent Middle East. Since then, the industry’s history in Iran is intertwined with CIA-backed coups, colonial exploitation and the anti-Western resentment surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    • NEWS ANALYSIS: Oil majors likely to kiss and make up with Iran

      Outside the boardroom of BP’s headquarters in London, a display case houses the geological data from Masjid-i-Solaiman, Iran’s first oil well. The discovery of crude in 1908 laid the foundations for the company that would become British Petroleum and opened one of the richest opportunities that western oil companies have ever enjoyed in the turbulent Middle East. Since then the industry’s history in Iran is intertwined with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coups, colonial exploitation and the anti-western resentment of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    • Cold War-era plane repair firm Air Asia still active in Taiwan

      US military aircraft are no longer allowed to be deployed to Taiwan after Washington established ties with Beijing in 1979, but Air Asia was able to deal with the US planes, showing it is still active. Chang Ching, a Taiwanese military expert, rejected rumors on the internet that the US was trying to provide F/A-18C technology to Taiwan by sending the two fighters, calling the claims nonsense.

    • Letters to the Editor: Watch where we send troops

      The U.S. interventions around the world have not always been for the good. We have overthrown democratically elected governments because they were supposedly Communist. The Chilean people might have a different take on our allowing the C.I.A. to overthrow the democratically elected Allende and then to install a dictator like Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was wanted in Spain and arrested in England for his crimes. He was later reindicted in Chile but died before trial. George W. Bush was actually convicted in absentia in Malaysia for torture. We expect other countries to follow the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations. It is no wonder so many citizens of Venezuela and Cuba have a negative attitude towards the good old U.S.A. We also tried to overthrow the Castro government militarily and with exploding cigars. Our CIA also told the white South African police where Nelson Mandela was hiding after his conviction on terrorism by the same legal system, leading to 27 years on Robbins Island at hard labor. We also replaced a head of state picked by the citizens of Iran in the 1950s and replaced him with the Shah of Iran. We all know how that turned out, but just as in this country, we care about those of lighter skin colors. We should heed the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.”

    • Yossi Melman: There is no no existential threat to the Jewish State

      In an analysis in Jerusalem Post today, Yossi Melman makes the case that there is no existential threat to Israel and indeed Israel has a submarine capability to make a nuclear retaliatory strike against Iran, should Iran destroy Israel with nuclear weapons. Melman reports that the submarines are coming from Germany out of “pangs of guilt following the Holocaust.”

    • More on Senator Menendez’s favorite (ex?) terrorist group and the insanity of neocon policy in the Mideast

      Even at this late date a lot of people claim not to know the difference between us true conservatives and the so-called “neo” conservatives.

      Hint: “Neo” means new. And if you have new beliefs, then by definition you’re not a conservative. We stick to the tried and true. Plato’s fine but that Aristotle guy was getting a little ahead of himself.

      Another hint: If you’re a true conservative, then people will call you an “isolationist.”

    • Why still meddling?

      The US has not limited its dealings to the Middle East but has conspired to control many countries by making them financially dependent. This has been done by promising countries the US would help in power generation and construction of infrastructure. Huge loans were organised and contracts awarded to US companies such as Haliburton, so the money never left the US. The loans were impossible to repay which led to increased unemployment and poverty in the target country. The US could then control the assets of that country for its own gain, whether it be oil, gas, minerals or, in the case of Panama, the canal.

    • U.S. Military Planes Cleared to Refuel Saudi Jets Bombing Yemeni Targets

      The U.S. Defense Department has cleared the way for American military planes to start refueling Saudi Arabian jets bombing Houthi fighters in Yemen as the U.S. deepens its role in the expanding regional conflict, U.S. defense officials said Thursday.

    • Yemen as Vietnam or Afghanistan

      It is hard to believe that history now seems to be repeating with Egypt and Saudi Arabia again engaged in a counter-guerrilla war in Yemen! For Nasser, it was Egypt’s Vietnam. Will the new Yemen war be Egypt’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) Afghanistan? I think it is very likely. All of the signs point in that direction.

      And, as I have laid out in numerous essays on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Mali and Algeria, and in my little book Violent Politics, guerrilla wars are almost never “won” but usually drain the supposedly dominant power of its wealth, moral position and political unity.

    • From Turkish prison, Kurdish leader tells followers to lay down their arms

      It has been one of the world’s longest and deadliest civil conflicts. Since the first incidents more than three decades ago, an estimated 40,000 lives have been lost.

      It has been, some say, a battle by activists among Turkey’s Kurdish minority for independence. It has been, others say, a guerrilla war by rebels who have punctuated their campaign with terrorist acts.

    • The Libyan quagmire

      Libya is no exception to this rule. Since the overthrow of Libya’s ruler Muammar Qaddafi in October 2011, the country has fallen into chaos in which armed militias govern their own patch of territory while successive governments have been unable to stabilize the situation and actively take control of the country. According to a BBC report, there are more than 1,700 armed and ideologically divided groups across Libya creating indescribable havoc, which is not only fragmenting the country but bringing Libya to the status of a lawless failed state. Some of the groups are Jihadist, others secular, liberal, or split according to geographical location, ethnic identity, or along tribal lines.

      [...]

      Khalifa Haftar was a colonel under Qaddafi. He led Libyan forces during a disastrous war with Chad in the south. After his defeat by Chadian forces in 1987, he was taken captive for almost five years, refusing to return to Libya out of fear Qaddafi would “punish” him for his defeat. Later, the CIA succeeded in whisking him out of Chad together with 300 of his men to Virginia where he underwent special training by the CIA. After living in exile in the U.S. for 20 years, he returned to Libya and led ground forces to help oust Qaddafi in 2011.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Obama’s Secrecy Obsession

      But Obama’s lack of transparency — after promising in 2008 to run a transparent administration — has left him at the mercy of Washington’s closed club of insiders, while alienating him from the broad American public. With neoconservatives and other opinion leaders dictating the dominant narrative on topic after topic, Obama has ended up reacting to events, not controlling them.

    • Obama Administration Improperly Claims Secrecy Power Over Videos of Former Guantanamo Prisoner’s Force-Feeding

      President Barack Obama’s administration claims that the executive branch alone may decide whether to disclose previously classified videos of the force-feeding of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner—even though the videos are judicial records and a judge should be able to unseal and release them to the public.

      On October 3, 2014, a federal district court ordered the Obama administration to review videos of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian who at the time was still being held in indefinite detention. The government was granted permission to redact portions they believed needed to be censored for “national security.” Lawyers for Dhiab and media organizations, which supported disclosure, were to put forward a proposal for the release of videos.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ‘Cheating’ jockey is caught in finish line photo: Winning rider who ‘used secret device to give horse painful electric shocks’ exposed

      After being confronted by Texas Department of Public Safety investigator Jeff Green, Chapa first denied having seen the photo, then claimed it was ‘photo-shopped and someone was trying to frame him,’ the complaint stated.

      Two days after the race, Texas Racing Commission stewards suspended Chapa, pending an investigation and hearing.

      ESPN reports that Chapa faces a felony charge and that a warrant was issued for his arrest on Tuesday, but authorities have so far been unable to locate him.

    • Indian Army Team To Scale Mount Everest, Will Come Back With 4000 Kg Garbage

      Mountaineers usually shed baggage as they climb higher. A 30-member Indian team setting out for Mount Everest next month plans to come down with 4,000 kilos of excess baggage, or rather, garbage.

    • Toward Democracy? Part Eight

      Offshore oil is not the only resource the UK Government wants kept out of Scottish control; England needs our water supplies. Over-population has begun a series of famines which will increase throughout the century. More wastelands must be cultivated, and Scotland has many used as sporting estates by very few. Unionist politicians thwarted Irish Home Rule by giving a separate UK parliament to northern Protestants who owned Ireland’s heaviest industries. In the 1970s the Westminster party leaders created an oil fund for the Shetland Islands, whose people have quietly benefited from local oil fields in a way Westminster openly denied to the rest of Scotland. The Shetlanders have now a generally higher standard of living than on the Scottish mainland, and higher than many parts of London.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Holyrood inquiry to probe historic CIA-backed human brainwashing experiments

      THE Holyrood inquiry into historic child abuse will be asked to investigate Scottish links to an infamous CIA-backed brainwashing programme, the Sunday Express can now reveal.

    • For Obama Critics, Google Is Part of the Conspiracy — Until It Isn’t

      Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt is apparently friends with Obama–cue fanfare and commence the investigation! SearchEngineLand reported Republicans think the Federal Trade Commission is treating the search giant with kid gloves when it comes to antitrust laws and are calling for an investigation.

    • Tragedy in Chico

      The story of Cass Edison is nothing short of tragic. At age 55, the accomplished journalist had had many experiences most of her peers could only imagine—living in Singapore and the Philippines, being recruited by the CIA, starting her own newspaper. Alcoholism took its toll, though, and led to lost relationships, money, and even her home. Then, one morning last month, she was found dead, her body dumped in a stranger’s yard. A suspect is in custody and, based on evidence, the case against him is strong.

    • Why conservative media are so powerful

      In this context, Fox News’s “Fair and Balanced” slogan is a bit of genius. It gives Fox’s opponents something to drive themselves nuts over, since the network is (with a few exceptions, such as Shepard Smith’s straight news reporting) so manifestly uninterested in adhering to its own stated mission. But while liberals fight to preserve the idea that news should be fair and balanced, Fox News and publications built on its model get on with their real work of being wildly entertaining and pushing the ideas and narratives its anchors and writers think are important.

  • Censorship

    • Senator Feinstein calls for internet ban of Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire magazine

      Feinstein is currently Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but under her chairmanship of the committee, which ended last year, she was responsible for the release of the report on the CIA’s use of torture against detainees during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She released her request on Friday.

    • Sen. Feinstein Wants DIY Bomb-Making Guide ‘Anarchist’s Cookbook’ Off The Internet

      The Anarchist Cookbook was written by William Powell in 1971, and contains instructions to make explosives. Powell has fought to have is own book removed from publication, but the publisher has refused.

    • DDoS attacks that crippled GitHub linked to Great Firewall of China

      Earlier this week came word that the massive denial-of-service attacks targeting code-sharing site GitHub were the work of hackers with control over China’s Internet backbone. Now, a security researcher has provided even harder proof that the Chinese government is the source of the assaults.

    • BBC Rape Documentary Misses the Point

      This International Women’s Day marked the beginning of a large-scale campaign to eradicate gender inequality and end violence against women in India. India’s Daughter, a documentary from Leslee Udwin focusing primarily on the December 2012 gang-rape of Jyoti Singh, was intended to air on BBC that day to launch the campaign. According to Udwin, the campaign will show this film to 20 million schoolchildren in an effort to educate them on issues of gender sensitivity. BBC decided to release the film four days early while the Indian government banned it amid controversy. Discussion around India’s Daughter since then has primarily focused on the ban.

    • Real Action For Children Not Censorship

      No, it was screaming tabloid headlines and a promise from the Tories to bring in web blocking powers, Internet regulation and what amounts to electronic ID cards.

    • Free speech under fire

      That said, many outlets in the United States debated publishing some of the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the attacks. The New York Times declined to do so, saying it would cross the “line between gratuitous insult and satire.” Online outlets, including BuzzFeed, Vox and the Huffington Post, opted to publish the cartoons.

    • Porn sites must have age checks, say Conservatives

      Pornography websites must adopt age-restriction controls or face closure, the Conservatives say.

    • Google Asked to Wipe Record Breaking 100 Million Pirate Links in 2015

      We’re just three months into 2015 but Google has already processed copyright takedown requests for 100 million allegedly infringing links. This is a significant increase compared to last year, and one that hasn’t been without controversy.

  • Privacy

    • Opinion: Mixing the world of spying and public office

      Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer before he moved on to politics. Mixing the secret world of spying and public office is not a good idea, argues DW’s Alexander Andreev.

    • On Movies, Dynasties, and Hope

      One of the most interesting political movies of recent years was the German film The Lives of Others, which gave a realistic depiction of the overwhelming espionage to which the government of East Germany subjected the citizens of that country, and of the corruption at the highest level, as officers of the state and the ruling party used their powers for unspeakable private purposes. The movie won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, along with a number of other prizes, and was acclaimed by many as a masterpiece.

    • All of the ways US intelligence thought Hitler may try to disguise himself

      Fearful that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler would attempt to flee Germany, US intelligence tried to predict what the Führer would like if he altered his appearance.

    • The Government Says It Has a Policy on Disclosing Zero-Days, But Where Are the Documents to Prove It?

      We have known for some time that the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community looks to find and exploit vulnerabilities in commercial software for surveillance purposes. As part of its reluctant, fitful transparency efforts after the Snowden leaks, the government has even officially acknowledged that it sometimes uses so-called zero-days. These statements are intended to reassure the public that the government nearly always discloses vulnerabilities to software vendors, and that any decision to instead exploit the vulnerability for intelligence purposes is a thoroughly considered one. But now, through documents EFF has obtained from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, we have learned more about the extent of the government’s policies, and one thing is clear: there’s very little to back up the Administration’s reassuring statements. In fact, despite the White House’s claim that it had “reinvigorated” its policies in spring 2014 and “established a disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure,” none of the documents released in response to our lawsuit appear to be newer than 2010.

    • Section 215’s Multiple Programs and Where They Might Hide after June 1

      But my post was about more that just the phone dragnet. It was about two things: First, the way that, rather than go “cold turkey” after it ended the Internet dragnet in 2011 as the AP had claimed, NSA had instead already started doing the same kind of collection using other authorities that — while they didn’t collect all US traffic — had more permissive rules for the tracking they were doing. That’s an instructive narrative for the phone dragnet amid discussions it might lapse, because it’s quite possible that the Intelligence Community will move to doing far less controlled tracking, albeit on fewer Americans, under a new approach.

    • Times Hammers NSA for Inspector General Info

      Dogged in pursuit of hidden national security-related documents, the New York Times and investigative reporter Charlie Savage are returning to federal court to demand the release of the National Security Agency’s inspector general reports.

  • Civil Rights

    • US to UN Human Rights Committee: Move Along, Nothing to See Here

      Yesterday the United States gave the U.N. Human Rights Committee its one year follow-up report on progress made to implement four priority recommendations made by the committee a year ago. The independent human rights experts had reviewed the United States’ compliance with a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They found the U.S. coming up short in many areas, including accountability for torture, privacy and surveillance, Guantánamo, and gun violence.

    • UK Intelligence Services Attack SNP

      Ever since Treasury Permanent Secretary Nicholas MacPherson stated that civil service impartiality rules do not apply in the case of Scottish independence, I have been warning the SNP that we are going to be the target of active subversion by the UK and US security services. We are seen as a danger to the British state and thus a legitimate target. I spelled this out in my talk to the Edinburgh SNP Club on 6 March, of which more below.

    • #Frenchgate: Definitely the Security Services

      It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish Office document, was originated by the Security Services, possibly with the active collusion of someone in the Scottish Office, or equally possibly without their knowledge. Whatever it purported to be, it never entered the normal civil service distribution systems, as the FCO would have a copy, and it would have raised alarm bells all over the place as seriously weird and improbable. It is in that sense a fake, even if it were physically produced inside the Scottish Office. Its purpose was to be leaked to the media and influence the election.

    • Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding

      Between 1979 and 2007, average incomes for the 1% increased 241 percent. In the same time period, middle-class incomes grew 19 percent.

      The top 10 percent in this country earns an average income of $161,000 (a little less than the average salary of your Congressional representative) while the bottom 90 percent bring in a little under $30,000.

    • EXCLUSIVE: As Chicago Police Kill Youth, Vast Misconduct Allegations Purged

      The high cost of failed oversight

      A combined $21 million in taxpayer funds are dedicated to the city’s police accountability structure, among the Independent Police Review Authority, Internal Affairs, and the Police Board, according to the City of Chicago’s 2015 budget. In contrast, a proposed ordinance to fund reparations for police torture victims seeks a one-time sum of $20 million, to provide counseling and education to those tortured into false confessions by police, alongside monetary restitution and inclusion of the city’s decades-long police torture scandal in Chicago public school curricula.

      Between 2012 and 2014, the City of Chicago Department of Law requested payment of $192 million in settlements, verdicts and fees attributed to the Chicago Police Department. $61 million was paid to settle wrongful convictions, and another $43 million went toward cases charging excessive force. The majority of cases were from the city’s backlog, which as of September 2014 included 491 Chicago police cases – but on average 20 percent, or 250 cases, were the result of incidents taking place in the years of the current administration.

    • Exclusive: Lithuania prosecutors restart investigation into CIA jail
    • Exclusive – Lithuanian prosecutors restart investigation into CIA jail

      Lithuanian prosecutors said on Thursday they had restarted an investigation into allegations that state security officials helped the CIA run a secret jail in the Baltic state as part of the agency’s global programme to interrogate al Qaeda suspects.

      Prosecutors re-opened a probe, which was dropped four years ago, after a U.S. Senate report last year detailed a secret CIA facility that matched reports about a site in Lithuania, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said.

    • Lithuania reopens CIA ‘black site’ investigation

      Lithuanian prosecutors said Thursday they have reopened an investigation into allegations that the Baltic nation hosted a secret US interrogation centre for Al-Qaeda suspects a decade ago.

    • Lithuania Next in Line as New Evidence of Secret CIA Jail Emerges

      Lithuanian prosecutors have restarted an investigation into claims that state security officials helped the CIA run a secret jail in the country, as part of the US intelligence agency’s post 9/11 interrogation and rendition program.

    • Lithuania prosecutors restart probe into secret CIA ‘black site’

      Lithuanian prosecutors have reportedly reopened a criminal investigation into claims that state security officials helped the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to operate a ‘black site’ in the Baltic country.

      Senior prosecutor Irmantas Mikelionis has decided to restart the investigation into the “possible abuse” of power by state employees, the spokeswoman for the prosecutor-general’s office told Reuters in an email on Thursday.

    • CIA Interrogations: what have we learned in the UK?

      When late last year the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published parts of its 6,700 page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, it shed light – remarkable light – on how the ‘war on terror’ had been conducted by the US for some time.

      It very rightly prompted questions for this country. The most immediate and top level question was, if that is what the US did, what did Britain do? But one need barely scratch the surface of the matter before encountering some difficult questions about method – how do we find out what Britain did? – and about scrutiny – are there lessons to be learned about oversight and accountability?

    • It’s Been A Year Since Senators Voted To Reveal CIA Torture. What Do We Have To Show For It?

      One year ago Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then under the command of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), voted to share with the world some of Washington’s most tightly held secrets: gruesome accounts of CIA personnel torturing detainees for the good of all Americans — who had little idea what was being done in their name.

      After a protracted battle with both the CIA and the White House over how much information to release, the executive summary of Feinstein’s massive torture report finally saw the light of day in early December. Its release did not set off a violent backlash overseas despite panicked warnings from the intelligence community, nor did it irrevocably damage U.S. national security. It didn’t sit well with the American public either, who saw headlines about rectal feeding and sodomization for weeks.

    • Poland risks breaching court ruling on CIA jail: lawyer

      Poland must de-classify details of an investigation into a secret CIA jail on its soil, or it will be in breach of a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling, a lawyer for a former inmate at the secret jail said.

    • Worse in Store for Russian Economy, Bosnia Just Beats Deadline to Form Government

      A lawyer for a man who was held at a secret CIA prison in Poland is warning Warsaw that it must declassify documents related to the investigation or be in breach of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, Reuters reports.

    • Poland risks breaching EU court ruling on CIA jail

      Poland must de-classify details of an investigation into a secret CIA jail otherwise it will be in breach of a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling.

    • Cough Up the Docs: Poland Warned of Court Breach Over Secret CIA Jail

      Poland has been warned that it must de-classify details of an investigation into a secret CIA jail in the country, or it will be in breach of a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling, according to the lawyer of a former inmate who was held at the facility.

    • Polish airport used by CIA obtains millions in EU funds

      A small airport in north-eastern Poland used by the CIA to fly in kidnapped detainees for torture at a nearby intelligence training camp has received over €30 million in EU funds.

      The EU money is part of a larger €48.5 million sum to turn the former military airstrip into an international commercial airport known as Szymany.

    • Poland asks U.S. to spare alleged USS Cole bomber from execution

      Poland, which allowed the CIA to have a secret interrogation site there after 9/11, has formally asked the United States to make sure the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing is spared the death penalty, Poland’s Foreign Office said Wednesday.

    • Poland seeks U.S. assurances over Guantanamo inmate

      Poland’s government has sent an official note to U.S. authorities seeking diplomatic assurances that an inmate at the U.S. military jail in Guantanamo Bay will not be subject to the death penalty, the Polish Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

    • Britain spied on Argentina until 2011 over fears that it would try to retake Falklands, CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden claims
    • Whistleblower Edward Snowden claims Britain spied on Argentina over fears of new Falklands invasion
    • UK ‘spied on Argentina’ over Falklands, claims Edward Snowden
    • UK ‘spied on Argentina for five years’ fearing new Falklands invasion
    • REVEALED: Britain spied on Argentina over fears of ANOTHER Falklands invasion
    • Britain spied on Argentina, says Snowden
    • CIA Allowed To Keep Interrogation Program Docs Secret

      A Washington, D.C., federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Central Intelligence Agency did not have to cough up documents to a Vice Media Inc. reporter on its use of contentious “enhanced interrogation” techniques, finding the documents were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

    • Judge Rules That the CIA’s ‘Panetta Review’ Can Remain Private
    • Court Denies FOIA Request for Panetta Review on CIA Torture
    • Judge: CIA can keep Panetta review secret
    • Federal judge denies FOIA request for secret CIA document
    • CIA Veteran Sees Big Hole In Sterling Espionage Conviction

      Leutrell Osborne is a 27-year veteran of the CIA who as a case officer oversaw spies and assets in 30 countries. He said he befriended Sterling, who like Osborne is African American, during the course of a discrimination lawsuit Sterling initiated against the CIA in 2000. That litigation was ultimately dismissed by the courts in early 2006 due to the government’s national security claims.

      [...]

      However, Osborne said the CIA never contacted him about Sterling, prior to or during the course of the criminal investigation targeting Sterling. That criminal investigation, which led to Sterling’s indictment in 2010, was initiated by at least 2008 — when reporter Risen was first subpoenaed in the case. Osborne also said that, to date, the CIA has not returned a call he made to the agency shortly after Sterling’s conviction in late January.

      If the CIA was truly concerned that Sterling was leaking classified information, then the agency should have vetted anyone who had his confidence, particularly current and former CIA personnel, to determine the extent of his alleged espionage activities, Osborne contends.

      “The CIA investigated Sterling, and they knew I knew him, or should have known, yet they did not talk to me,” Osborne said. “Is the CIA that incompetent in security? The CIA is supposedly the best security organization in the world, and yet they didn’t care that there were holes in their investigation? That raises a red flag for me.”

    • Was I a CIA Spy? 50 Years On, I Still Don’t Know

      A new book tells the story of how the CIA used unwitting college kids to send in reports from Third World countries. And I was one of them.

    • Views of the News: CIA reform adds cyber and regional analysis

      A major problem in adding cyber resources will be avoiding duplication with NSA and with the Pentagon’s Cyber Command.

    • Perils of the CIA’s reform and what Congress can do

      Unlike many other Congressional reports that are soon forgotten, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s interrogation program has been quickly followed by a major restructuring in the agency it so harshly criticized. Unfortunately, the CIA’s reform announced by its director, John Brennan, goes in the opposite direction of the Senate’s report logical conclusions.

    • Whistleblower says US keeping him from think tank work, as he ‘might comment on prison reform’

      Whistleblower John Kiriakou, a former CIA veteran recently released from federal prison for disclosing the agency’s torture program, says the federal government recommended he not work for a Washington think tank on account of his goal of prison reform.

      Kiriakou tweeted Wednesday that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) — a subagency of the US Department of Justice that is responsible for operation of all federal prisons, including the one Kiriakou served time in — said it was “inappropriate” for him to work at the Institute of Policy Studies, a social justice think tank located in Washington, given his stated desire to work for reform of the US prison system.

    • Free Brazil Movement Leader Denies CIA Link

      The national coordinator of the Free Brazil Movement, or Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), Renan Haas, denied any links or financing by US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an interview with Sputnik.

    • US Manipulates Students as Part of Spy Game – Former CIA Officer

      Former CIA Officer Larry Johnson says that CIA exploiting college students travelling abroad to gather intelligence during the Cold War is not a shocking discovery.

    • Views of the News: CIA reform adds cyber and regional analysis

      CIA Director John Brennan announced recently that the organization will be broadly restructured to include cyberspying—plus 10 mission centers to analyze dangerous regions worldwide.

      Cyberspying will enable the CIA to track targets via their digital activity such as car rentals. It will also help CIA agents conceal their online tracks.

    • What Harvard Law Students Should Know About the Torture Lawyers: What Will They Tell Their Children?

      John Yoo (Yale Law, ’92), is a charter member of the Richard Rich Society. He is the very model of a modern Richard Rich. At the CIA’s request, Yoo wrote secret memos assuring CIA agents that they had legal authority to use “extraordinary techniques” when interrogating prisoners. These memos were secret, of course, because they could not have withstood the light of day. CIA officials jokingly referred to them as “get out of jail free cards” because they were meant to give American war criminals a new legal defense: “I’m not a war criminal because my lawyer said I could do it.”

      Yoo also wrote memos justifying the creation of military tribunals that would not be bound by the ordinary rules of evidence – something officials don’t do unless they intend to introduce evidence obtained by illegal means.

      The memos were a “bad idea and even worse advice,” Dean Chris Edley (Harvard Law, ’78) conceded when he defended Yoo’s return to his tenured position at Boalt Hall, but they couldn’t be deemed criminal unless a court so ruled. And because President Barack Obama (Harvard Law, ‘91), would not allow the torturers to be prosecuted, there was nothing to prevent Yoo from returning to the classroom.

    • The Torturous Evasions of the American Psychological Association

      Even as the Senate Intelligence Committee released its scathing report last December highlighting the role of psychologists in designing and implementing the CIA’s torture of detainees, the American Psychological Association (APA) had already begun to distance itself from the two leading psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who created what the committee called the “ineffective” and “inhumane” $81 million program for the CIA. That program was also adapted by the U.S. military, leading to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. In an October, 2014 press release and public statements in response to James Risen’s book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War, the world’s largest psychology organization sought to rebut the damning confidential emails in Risen’s book about how the APA’s own leaders apparently colluded with the Bush administration’s top national security psychologists, including those with the CIA, to provide ethical and legal cover for psychologists’ involvement in “enhanced interrogation.”

    • Florida Teen, War Criminal: The Life Of An ‘American Warlord’

      Only one American in history has ever been convicted of torture committed abroad: Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

      His father led militants to take control of Liberia in the late ’90s, went in exile after Liberia’s Second Civil War and was found guilty of abetting war crimes in Sierra Leone. But young Chuckie Taylor seemed far removed from that warlord life — he lived in America with his mother and stepfather, just another teenager listening to hip-hop and watching TV in his room.

    • Confessions of a D.C. Madam

      Confessions of a DC Madam (Trine Day, March 2015) is an autobiographical account of Henry W. Vinson’s odyssey from the humble origins of Williamson, West Virginia to running the largest gay escort service in Washington, D.C. by the time he was 26 years old.

      This haunting exposé is the first book to tell the tale of sexually blackmailed politicians and government officials in the U.S. by an individual who actually witnessed these sinister maneuverings first-hand. Confessions of a DC Madam proves that there is a clandestine checks-and-balances system in effect within our government—blackmail.

      Vinson intricately documents his interactions with various closeted and non-closeted VIPs who solicited the escorts he employed. Moreover, this new book details Vinson’s numerous exchanges with a CIA asset whose specialty was sexually compromising the power brokers of Washington, DC, and the trials and tribulations Vinson suffered because he was privy to information that could have produced a seismic political scandal.

    • Guantanamo Bay Diary

      Also nearby is the only known military “black site” on American soil. A place where torture happened.

    • How Canada lets people get tortured

      Following December’s release of the U.S. Senate report on American complicity in torture, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quickly declared, “It has nothing to do whatsoever with the government of Canada.” Despite the CIA’s close relationship with Canadian state security agencies, as well as two judicial inquiries finding Ottawa complicit in the torture of Canadian citizens in Syria and Egypt, Harper preferred to ignore the facts.

      At about the same time, a stunning memoir was published that paints another damning portrait of Canadian authorities from even before September 11, 2001. Guantanamo Diary was originally composed by hand in 2005 from a cell at the infamous U.S. torture camp, which remains open despite President Obama’s promise to close it eight years ago. It tells the remarkable story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who remains detained there despite a 2010 U.S. release order.

    • Detained mothers launch hunger strike

      About 40 mothers being held at an immigration detention camp in Karnes, Texas, have launched a hunger strike to protest the detainment of their children as the families await immigration and asylum hearings, according to detainees and advocates working on their behalf.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Peter Sunde: The ‘Pirate Movement’ is Dead

        Give up the idea of pirates being cool. They’re not. My biggest regret in my part in all of this was to use the word pirate. Not even Johnny Depp can make pirates look cool – and he manages to make cocaine-dealers look awesome. Pirates are awful. And today’s pirates – the ones in Somalia – also lost their battles. Good! So let’s get rid of this stupid culture of having a stupid culture.

04.04.15

Links 4/4/2015: Rust 1.0 Beta, IceCat 31.6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Get 91% off the Linux Learner Bundle

    Master Linux quickly & efficiently with the next great courseware offer from TNW Deals! The Linux Learner Bundle puts you in command of the basics with 6 elite courses and 50+ hours of interactive learning content.

  • Desktop

    • Meerkat Is a Superb Mini-PC from System76 That Can Be Anything, Including Steam Link

      Meerkat is a mini-PC developed by System76 that is based on the NUC Intel platform and that comes with some insane specifications. The good news is Meerkat is now available for purchase.

    • Ubuntu on the Asus Zenbook UX305 ultrabook

      The Asus Zenbook UX305 is a thin and light laptop that offers a pretty great value. For $699 you get a 2.6 pounds notebook with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of solid state storage, a 13.3 inch full HD matte display, and an Intel Core M Broadwell processor.

    • Vive La France Libre! GNU/Linux Rolls Onwards And Upwards
    • A Linux Paradox Needs Explanation: Making Your Linux OS Look like Windows

      The Linux platform is extremely flexible, and it can be implemented pretty much anywhere, either as a server, a firewall or as an OS for your heating system at home. The same flexibility allows users to customize their operating systems to look like Windows, and that is somewhat of a paradox.

    • Google Unveils 4 New Chromebooks and Chrome OS on a Stick

      Google has unveiled five new computers running its Linux-based Chrome OS, including the first Chrome OS stick computer and the lowest priced touchscreen Chromebook to date.

      The new models move Chrome OS closer to the mobile embedded realm of Android, a trend underscored with Google now opening up its technology for porting Android apps to Chrome OS to any Android app developer. Google also showed off a beta Chrome Launcher 2.0 that switches the UI to a more Android-like Material Design look and feel, as well as Google Now.

    • Five New Chrome OS Computers

      The candy-bar sized Chromebit HDMI stick has some of the same innards as the four new Chromebooks including a Rockchip RK3288, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of eMMC. The under $100 TV plug-in also sports a USB port, Bluetooth, and WiFi ac.

    • Google announces new Chromebooks and Chromebit HDMI sticks

      Google’s Chromebooks have long been burning up the sales charts on Amazon’s list of bestselling laptops. Now the company has announced four new Chromebooks, new HDMI sticks called Chromebits, and an update to its App Runtime for Chrome.

    • Chromebook Flip: Incentive for Google to improve touch for Chrome OS

      Chromebooks have been available with touch screens since the original Chromebook Pixel. They aren’t common but there are a few models on the market. One reason they aren’t common is that touch support in Chrome OS is not very good, so there’s no incentive for OEMs to build Chromebooks with touch.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Important X.Org Election Is Ending This Weekend

        For X.Org members that haven’t yet voted in this year’s particularly important elections, there’s just a few days to cast your ballot.

        The elections were supposed to happen back from 9 March to 22 March, but were significantly delayed and didn’t get started until 23 March. As such, they’re now expected to end on 5 April at 23:59 UTC.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Countdown on elementary OS Website Suggests a New Freya Release

      A countdown has appeared today, April 4, on the elementary OS website suggesting that a new release of the highly anticipated operating system will be unveiled in approximately 7 days and 10 hours from the moment of writing this article.

    • New Releases

    • Arch Family

      • BlackArch Linux Offers Wealth of Security Research Tools

        There is no shortage of Linux-based operating systems focused on security research in the market today, including BackBox, Pentoo, CAINE and Kali Linux. While all of those Linux operating systems include a healthy volume of tools, BlackArch is in a category of its own in terms of the sheer number of included applications. BlackArch Linux version 2015.03.29, released March 29, provides users with more than 1,200 security tools. BlackArch is an Arch Linux-based security research operating system. Arch Linux is what is known as a rolling release Linux distribution that is constantly being updated. BlackArch includes anti-forensic, automation, backdoor, crypto, honeypot, networking, scanners, spoofers and wireless security tools. Among the interesting tools that BlackArch includes is Easy Creds, which aims to make it easier for security researchers to obtain user credentials during a penetration test. Within BlackArch’s backdoor tools category is OpenStego, a steganography application, which can be used to hide data inside an image. eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the BlackArch 2015.03.29 release.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Scientific Linux 7.1 to Offer ZFS on Linux, UEFI Secure Boot Support Still Not Fully Implemented

        The Scientific Linux development team, through Pat Riehecky, has announced a couple of days ago that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Scientific Linux 7.1 computer operating system is available for download and testing.

      • Scientific Linux 7.1 Is Coming Soon, Up To An RC State

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 was released in March and since then all of the RHEL derivatives have been busy testing and pushing out their updates. The Scientific Linux development community is close to getting out their SL7.1 release but they’re hoping for some last-minute testing.

        Scientific Linux 7.1 RC1 was released last night with all of the RHEL 7.1 changes incorporated. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 brought Kpatch support, SSSD for CISF, USB 3.0 support for KVM as a tech preview feature, vCPU support in KVM up to 240 vCPUs, Btrfs improvements, and many package updates throughout. Those wanting to find out about the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 improvements can find the release notes at RedHat.com.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Hack The Home: creating the home of the future

            These days, the free availability of open source software – take Snappy Ubuntu Core as a great example – means the near future is more sci-fi than DIY. Now, as GE’s company FirstBuild is about to prove, the home is the playground of the inventor, and freely available open source software like Snappy is their toolkit.

          • Canonical Wants Ubuntu to Power the House of the Future

            The home of tomorrow will be smart and it will be a part of the Internet of Things, but what operating systems will be behind everything? Canonical wants to make Ubuntu Snappy Core the engine for the house of the future, and that’s the reason it’s sponsoring the Mega Hackathon: Hack the Home event.

          • Users Report Some Bq Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Phones Going into Reboot Loop

            Users have reported that some of the Bq Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition phones are stuck in a continuous reboot loop and Canonical took notice. They are now investigating the problem, and they are looking for solutions.

          • Lots of GnuPG Vulnerabilities Have Been Closed in All Ubuntu OSes

            Canonical has published details in a security notice about a number of GnuPG vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

          • Cube i7-CM is an Ubuntu tablet with Intel Core M

            Chinese device maker Cube offers a range of tablets with Android, Windows, or both. Now the company’s launching its first tablet running Ubuntu Linux.

            The Cube i7-CM is a tablet with an Intel Core M processor Canonical’s Linux-based operating system. It launches in China this week, but you should be able to have one shipped internationally if you find a seller at AliExpress or a store that exports Chinese tablets.

          • Is Radio Ready for Ubuntu?

            In the early 1990s, it seemed that the major PC operating systems had pretty well marked their territories. Creative endeavors went with Macintosh; business and finance adopted Windows; Linux was embraced by the computer geeks.

            But are those boundaries cast in stone? Andrew (A.J.) Janitscheck, director of program operations and support for Radio Free Asia, thinks it might be time for radio stations to do a rethink.

            His NAB Show presentation “Ubuntu — Radio Ready” describes RFA’s adoption of Linux, which began with system administrators and spread much further. Today, the RFA studios and broadcast network are powered by Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio.

          • You Can Now Send Web Pages to Your Ubuntu Phone from Any Browser

            A Softpedia user brought to our attention that there’s a new application for Ubuntu Touch OS, as well as corresponding browser extensions, that allow users to send web pages (basically any URL) to their Ubuntu Phone devices.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny SODIMM-style module runs Linux on Cortex-A5

      Denx announced an “MA5D4″ COM that runs Linux on Atmel’s SAMA5D4 SoC, plus a baseboard kit that adds a touchscreen and CAN, serial, HDMI, USB, and camera ports.

      Like Denx Computer Systems’s recent, Freescale i.MX6-based Denx M6R computer-on-module, the MA5D4 is supplied with the Yocto Linux based Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK) distribution from sister company Denx Software Engineering. Applications are said to include mobile input and output terminals, measuring instruments, or scanners with simple UIs. Many other types of IoT gizmos could make use of this module, especially those that require low power consumption, which is claimed to be ~500mW on the MA5D4.

    • Open spec x86 SBCs gain prototyping add-ons

      Newark Element14 launched a $20 motor control add-on for AMD’s Gizmo 2 SBC, and MinnowBoard.org tipped a new “Lure” LED add-on for the Minnowboard Max.

    • Tiny SBC runs Linux on Vybrid-based COM

      F&S announced an open-spec “PCOMnetA5″ SBC, combining a carrier board with a Linux-ready COM equipped with Freescale’s Cortex-A5 and -M4 based Vybrid SoC.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • IoT on Tizen with IoTivity

          First, what is the Internet of Things? I will try to answer this question based on my personal research and experiments as a Tizen and IoTivity community contributor.

          Many analysts or programmers may feel the “IoT hype” is overrated, since it became one of top buzz word of this year 2015, (it replaced big data which took the place of cloud the year before).

          Believe it or not but I also think something big is happening now in the embedded world, pretty much similar to what happened when local networks were connected together into the Internet.

          This can be a hasty analogy, but I see the very same pattern: while we’re used to connect embedded devices or computers, let’s transpose this one level down, then it’s easy to imagine the connections between each components of the system and the ability to deal with them as network nodes.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • Meteor: An amazing free, open source Web app platform you have to try

    So, you’re probably wondering what makes Meteor so damn exciting … first of all, you code in JavaScript on both the client- and the server-side. Second, Meteor is real-time even for implementing code updates for running apps. Third, it’s based on Node.js:

    … a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

  • Hidden Costs of Open Source
  • Open Source as a Force Multiplier

    In essence, the Open Source approach serves as a force multiplier for my development team. Welcome to the team!

  • Open-source eats open-source: Why the innovation will never stop

    Technology only exists thanks to innovation. If nobody was pushing the boundaries with fresh ideas, then technology, and the people who depend on it, would have died out with the neanderthals. But while many people might believe the big tech vendors are the ones responsible for driving most of the innovation in computing today, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

  • OpenIndiana 2015.03 “Hipster” Solaris OS Adds Enlightenment 0.19 as Alternative Desktop

    After half of year of development, Ken Mays has announced earlier this week the availability of a new OpenIndiana release, 2015.03, dubbed Hipster. OpenIndiana is the continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system, and this new release introduces several updated packages, an alternative desktop environment, and various under-the-hood improvements.

  • Events

    • LLVM Microconference Accepted into 2015 Linux Plumbers Conference

      This microconference will cover all things LLVM related to Linux. Discussions will range from progress in compiling the Linux kernel (and changes in clang/LLVM) to support of clang in yocto, and even to compiling an entire distro with clang (while also using the “musl” replacement for glibc and uclibc). The topics will also include LLVM being used for bug hunting and for the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF).

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Rust 1.0 beta released

        The Rust team at Mozilla Research has announced the first beta release of Rust 1.0. The release notes detail a number of important changes, but the announcement adds some additional noteworthy items.

      • Rust 1.0 Now In Beta
      • Announcing Rust 1.0 Beta

        Today we are excited to announce the release of Rust 1.0 beta! The beta release marks a very significant “state transition” in the move towards 1.0. In particular, with the beta release, all libraries and language features that are planned to be stable for 1.0 have been marked as stable. As such, the beta release represents an accurate preview of what Rust 1.0 will include.

      • Mozilla Firefox 37.0.1 Out Now, Disables HTTP/2 AltSvc and Fixes Bugs

        Mozilla has pushed the first point release of its recently announced Firefox 37.0 web browser to mirrors worldwide. The new version will be available to users via the application’s built-in updater.

      • IceCat 31.6.0 release

        GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Survey Results Disagree on the True State of Hadoop Adoption

      How much traction are Hadoop and other Big Data tools getting in enterprises? That depends on which studies you put credence in. A new report from Barclays Bank PLC notes that Hadoop is gaining substantial enterprise traction, but other reports note that many enterprises remain in evaluation stage. Meanwhile, a recent report from Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehousing company, found that nearly two thirds of the respondents said that they believe Hadoop will not have any impact on their legacy data environments.

    • OpenStack Innovator Nebula Ceases Operations: Is OpenStack in Trouble?

      The company founded by the OpenStack founder (and former NASA CTO) goes bust; what happened and does this mean OpenStack as a whole is in trouble?

  • Databases

    • Open source is better off without FoundationDB

      Database startup FoundationDB mysteriously vanished at the end of last month, along with both the downloads of its proprietary database and its open source projects.

      As it turned out, Apple bought the company for internal use. I was interested in how this was perceived. When Ben Kepes of Forbes initially wrote about the purchase, for example, he erred in characterizing FoundationDB as all open source. It was an easy mistake; the company used the language of developer communities. Many of us assume “open” when we hear “community” because open source is so much the default these days.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Thousands of Spaniards leave Twitter for GNU social

      Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by a centralized authority, GNU social is a network of independent servers called nodes. Federation technology allows users to communicate between nodes, preserving the unified experience of traditional social media systems, and the free GNU social software allows anybody with an Internet connection to start their own public or private node and join the network. These administrators can even customize their nodes to suit the unique needs of their users.

    • Social FLOSS “Out There”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Overhaul to ensure relevance of projects on Joinup

      The projects shared on the Joinup collaboration platform are being checked for relevance. Over the past 8 years, Joinup and the original two communities, OSOR and SEMIC, have collected over 4000 software solutions and more than 2000 semantic assets. Some of these projects have meanwhile been replaced by new tools, some moved to different repositories, and others have become obsolete.

  • Licensing

    • European Commission finalises the draft EUPL v1.2

      After this presentation, a specific point was still under investigation: the possibility of an “opt out” clause regarding the updated list of compatible licences. This list is not only extended to the GPLv3 and AGPLv3, but also to other copyleft licences like the MPL or the LGPL that protect the covered files or the derivatives of the covered works against exclusive appropriation (prohibition of re-licensing the covered files or their derivatives under a proprietary licence) without any ambition to extend their coverage to the whole work or application in which the covered file is integrated or linked.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Suing EPA for failure to regulate nano-pesticides

      We finally know what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will and will not do about regulating the use of nanomaterials in pesticides. It has taken seven years and a lawsuit to force the EPA to act. And unfortunately, its action leaves much to be desired: there are still no requirements to protect nano-pesticide manufacturer workers, farmer workers and those living downwind from nano-pesticide drift. (A 2014 General Accountability Office report stated that the EPA’s oversight of pesticide residue testing laboratories was inadequate. Nano-pesticide residue testing standards have yet to be developed.)

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Nuclear deal: Iranians find ways to celebrate on social media

      As news of Thursday evening’s breakthrough in nuclear negotiations began to sink in, Iranians reacted jubilantly – both in the streets of Iran and online.

    • It Didn’t Happen

      It is so unthinkable, that IT NEVER HAPPENED. Not one British mainstream media report of the debate mentions Trident missiles or nuclear weapons. A Google news search on trident missiles or on nuclear weapons throws up zero references to the leaders’ debate or Nicola Sturgeon in British mainstream media today. Not one of the broadcasters’ highlight packages repeated Nicola’s outrage at the country’s throwing away money on weapons of mass destruction when so many children are living in poverty.

    • Whisper it Gently: Iran Played a Blinder

      Three months ago, I published this: “I remain hopeful that Iran will realise that there is a huge opportunity here. If Iran tactically backs down on its nuclear programme in the current circumstances, that will not be a defeat for Iran but a defeat for the neo-cons.”

      That is precisely what has happened. My own Western diplomatic source with access to the talks, has told me today that he estimates 96% of the movement since December has been on the Iranian side, and only 4% on the international side. At the end, the Iranians took everyone by surprise by agreeing to take 2,000 more centrifuges out of use than anybody ever thought they would.

    • At least 54 Colombian girls sexually abused by immune US military: Report

      US soldiers and military contractors sexually abused at least 54 children in Colombia between 2003 and 2007, according to a recently released historic document on the country’s conflict. The suspects have allegedly not been prosecuted due to immunity clauses in bilateral agreements.

    • US Military’s Sexual Assault of Colombian Children

      …not a single U.S. mainstream domestic news outlet has covered any aspects of the report to date.

    • Five Years On, the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” Video Matters More than Ever

      This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the release of the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video which showed a July 12, 2007 US Apache attack helicopter attack upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst the over twelve people killed by the 30mm cannon-fire were two Reuters staff. The video was part of the huge cache of material leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning.

    • The Case for Giving Iran’s Scholar-Diplomats a Chance

      Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, has more cabinet members with Ph.D. degrees from U.S. universities than Barack Obama does. In fact, Iran has more holders of American Ph.D.s in its presidential cabinet than France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, or Spain—combined.

    • Top Bush Administration Official Says There’s No Alternative To Diplomacy With Iran

      Gen. Michael Hayden, President George W. Bush’s director of the NSA and CIA, told Fox News on Friday morning that he was “heartened” by the tentative deal the Obama administration and its international partners have reached with Iran in an effort to contain its nuclear program.

    • Iran: US Drone Killed Two of Our Advisers in Iraq
    • Iran US Drone Strike: Revolutionary Guard Claims America Killed 2 ‘Advisers’ In Iraq
    • Iranian Guard says US drone killed 2 of its advisers in Iraq; US says it only struck militants
    • Iran Says U.S. Drone Killed Two Advisers In Iraq
    • Monthly Drone Report, March 2015: US drone strikes drop 50% as chaos envelops Yemen
    • ‘Kill Chain’ holds up the drone and looks at it from every angle

      Recall, fondly, the $435.00 hammer. That was the $15.00 hammer the Pentagon bought back in the 1980s, after $420.00 had been tacked on for research and development. R&D on a hammer (a pause here to reflect on this), a tool that hasn’t changed since the first years of the Iron Age (1200 BC). Good for a laugh, that kind of cheesy, bureaucratic thievery.

      Now consider the drone, as Andrew Cockburn does with mordancy in Kill Chain: an unmanned aerial vehicle that has been with us for some time; imagine a hot-air balloon that escapes its mooring. But the kind that takes pictures and fires a high-explosive missile you do not want to be on the receiving end of (and the receiving end is not necessarily its target).

    • Trusting High-Tech Weapons of War
    • Review of “Kill Chain: Rise of the High-tech Assassins”

      Cockburn has provided a highly readable, and logically devastating story, written from a bottom-up empirical perspective. He explains why our strategy in Yemen was doomed to fail, as indeed it has in recent weeks. His meticulously referenced historical and empirical research makes this book hard to pick apart. No doubt, there are some small errors of fact. For example, not all the drone/bombers deployed in ill starred Operation Aphrodite (which blew up JFK’s elder brother) in 1944 were B-24s as Cockburn incorrectly suggests; the operation also used B-17s. But I defy anyone to find a single thread or family of threads that can be used to unravel his tapestry.

    • Television Commercial in California Asks Drone Pilots to Stop Killing

      The ad was produced by KnowDrones.com, and is cosponsored by Veterans for Peace/Sacramento, and Veterans Democratic Club of Sacramento. It is airing on CNN, FoxNews and other networks starting Tuesday in the Sacramento/Yuba City area, near Beale Air Force Base.

    • Think drones technology is not really the problem? Think again

      While US targeted killing outside international law did not originate with drones, without a doubt it is the technology that has enabled a wholesale expansion of it – so much so that it has almost become normalised. And it is not just ‘anti-drone’ campaigners who are making this point. The 2014 report of the Stimson Task Force on US Drone Policy, authored by former senior US military and administration officials, states “it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms” and declares that “the availability of lethal UAV technologies has enabled US policies that likely would not have been adopted in the absence of UAVs.” (For more on drones and targeted killing see here). But the problem with drones is not just their use for targeted killing as we continue to stress.

    • UG#706 – When Are Terrorists Not Terrorists? (States assassinating by drones)

      We conclude with Wendy Patten, who looks at the US government’s use of drones, specifically the policies which guide it. She begins by describing what is currently known of a May 2013 presidential policy guidance (PPG), which purports to constrain use of drones. Only a 2 page ‘fact sheet’ of this has currently been declassified. Then she looks at what has emerged from the efforts to use litigation as regards drone usage.

    • Mike Tipping: Maine’s senators can help end hypocrisy over war and peace

      Traditionally, Maine’s senators have used positions like these to advocate for steady spending on shipbuilding as a way of safeguarding jobs at Bath Iron Works and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. At this crucial moment, however, Maine’s representatives in Washington also should take a broader view and ask deeper questions about our military spending, our foreign policy goals and our priorities as a nation.

    • How Yemen’s US-backed ex-dictator is tearing his country apart

      For years, the Americans saw President Ali Abdullah Saleh as a key ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. He allowed his air bases to be used by US drones to strike at the movement’s operatives, and gladly received Western aid in development cash and arms supplies.

    • The collapse of the Obama doctrine: Yemen war as an opportunity?

      Despite a preliminary nuclear deal agreed upon between Iran and its allies, it is unlikely Obama will enact any major shift in regional policies, but continue to hide behind its allies to achieve muddled objectives

    • Scotland’s biggest public sector pension scheme has £83mn stake in arms trade

      Scotland’s most substantial local authority pension scheme has been sharply criticized for investing £83 million in 11 of the world’s biggest arms firms.

      At the close of 2014, Glasgow City Council’s Strathclyde Pension Fund had shares amounting to £19.6 million in Lockheed Martin and Boeing – two of the biggest arms manufacturers on the planet.

    • US drone programme: ‘Schizophrenia’ comes to the big screen
    • DARPA’s Vision of Future War — Swarms of Missiles and Drones

      One of the most important jobs for an air force is suppressing enemy air defenses. It means hacking, jamming or otherwise blowing up radars and anti-aircraft missile sites — often during the opening stages of a war.

    • DARPA needs drones, fighters, missiles to attack in tandem; wants open systems to make it happen

      Pentagon researchers have decided the most effective way to penetrate state-of-the-art air defenses is the same approach with which users have flummoxed large-scale IT security operations for years:

    • DARPA wants modular, specialized, cheaper and drop in upgradable swarm cloud of drones, missiles and mothership airplanes
    • Religious leaders urge a ban on fully autonomous weapons

      Diplomats, soldiers, scholars and concerned citizens will meet in Geneva immediately after Easter to discuss these and other implications of a new class of arms known as “lethal autonomous weapons”, or “killer robots”.

    • The West and its flawed anti-IS strategy

      Finally, there is a need for introspection inside Europe, the U.S., and even Australia, which have seen growing numbers of their citizens get through Turkey to join IS. While the brutality of the Assad regime and economic distress in the region have been blamed for the thousands of Arab youth taking up arms for IS, what explains the hundreds of citizens joining it from the U.K., France and the U.S.? According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, 3,400 of the 20,000 IS foreign fighters are from Western countries. Why are British and French girls becoming jihadi brides, schoolboys and young doctors learning to kill, and teenage Americans travelling all the way just to join IS ranks? Could it be that in the early years of a push for regime change and sanctions against Syria, Western governments themselves promoted the propaganda against Mr. Assad’s government, allowing many of their Muslim citizens to think they had not just religious but national sanction to join the war?

    • Blackwater: One of the Pentagon’s Top Contractors for Afghanistan Training

      Despite a sordid and deadly reputation in Iraq, the mercenary army that began as Blackwater and is now known as Academi was a top recipient of Pentagon contracts for training Afghanistan’s security forces from 2002 to 2014, a government watchdog reported Tuesday.

    • America is still fighting the Cold War: Why its military “strategy” is hopeless

      Current levels of Pentagon spending simply aren’t sustainable. The time is now to abandon our global war on terror

    • There is nothing conservative about the Republican ‘War’ Party

      Neocons have so corrupted the Republican Party that in order to be considered a viable national presidential candidate and to be embraced by the rank and file and Tea Party right, one must openly advocate for an open-ended continuation of the war on terror and a de facto war against Iran.

    • Yemen’s Houthis seize central Aden district, presidential site

      China’s Xinhua news agency said a Chinese missile frigate evacuated 225 people, all non-Chinese nationals, from Aden on Thursday to Djibouti.

    • 35 dead, 88 wounded as Saudi-led air strikes hit Yemen for fifth day

      The Health Ministry, loyal to the Houthi fighters who control the capital, said Saudi-led air strikes had killed 35 people and wounded 88 overnight. The figures could not be independently confirmed.

    • Freedom Rider: American Hell for Yemen

      The U.S.-spawned whirlwind of carnage and destruction has wrecked the societies of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, yet most Americans feel themselves blameless. “The people, the corporate media and the political system all accept that their government has the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations and that it is always right and moral in its claims.” They behave like zombified cogs in an imperial death machine.

    • COMMENT: The bodies pile up in Yemen’s civil war and Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign, but who is counting the casualties?

      Between 29 and 45 people were reported killed by an apparent air attack at the al Mazraq camp – some were said to have been burned beyond recognition. Depressingly, the victims also included children.

      Although the attack came shortly after Saudi Arabia had launched an aerial bombardment of Yemen, Yemen’s foreign minister, speaking from Riyadh, blamed artillery fired by the Houthi militia which stormed the country’s capital Sanaa late last year. A Saudi spokesman meanwhile said that rebels had been firing from a residential area in response to a question about the bombing.

    • Causing genocide to protect us from terror

      A report called Body Count has revealed that at least 1.3 million people have lost their lives as a result of the US-led “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s a report which should have made front page news across the world.

    • Report: At Least 1.3 Million People Killed In US War On Terror

      A recent report found that in the estimated number of casualties from the United States’ “War on Terror,” at least 1.3 million people were killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. While the report emphasizes that this is a “conservative estimate,” 1.3 million is 10 times higher than the number of casualties previously reported by mainstream media in the US.

    • US War on Terror Leaves 1.3 Million Dead in Three Countries
    • The ‘War on Terror’ has killed 1.3 million people, report finds

      A report has found that 1.3m people have lost their lives as a direct or indirect result of the ‘War on Terror’.

    • Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers

      There is no blame attributed to the French socioeconomic system, which relegates most of France’s Arab population to a permanent underclass of unemployment and poverty. As racial minorities in a country that holds few opportunities for people with their background, the brothers worked dead-end jobs like delivering pizzas and fish mongering. They were not able to get jobs at French investment banks or in the fashion industry. Certainly this must have produced adverse mental health effects.

    • Land safely? ‘Let’s wait and see:’ Alps co-pilot’s last words revealed

      The co-pilot who investigators believe deliberately crashed Germany Wings Flight 9252 gave clues to what he was about to do in the last few sentences he uttered before his actions killed all 150 people on board.

      In transcripts obtained by the German press, Andreas Lubitz repeatedly tells Captain Patrick Sondeimer that he is ready to take over “any time,” the Independent reported.

      Sondheimer then orders his co-pilot to prepare the plane for landing, to which Lubitz responds to with “hopefully” and “let’s wait and see.”

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange: ‘I still enjoy crushing bastards’

      Five years after ‘Collateral Murder’, the secret US military video which made the Pentagon furious and WikiLeaks famous around the world, l’Espresso meets the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is holed up to ask whether he has changed his mind and goals

    • eymour Hersh on My Lai and the state of investigative journalism

      When he first reported the My Lai story, Hersh was a freelancer. Magazines including Life turned down his initial account of the massacre, which included a difficult-to-obtain interview with Lieutenant William L. Calley, the commander who led the slaughter. Hersh initially published his blockbuster scoop with a small antiwar newswire called the Dispatch News Service.

    • Latest Wikileaks TPP Document Release Has Obama Administration on the Defensive

      The White House is once again on the defensive. Last week, Wikileaks released a document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which have been notoriously private and closed off to the public, and hours later, the White House posted a lengthy blog to defend the most controversial aspect of the document, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision.

      For a while now, we have known that the TPP was going to include the ISDS, which allows corporations and other investors to sue foreign governments when a new law or regulation hurts the companies investment or when a government expropriates the property all together. But the public has also been clueless as to whether the provision would be worded differently than in previous trade agreements that had the ISDS, such as NAFTA. The Obama administration has quite adamantly insisted that the TPP will be transparent and that governments will not have to worry about challenges to health or environmental regulations, which has happened in previous trade agreements with the ISDS.

    • Zimbabwe: Politics – Where the Media Goes Against Journalism

      It must be a very difficult period for America, Obama especially. There is no rhyme, no reason, to the workings of the world that America has made.

      Everything looks Frankensteinian, all proving runaway, unknown and unknowable.

      Not such a burden for mere mortals, whose very humanity is founded on a limited ken. But not so for gods, who should know, make and determine everything. And America regards itself as a god, the only one in fact.

      A real monotheist god, politically that is. Godliness rests in the power to make reality, to write and dispose of rules of life and nations, as meets the creator’s caprices. And Shakespeare had his finger on the whimsical proclivity of gods. He wrote: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods/ They kill us for their sport”.

    • Chinese ‘Thunderbolt’ copters to replace US Cobras in Pakistan

      In line with a January 2015 contract, Pakistan has received three Chinese Z-10 “Thunderbolt” attack helicopters to replace its American Cobra helicopter.

    • Chinese attack helicopters could soon replace American Cobras in Pakistan
    • Drone Warfare: Death Delivered From a Location Near You

      On March 7th, my Family and 20 or so other people protested drone warfare in front of the main gate of the Battle Creek Air National Guard base in Michigan. In 2013, the base was named a Reaper Drone Operating Station and should be operational any day, if not already. Weaponized drone operators are dropping bombs from my backyard.

      We stood in the mud on the side of the four-lane highway from Noon to 1pm. A few of us held signs with slogans like “Stop Drone Warfare” while others offered conversation to each other or waved at honking cars. One father and fellow protester brought fresh-popped popcorn, which he passed out in little blue bowls to the few children that were present. In between piling kernels in their mouths, the kids stomped in the water and slid on the ice behind us that had accumulated at the base of a mountain of plowed snow.

    • Luftwaffe Fighter Pilots Learn to Fly Israeli Drones by Mouse

      The German pilot simply presses a key on a keyboard to make his approach to land on the airfield at the military base at Mazar-e-Sharif in northern

    • Just Say No

      Why the United States can’t kick the bad habit of repeating failed campaigns in its war against terror.

    • America That We Need (3-5)

      American airpower has blown away parts or all of at least eight wedding parties in three countries

    • Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness

      Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which “violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma,” legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics. Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a war on terrorism “that represents the negation of politics—since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one’s side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent.” Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.

    • State Department found 4 emails about drones sent by Clinton
    • Hillary Clinton also used iPad for e-mail

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 15 ways the world will be terrifying in 2050

      But despite our technological advances, humanity has failed to solve many of its problems. The world hasn’t weaned itself off fossil fuels or antibiotics, protected the rain forest, or reduced the stigma surrounding mental illness. We haven’t flood-proofed our cities or protected our energy grids from natural disasters.

    • Instagram endangers rhinos

      Posting your rhino pictures from your game reserve getaway on social media might be inadvertently giving poachers directions to their next kill.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Britain Used Spy Team to Shape Latin American Public Opinion on Falklands

      Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands.

      A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since at least 2009. Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in partnership with Argentine news site Todo Notícias, refer to the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Truecrypt report

      The NCC audit found no evidence of deliberate backdoors…

    • Tor Summer of Privacy–Accepting Applications Now

      The Tor Project, in collaboration with ​The Electronic Frontier Foundation, has taken part in Google Summer of Code for 2007 through 2014, mentoring a total of 53 students. But this year ​https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008358.html, the program was trimmed back and room was needed for new organizations. We think that is important, too.

    • HTTPS Everywhere Version 5: Sixteen New Languages and Thousands of New Rules

      This week we released the latest version of HTTPS Everywhere to all of our users. Compared to the previous major release, this version introduces thousands of new rules, translations of the interface into sixteen new languages, and support for “Block All HTTP Requests” in Chrome. If you already use HTTPS Everywhere, you will automatically be updated to the latest version. If you don’t have HTTPS Everywhere installed, you can get it here.

    • Bill would stop feds from mandating ‘backdoor’ to data

      A bipartisan group of lawmakers is set to push for legislation that would bar federal agents from forcing tech companies to give them access to customers’ emails, texts and photos.

      “I think you have the right to go about your business without government — in a Big Brother way — listening to your phone calls or reading your emails,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.

      Pocan is sponsoring the Surveillance State Repeal Act with Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. The bill includes a provision that the federal government cannot require electronics or software manufacturers to build in a mechanism to allow the government to bypass privacy technology.

    • Pm Has Us Report On Nsa Interception Of Phone Calls

      AMERICAN officials presented Prime Minister Perry Christie with a formal communication regarding reports that the US’ National Security Agency had been intercepting and monitoring the telephone conversations of Bahamians, Foreign Affairs and Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell confirmed yesterday.

      #The official correspondence, The Tribune understands, contained an assurance from the United States that consideration would be given to changing America’s oversees telephone monitoring procedures.

      #However, Mr Mitchell declined comment on this saying he had yet to formally present the communication to Cabinet. He said once this was done, it was his intention to make a formal statement in Parliament when it meets next, pending instructions from Cabinet.

    • Your Parents Just Became The NSA With This Car Manufacturer’s Spying App

      GM has a message for teenagers who want to drive its cars: even if your older sibling has left for college, Big Brother is still watching you.

    • Destroyed Snowden laptop: the curatorial view
    • A British Museum Is Showing Off a MacBook Air — But Not Because of Apple’s Design
    • Smashed Snowden laptop on display in British museum

      A laptop that was used to store leaked files from Edward Snowden and then destroyed under watch from U.K. intelligence officers is now on display at a prominent London museum.

      The smashed MacBook Air is on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of an exhibition examining “the role of public institutions in contemporary life and what it means to be responsible for a national collection.”

    • In New Video, Congressman Explains Why His Fellow Lawmakers Couldn’t Be Trusted with NSA Oversight

      Congressmen who asked about oversight of NSA mass surveillance and domestic spying in 2013 could have “compromise[d] security” and were denied the records they sought because of concerns they lacked formal government security clearance, a former member of the House Intelligence Committee says in a newly-released video.

      The footage, from an August 29, 2013 town hall meeting, sheds new light on why lawmakers were denied key rulings and reports from the secret courts overseeing the National Security Agency — even as the Obama administration and intelligence officials claimed that all NSA programs were subject to strict congressional oversight and therefore could be held accountable.

    • When Will the NSA Stop Spying on Innocent Americans?

      Unless Congress acts, Americans will soon benefit from one of the Patriot Act’s most important safeguards against abuse: Language in Section 215 of the law is scheduled to expire in June, depriving the FBI and NSA of a provision they’ve used to justify monitoring the phone calls of tens of millions of innocents (though a primary author of the law insists that it grants no such authority). If you’ve used a landline to call an abortion clinic, a gun store, a suicide hotline, a therapist, an oncologist, a phone sex operator, an investigative journalist, or a union organizer, odds are the government has logged a record of the call. If your Congressional representative has a spouse or child who has made an embarrassing phone call, the executive branch may well possess the ability to document it, though government apologists insist that they’d never do so and are strangely confident that future governments composed of unknown people won’t either.

    • NY Times Reporter Demands Access to NSA Inspector General Reports

      Savage says the NSA denied expedited processing of his request, and then never followed up on it.

    • The simple math problem that blows apart the NSA’s surveillance justifications

      At any rate, as I’ve argued before, simple bureaucratic competence and bog-standard detective work are vastly underrated compared to piling up gigantic quantities of irrelevant data. But the false positive problem ought to be the final nail in the dragnet coffin. Unless terrorism becomes thousands of times more common than it is today, such broad techniques will be utterly useless against real terrorism.

    • Advancing cyber bills spark fresh NSA worries

      The House Intelligence panel is preparing to move a cybersecurity bill that privacy advocates argue would embolden the National Security Agency (NSA).

      Before the contentious bill hits the floor, though, Intelligence Committee leaders want to join forces with their Homeland Security panel colleagues who are considering a bill of their own.

    • NSA looks to continue cybersecurity partnership with private sector

      The National Security Agency has helped investigate every major cyber intrusion in the private sector in the last six months, Director Adm. Michael Rogers said, adding that he wants that collaboration to get faster and more anticipatory.

    • Mozilla warns against data-storage rules in NSA reform

      Mozilla on Friday warned against a government policy that could require phone companies to hold on to customer data longer than their business purposes require.

      Advocates for National Security Agency reform have cautioned against such a measure for the past year. Lawmakers are considering ending the government’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records in exchange for a system where officials could search records stored with the private companies themselves with approval from the surveillance court.
      The data retention provision did not make it into reform bills last year, including one in the Senate that narrowly failed on a procedural vote. Mozilla’s director of public policy, Chris Riley, wants it to stay that way.

      “It is an unnecessary, and harmful, posture for any democratic government to take. Data retention mandates are not a missing piece of the long-term surveillance ecosystem; they are a bridge too far,” he wrote in a blog post. Riley asserted that kind of deal would amount to “misguided pragmatism.”

    • NSA spying caused 9 percent of foreign firms to dump U.S. clouds

      In the weeks following Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s massive web surveillance program PRISM, speculation was raised about the negative implications it could have on U.S. cloud companies.

      Now, Forrester Research has taken the time to see just what kind of impact it has had, asking a host of foreign firms whether or not PRISM has caused them to scale back their spending on U.S. cloud services, and the answer makes for some uneasy reading.

    • ​Snowden, PRISM fallout will cost U.S. tech vendors $47 billion, less than expected
    • How To Make A Secret Phone Call

      To show how hard phone privacy can be, one artist examined the CIA, consulted hackers, and went far off the map (with a stop at Rite Aid).

    • Why Is Obama Keeping Secret Four Seconds of a Nixon-Era Tape?

      Releasing it “would reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities,” a National Security Agency spokeswoman says.

    • The Dutch “Surveillance Kings of Europe” Are About to Get Even Nosier

      The Netherlands is considering a new law that would give its spooks unprecedented access to global data, including yours and mine.

    • Off the Cuff: Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times

      You’ve expressed regret that Edward Snowden went to The Guardian and The Washington Post to make his NSA disclosures instead of going to The New York Times. But looking at the Times’ history, when it sat on the warrantless wiretapping story during the Bush administration, and also during your career, when you sat on an NSA story at the LA Times, didn’t Snowden make the right choice? Why should the next big whistleblower come to the Times?

      Was he right? No, I don’t think he was right. I understand why he made his decision. I don’t think he was right. First off — and I wasn’t at The New York Times for the [warrantless wiretapping] NSA story — it did publish it, it didn’t kill it.

      But only after the [2004] election.

      It had nothing to do with the election. If you read the accounts at the time, Jim Risen was about to put it in a book. It wasn’t because of the election; it was because Risen was about to put it in a book and that forced the hand of the editors of The New York Times. I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to judge how they made the decision. I was at the LA Times at the time, but they did publish it.

      If you were to say one reason he didn’t come [was because] The New York Times screwed up in the post-war coverage before the US went to war in Iraq, he’s right, The New York Times did. So did the LA Times, which I ran at the time. Everybody did. … But I think that if he looks at our overall track record, we publish stuff very aggressively. We published the NSA stuff, we’ve published other Risen stories, we’ve published hard-hitting reports about the Obama administration that they hate, we’ve published lots of stories about drones [and] we’ve published other stories about surveillance. And it breaks my heart that he went elsewhere. But I think my appeal to him and future Snowdens would be, ‘we do publish.’ You’re isolating a couple of things where you thought we were too slow or did something off, but if you look at the whole history of The New York Times, you have to include the Pentagon Papers, you got to include coverage of Vietnam [and] you got to include our aggressive coverage of the world. I think our track record is really good.

      The LA Times thing has always been misunderstood. The allegation was that when I was editor of the LA Times, an engineer in AT&T or an employee of AT&T became very suspicious about a room at the headquarters in San Francisco, where he was convinced there was some surveillance going on. Nobody could go into the room and the room was always locked. So he came to the LA Times and we reported the hell out of it. We went nuts to report it, but we could never prove it was anything other than a mysterious closed door. This is before people realized how much spying there was, before people realized what the NSA had become. So all we had, with all that reporting, was that there was closed door, it was mysterious, and the government wouldn’t talk about it. And I don’t think that was enough for a story. So we didn’t write a story. It wasn’t because the government told us not to write a story; it was because I didn’t think we had enough for a story. If you look at what people wrote at the time, because eventually The New York Times wrote a modest inside story about the guy’s allegations, all it said was that an engineer at AT&T thinks that there’s a door down the hall that’s locked, etc. So I don’t have any regrets about that one. It turned out it was part of NSA spying, but, jeez, if we published everything where people are concerned about closed doors and mysteries like that, mostly we’d be wrong.

    • Whistleblower’s Legacy: President Reforms Key Surveillance Law; Europe Questions Safe Harbor Regime

      On June 1, 2015, Section 215 of the U.S. PATRIOT Act (50 U.S.C. § 1861) (“Section 215”) is set to expire. Section 215 is the authority that allows the NSA, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), to collect “metadata” of every phone call that originated or terminated in the United States. Some of the first documents revealed by Edward Snowden were orders by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”) (the court that entertains applications submitted by the U.S. government for electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes) requiring Verizon, Sprint and AT&T to hand over such metadata. The FBI obtained these orders for the benefit of the NSA.

    • Is Big Brother Watching Our Campuses?

      At Georgia State University, algorithms alert advisers when a student falls behind in class. Course-planning tools tell students the classes and majors they’re likely to complete, based on the performance of other students like them. When students swipe their ID cards to attend a tutoring or financial-literacy session, the university can send attendance data to advisers and staff.

    • The Brennan Center Report on the FISA Court and Proposals for FISA Reform

      As Wells noted when it first came out last month, the Brennan Center has a new report: What Went Wrong With the FISA Court. Despite the title, the report is really a condensed history of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC or the Court), with the Brennan Center’s judgements about what has gone wrong with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) itself. The report also provides a vehicle for the Brennan Center to highlight proposals for surveillance reform, some, but not all of which, relate to the upcoming sunset of certain FISA provisions, unless Congress extends them this spring.

      [...]

      For all the criticisms of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, changing FISA’s standard to “a significant purpose” and removing the justification for the old “wall” is one that has been overwhelmingly understood as an important substantive correction. There is no reason to go backwards.

    • Why ‘The Nation’ Is Suing the Federal Government

      The NSA is monitoring almost all of our international communications. This is a fundamental violation of First and Fourth Amendment rights.

    • A mayday mystery and secrets of the NSA

      “We were monitored every second of everyday and we sent those tapes to NSA, headquarters Fort Meade Maryland and the British GCHQ in London. So both the tape and the logs went off to both of them but the way the NSA talks they have everything.”

    • Maine Bill Taking On NSA Scheduled For Important Committee Hearing

      A Maine bill that would turn off support and resources to the NSA in the Pine Tree State will have an important committee hearing Thursday.

      Sen. Eric Brakey (R-Androscoggin) introduced LD531 On Feb. 26. His seven cosponsors literally span the political spectrum, including Republicans, Democrats and an Independent.

      [...]

      Reuters revealed the extent of such NSA data sharing with state and local law enforcement in an August 2013 article. According to documents obtained by the news agency, the NSA passes information to police through a formerly secret DEA unit known Special Operations Divisions and the cases “rarely involve national security issues.” Almost all of the information involves regular criminal investigations, not terror-related investigations.

      In other words, not only does the NSA collect and store this data, using it to build profiles. The agency encourages state and local law enforcement to violate the Fourth Amendment by making use of this information in their day-to-day investigations.

    • Lawmakers Consider Bill That Could Hinder NSA Operations in Maine

      On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the Maine Fourth Amendment Protection Act, a bill introduced by freshman Senator Eric Brakey (R-Androscoggin).

      The bill’s purpose is to withhold material support or other assistance to a federal agency, specifically the National Security Administration, in its efforts “in the collection or use of a person’s electronic data or metadata” without informed consent, a warrant, or a legally recognized exemption.

    • IT Independence is National Security

      The NSA’s “Equation Group” is apparently behind the infection with malware of hard drive firmware on computers used by nations considered “enemies” by the United State. The installation of the malware is believed to have required access to trade secrets of IT manufacturers as well as physical access to the soon-to-be infected computers. Popular Science in their article “The World’s Most Sophisticated Malware Ever Infects Hard Drive Firmware“suggests that the NSA intercepted computers in transit through global logistical chains.

      However, a simpler and more logical explanation remains, though it is one manufacturers vehemently deny; that the NSA had/has direct access to the factory floors of several IT giants. These include Western Digital Corpororation, Seagate Technology, Toshiba Corporation, IBM, Micron Technology and Samsung Electronics.

      The infection of hardware starting on the factory floor is nothing new. Australia’s Financial Review revealed in 2013 in an article titled, “Intel chips could let US spies inside: expert,” that, “one of Silicon Valley’s most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be “surprised” if the US National Security Agency was not embedding “back doors” inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, two of the world’s largest semiconductor firms, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.”
      First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/29/it-independence-is-national-security/

    • 3 Reasons Apple Is Pushing for NSA Spying Reforms

      As the owner of the world’s most valuable brand, Apple is probably keenly aware that appearing to help the government with its controversial bulk data collection programs would tarnish its carefully crafted image as the consumer electronics brand for those who dare to “Think Different.” In this sense, Apple’s public opposition to the government’s surveillance programs is an effort to protect its brand from losing its appeal to consumers.

    • Documents on NSA’s zero-day policy provide little insight, EFF says

      When the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the National Security Agency (NSA) over records regarding the government’s alleged prior knowledge of Heartbleed, the privacy group hoped to gain insight into the agency’s zero-day exploitation policy.

      Within the heavily redacted pages of the obtained documents, however, a policy was nowhere to be found, the EFF wrote in a blog post on Monday.

    • Freddy Martinez Is Exposing Chicago Cops’ NSA-Style Surveillance Gear

      It took the curiosity of a skinny, fidgeting 27-year-old to force the Chicago Police Department to admit they purchased controversial surveillance technology. The department, legally boxed into a corner over its use of a device known as the StingRay, finally admitted to acquiring the cell-phone tracking product last summer, six years after actually buying the thing. The watchdog work came not from a newspaper or any other media outlet in the city, but Freddy Martinez, an information technology worker who oversees websites for a private company from a downtown office building.

    • Snowden-endorsed security software has no NSA backdoors

      An independent audit has concluded that popular encryption software TrueCrypt has no government backdoors or serious security flaws.

    • Audit Concludes No NSA Backdoors in TrueCrypt Software
    • TrueCrypt doesn’t contain NSA backdoors

      However, the software was found to contain a few other security vulnerabilities, including one relating to the use of the Windows API to generate random numbers for master encryption key material.

    • TrueCrypt audit shows no sign of NSA backdoors, just some minor glitches

  • Civil Rights

    • The Limits of Ken Roth’s Criticism of Obama

      Roth’s view seems optimistic, but it is inappropriate to argue that Obama should engage in a number of tasks while not criticizing increased presidential power. In fact, the actions he recommends could be used to justify a further expansion of executive power. At the same time, Roth’s support for “limits” on mass surveillance and “rules” for drone use, are even worse. This is because these measures would be ineffective in stopping the death and suffering caused by the reign of terror brought on by drone assassinations or in efforts protecting the inherent right of privacy of not only Americans, but people of the world.

    • Under President’s New Cybersecurity Executive Order… Is Wikileaks Now An Evil Cyberhacker For Releasing Trade Deal?

      Yesterday we talked about the ridiculousness of President Obama’s new cybersecurity executive order, in which he declares a national emergency around “malicious cyber-enabled activities” and enables his own government to do mean things to anyone they think is responsible for cyber badness (that his own NSA is the primary instigator of serious cyberattacks gets left ignored, of course). One of the points we made is that the definitions in the executive agreement were really vague, meaning that it’s likely that they could be abused in all sorts of ways that we wouldn’t normally think of as malicious hacking.

    • New Executive Order Could Sanction Cyber Activists, Wikileaks

      After spending a week trying to narrow its scope, President Obama on Wednesday released an executive order that still grants the White House broad authority to sanction individuals and organizations engaged in civil society online.

      The order targets entities located partially or wholly outside the United States “directly or indirectly” responsible for cyber-activities “harming, or otherwise significantly compromising…entities in a critical infrastructure sector.”

      “I’m for the first time authorizing targeted sanctions against individuals or entities whose actions in cyberspace result in significant threats to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States,” the President wrote in an article published on Medium to accompany the executive order. He also described the threat of such attacks as a “national emergency.”

    • Saudi Arabia warns Canada to not support blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes

      Saudi Arabia’s aggressive response to international criticism of its human rights and justice system continues with a warning to Canadian politicians. According to CBC News, the Saudi ambassador to Canada, Naif Bin Bandir Al-Sudairy, sent a letter to Quebec’s National Assembly telling it not to interfere in the case of blogger Raif Badawi.

    • Legislators Trying To Shield Cops From Accountability Are Running Into Unexpected Opposition: Cops

      Police misconduct has never been more visible, thanks to the internet and advancements in cell phone technology. Between this and increased use of public records requests, there’s a wealth of information surfacing daily on the misdeeds of law enforcement personnel. In theory, this should be raising the level of accountability. In practice, however, it’s a different story.

    • Police Chief Unable To Simply Do Nothing Over Reported Teen Sexting, Brings Child Porn Charges Against Four Minors

      Good, old-fashioned “sexting” has netted more teens some child pornography charges. Despite the teens involved claiming the photographed behavior was consensual, Joliet’s (IL) police chief still believes the only way to address a situation he and the laws he enforces aren’t built to handle, is to handle it as poorly as possible.

    • Final Four, the Madness Continues

      Yes, the NCAA Tournament is in full swing and nothing has changed. Once again, unpaid, logo-covered young men race up and down the court on every channel round the clock, creating billions in revenue for some, millions in salary for others and little for themselves.

      Of course, this is far from a new revelation. The ludicrous injustice of big time college athletics has been uncovered, covered, and re-covered. And the tide of public perception is slowly but unmistakably shifting. More and more people are seeing college amateurism for what is has always been: a thinly veiled attempt to avoid paying workers compensation for injuries as well as compensation in the broader sense.

    • Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car

      EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work. At the moment, the anti-circumvention prohibition in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably restricts vehicle inspection, repair, and modification. If EFF is successful then vehicle owners will be free to inspect and tinker, as long as they don’t run afoul of other regulations, such as those governing vehicle emissions, safety, or copyright law.

    • The Real Monopoly Board: The Victimization of Students by the College Board

      Have you ever applied to college? If so, you probably found yourself in the same situation that many of us have, whether or not to take standardized admission tests. Sadly, this isn’t actually a question because the answer is handed to you; you must take standardized tests in order to apply to a competitive college. Because of this monopoly, standardized test companies can charge any price they want. Being a senior in high school who is (almost) done with the college application process, I have spent hundreds of dollars on the College Board. I have been the victim on countless occasions of their unfair prices, and have found my bank account suffering as a result. It is completely wrong that students are the victims of this monopoly, and College Board should be stopped.

    • Statement on the suspension of Barrett Brown’s e-mail access and BOP retaliation

      An hour or so after having used the system to contact a journalist about potential BOP wrongdoing, Barrett Brown’s access to the TRULINCS prisoner e-mail system was restricted, for a full year until April 2016, without explanation.

      This is contrary to the BOP’s own policy on several points, as noted in their 2009 documentation — the administration is only allowed to remove access to TRULINCS for thirty days pending an investigation of any potential misuse, and the inmate is supposed to be informed in writing of the reason for that.

    • Informant Provided Bomb-Making Manual to Alleged “ISIS-Inspired” Plotters

      In what has been widely described in the media as the breakup of an “ISIS-inspired” plot, on April 2 the Department of Justice announced that Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, both of New York, had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The defendants “plotted to wreak terror by creating explosive devices” for use in New York City and sought “bomb-making instructions and materials” for an attack, the Justice Department statement said.

    • Obama’s NSA Reforms, One Year Later

      In February, the Director of National Intelligence issued a report summarizing the changes that President Obama has implemented since pledging major surveillance reforms in January 2014. The report chronicles a dizzying number of developments and contains links to several hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. But does this impressive accumulation of activity translate to meaningful reform?

    • U.S. Supreme Court: GPS Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure

      The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, before sending the case back to that state’s high court. The Court’s short but unanimous opinion helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government.

    • [Australia] The security paradox: individual privacy versus digital driftnets

      The great irony of the Abbott government’s plan enforce the mandatory data retention legislation is that while this is being done to make us safer, in fact it creates new data security risks for us all.

    • [Australia] E-mail autofill blunder leaks personal details of G20 world leaders

      A mistake with Microsoft Outlook’s autofill feature sent personal details of the world’s top leaders attending the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, to organizers of the Asian Cup soccer tournament. Those affected include the presidents of the US, China, Russia, Brazil, the European Commission, France, and Mexico; the prime ministers of Japan, India, the UK, Italy, and Canada; and the German Chancellor. Among the information disclosed was the passport numbers, visa details, and other personal identifiers.

    • Bolivia’s Contested Process of Change: Views From a Regional Election
    • Deterring Cyberattacks with Sanctions

      The White House has announced a new sanctions program that will authorize the executive branch to penalize malicious cyber “actors” whose behavior endangers “the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States.” Sadly the President is opting for theater that creates the perception of security rather than actually making it more difficult for attacks to succeed.

      Obama’s new executive order rests on a strategy of deterrence, a cold war idea that’s been revived by the likes of former NSA director Mike McConnell and more recently by current NSA Director Mike Rogers. The basic idea is this: if enemies fear retaliation they’re less likely to launch an attack (nuclear, cyber, or otherwise).

    • Barack Obama’s press freedom legacy

      According to the CPJ report, the Obama administration’s policies have undermined the role of the press in three fundamental ways.

    • Leading Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab arrested for highlighting prison abuse

      Head of Bahrain Center for Human Rights detained by police after speaking out over allegations of human rights abuses after riots in Jaw prison

    • Index condemns Bahrain’s continuing harassment of human rights defender

      Index on Censorship condemns the latest arrest and continued harrassment of prominent Bahraini human rights defender Nabeel Rajab.

    • Empathy, rage, and resistance

      I live in a consumer culture that distracts me from the plight of others with images of beautiful bodies wearing beautiful clothes that I am encouraged to buy. I live a life of relative comfort, and I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by a drone or starved to death. But despite having been subject to soul-destroying consumer culture for twenty years, if I saw someone drowning in a pond ten feet away from me, I would not hesitate to help them. Confronted with a fellow being facing imminent death, and having the ability to help, my instincts for empathy and care would spring into action.

    • Idaho Man Charged With Felony for Posting Non-Threatening Rant Against Cop on Facebook (Updated)

      On February 2, Matthew Townsend was standing on the sidewalk near a Liberty Tax Service office in Meridian, Idaho dressed as the Grim Reaper, holding a sign that said “Taxes ≠ liberty, Taxes fund terrorism.”

      For this simple display of activism, which was a play off the usual characters dressed in Statue of Liberty costumers, Townsend would find himself arrested and jailed, charged with resisting and obstruction by a Meridian cop named Richard Brockbank.

      Seven weeks later, a day after attending a hearing for that arrest, Townsend was arrested a second time after police banged on his door at 10 p.m., rousing him from his sleep, charging him with witness intimidation over a Facebook post he had made two nights earlier that police described as a “terrorist threat.”

      In that post, which you can read below, he tagged several journalists, activists, friends as well as some of Brockbank’s family members.

    • When the Government Views Its Own Population as the Enemy

      One could go on listing such facts indefinitely. For instance, the sordid lesson to draw from the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005 is that protecting Americans from a natural disaster was not a priority of government at any level, at least not of the governments involved.

    • The Reflective Voter’s Fear

      It is hardly news that American voters don’t choose candidates the way democratic theorists say they should; candidates are sold to them, in much the way that consumer goods are.

    • Pakistan military court sentences 6 Islamic militants to death on terrorism charges

      Pakistani military courts have sentenced six Islamic militants to death on charges including terrorism, murder, suicide bombing and kidnapping for ransom.

    • John Brennan’s reforms would turn the CIA into a paramilitary organization

      After 70 years, it’s time for some major restructuring at the CIA — at least according to its director, John Brennan, who announced earlier this month his plan to overhaul the agency by creating “mission centers” that would concentrate resources on specific challenges or geographic areas. Brennan also announced the formation of a new “Directorate of Digital Innovation” to lead efforts to track and implement new intelligence-gathering cyber tools.

    • India asks Saudi to help evacuate citizens from Yemen

      India asked Saudi Arabia on Monday to help evacuate its citizens from Yemen, where more than 4,000 Indians, over half of them nurses, are caught up in fighting.

    • UN says remaining international staffers leave chaotic Yemen

      The United Nations says the last of its international staffers have now left Yemen as the U.N. human rights chief warns of a “total collapse” in the Arab world’s poorest country.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Despite Claims Title II Will Kill Investment, Comcast Launches Major New 2 Gigabit Deployment

      While broadband ISPs have repeatedly claimed that being reclassified as common carriers under Title II will crush sector innovation, investment, and destroy the Internet as we know it — they simultaneously continue to do a bang up job highlighting how these claims are complete and utter nonsense. For example, while Verizon was busy proclaiming that Title II would ruin, well, everything, it’s been using Title II to reap massive tax benefits. Similarly, despite the fact wireless voice has been classified under Title II for years, that didn’t stop the industry from investing massive amounts during that period or spending record amounts at the FCC’s latest spectrum auction.

    • Brace Yourselves, The Net Neutrality Legal Challenges Are Coming

      On Wednesday afternoon the Federal Communications Commission filed its net neutrality order to the Federal Register, an FCC official confirmed to TechCrunch. Once published by the Register, the filing opens the gates to an inevitable outpouring of legal challenges from net neutrality opponents.

      The FCC’s filing comes a week-and-a-half after the agency was slammed with the first lawsuits attempting to block the new rules. An FCC official said the lawsuits from both The United States Telecom Association and Alamo Broadband — which were filed just 12 days after the rules were published — jumped the gun and may be dismissed on the grounds they were filed too early.

    • Bigger is better — for telecom companies, not Internet users

      Charter Communications’ merger further consolidates an industry characterized by scant competition and unacceptably slow Internet access speeds

04.03.15

Links 3/4/2015: ‘Atomic’ Distribution, System76′s Broadwell-Powered Lemur

Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Can Linux learn anything from Windows 10?

      Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system is available as a preview release. One Linux user at Network World decided to take the plunge and see if there was anything Windows 10 had to teach Linux.

    • 10 Truly Amusing Easter Eggs in Linux

      Back in 1979, a video game was being developed for the Atari 2600 — Adventure.

      The programmer working on Adventure slipped a secret feature into the game which, when the user moved an “invisible square” to a particular wall, allowed entry into a “secret room”. That room contained a simple phrase: “Created by Warren Robinett”.

  • Server

    • RancherOS: A Minimal OS for Docker in Production

      RancherOS, the latest minimal Linux-based operating system for running Docker containers, was recently launched by Darren Shepherd, Rancher Lab’s CTO. In contrast with Boot2Docker (another lightweight Docker-centric distribution) which openly discourages production use, RancherOS’s announcement claims the new OS is production and scale-ready.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Brought to Canon DSLRs by Magic Lantern

      Members of the Magic Lantern community are saying that this development will open the door to a universe of possibilities. While Magic Lantern was previously a set of hacks running on top of Canon code, being able to run Linux on a Canon DSLR means the developers will be able to implement new features cleanly and access the camera’s hardware directly.

    • Linux Kernel Ported to Canon DSLRs, Thanks to the Magic Lantern Developers – Video

      It’s no longer April Fools Day, so what we are about to tell you is no joke, but the real deal. The awesome developers behind the well-known and acclaimed Magic Lantern third-party software add-on that brings a wide range of new features to Canon EOS cameras, have announced that they’ve managed to port the Linux kernel to Canon DSLRs.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Calligra 2.9.2 Released

        The Calligra team has released version 2.9.2, a the bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Updating the software is recommended to everybody.

      • Calligra Office Suite 2.9.2 Out Now with Major Improvements for Krita Digital Painting Tool

        The Calligra Team, through Jarosław Staniek, was proud to announce today, April 2, that the second maintenance release of their Calligra office suite for KDE desktop environments has been released with a great number of improvements to the Krita digital painting software, for which we have a separate announcement.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Evolve OS Changes Names to Solus, an Old Community Favorite

      The Evolve OS project has just changed its name to Solus after a trademark spat over a name owned by UK’s Secretary of State office.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • PHP version 5.5.24RC1 and 5.6.8RC1

        NEW : Release Candidate versions are now available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host: Updates Made Easy

        Earlier in March we announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host, a small footprint, container host based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. It provides a stable host platform, optimized for running application containers, and brings a number of application software packaging and deployment benefits to customers. In my previous container blog I gave the top seven reasons to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host. One reason was the ability to do atomic updates and rollbacks. In this blog I provide an in-depth look into atomic updating and how it differs from a yum update. And, speaking of atomic updates… it just so happens that our first atomic update was made available yesterday.

      • Fedora

        • FLOCK 2015 is in Rochester NY

          This is a short blog post to get over my writer’s block. For the last 2 years, Fedora has had a computer festival called FLOCK in either Europe or North America. The first FLOCK happened in beautiful Charleston SC in 2013. The second FLOCK was in the wonderful capital of the Czech Republic, Prague. This years FLOCK is to be held from August 12-15 in Rochester New York. The main website is having some issues (various links aren’t pointing to the correct places because WordPress is being obstinate) but these are being worked on as I write and hopefully will be fixed soon.

        • Fedora under construction?

          Fedora’s quality makes complacency easy. But in truth, we’re always under construction — or we should be. You could call that constant disruption by different names. Risk positive. Forward leaning. Embracing change. Since inception, Fedora was intended to avoid the status quo. So what’s next for shaking up said status?

        • Fedora May Move to Project Atomic Distribution

          Fedora 22 was different from other releases most significantly by the way it was distributed – namely in three purpose-designed editions. However, Paul Frields is floating another method for future Fedora releases. He suggest Fedora 23 or 24 may consist of “some combination of a strongly managed center, curated stacks, and an expanding nebula of containers.”

        • Fedora 22 Beta Is Now in Freeze, Will Be Released on April 14

          Dennis Gilmore has announced the other day that the upcoming Beta release of the Fedora 22 Linux operating system is now in freeze and no other packages than the ones who fix the accepted blocker or repair two bugs that have been declared exceptions to the freeze.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Refuses to Fix a 5-Year-Old Bug in Ubuntu, Related to Notification System

            Recent reports show us that a known Ubuntu bug, which was submitted to Canonical’s Launchpad bug-tracking website about half a decade ago, still exists in the current version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system and Canonical refuses to fix it for unknown reasons.

          • System76 unveils all-new Broadwell-powered Lemur — an affordable Ubuntu Linux laptop

            While many computer manufacturers are in a race to the bottom — both in price and quality — some makers continue to produce reliable high-quality machines. One of these manufacturers is System76. If you aren’t familiar, it manufactures and sells desktops and laptops running the Ubuntu operating system. In other words, Linux fans can buy one of these machines and have it running the Linux distro out of the box — no need to format the drive to remove Windows.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Building Blocks of Open Source Innovation

    Open source code creation opens the door for IT developers across varied industries to adopt, modify and customize technology to their organization’s specific needs. Companies are free to contribute to and adopt code so long as resources—such as intellectual property software audit services—are applied to ensure that the ground rules established by the code’s originator are acknowledged and followed.

  • What does the future hold for the Internet of Things?

    I started getting involved with open source as a Computer Science (CS) grad student. I was using a combination of open source and proprietary software in my research. Given the nature of research, being able to rapidly prototype a concept and customize the tools involved are both hugely important goals. I found that open source tools often gave our team this win-win scenario where we were able to quickly try a variety of tools at no cost while also being empowered to modify or even combine solutions. This was a big advantage over using closed proprietary software.

  • ON.Lab Releases ‘Blackbird’ Open Source SDN Operating System

    ONOS’ community today announced the availability of the second release of its open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Blackbird, that is focused on performance, scale and high availability. ONOS is the first open source platform to define a comprehensive set of metrics for effectively evaluating the “carrier-grade quotient” of SDN control plane platforms/controllers and to publicly publish the performance evaluation of its Blackbird release using these metrics.

  • ONOS Project Unveils Second Release of Open SDN Platform
  • Instagram’s open-source library could make it easier for app makers to build for Apple Watch

    The library is known as IGInterfaceDataTable, and is intended to make “configuring tables with multi-dimensional data easier.” In other words, Instagram said, like its own app for Apple’s forthcoming smart watch.

  • Open Xchange teams with PowerDNS and Dovecot to create open source powerhouse

    OPEN-XCHANGE, the security conscious open source white label productivity provider from Germany, has announced a three-way merger to create one of the largest open source companies in Europe.

    The deal sees the company join up with Dutch DNS software vendor PowerDNS and Finnish IMAP server provider Dovecot to form a pan-European powerhouse.

    The new deal sees the combined Open-Xchange take a 90 percent market share in the secure DNS market and some 130 million user accounts.

    We caught up with Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna to get his thoughts on the news, starting with the advantages that the combined company will bring to the open source market.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • How open source software builds strong roots for better governance

      Open data and going digital are subjects high on the international agenda for global development, particularly when it comes to financing improved services and infrastructure for the poorest people in the world. Young people from Laos to Lagos aspire to become software developers, and smartphones are set to put unprecedented computing power into every corner of the earth. But the paradox is that many governments still only have rudimentary information technology infrastructure and often can’t find trained and skilled staff to design and run it.

    • Open Data

      • Slovakia project to reduce administrative burden

        The Slovak Republic wants to reduce the administrative burden on citizens and companies, and to avoid the need to repeatedly request information. The Ministry of Finance in February signed a contract for a base registry to make it possible for public administrations to exchange data and information. The EUR 13 million project will also result in standards for data sharing between public administrations.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Why Unikernels Can Improve Internet Security

      The creator of MirageOS, Anil Madhavapeddy, says it’s “simply irresponsible to continue to knowingly provision code that is potentially unsafe, and especially so as we head into a year full of promise about smart cities and ubiquitous Internet of Things. We wouldn’t build a bridge on top of quicksand, and should treat our online infrastructure with the same level of respect and attention as we give our physical structures.”

      In the hopes of improving security, performance and scalability, there’s a flurry of interesting work taking place around blocking out functionality into containers and lighter-weight unikernel alternatives. Galois, which specializes in R&D for new technologies, says enterprises are increasingly interested in the ability to cleanly separate functionality to limit the effect of a breach to just the component affected, rather than infecting the whole system.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Consent That Goes Both Ways

      In client-server, we’re calves and sites are cows. We go to sites to suckle “content” and get lots of little unwanted files, most of which are meant to train advertising crosshairs on us. Having Do Not Track in the world has done nothing to change the power asymmetry of client-server. But it’s not the only tool, nor is it finished. In fact, the client-side revolution in this space has barely started.

    • China’s CNNIC issues false certificates in serious breach of crypto trust

      In a major breach of public trust and confidence, the Chinese digital certificate authority China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) certified false credentials for numerous domains, including several owned by Google. The deliberate breach had the potential to seriously endanger vulnerable users, such as journalists communicating with sources. The breach was discovered by Google and published on its security blog on March 23. Despite this serious lapse, it appears CNNIC’s authority will not be revoked, and that its credentials will continue to be trusted by almost all computers around the world.

    • What’s the Cost of NSA Spying?

      By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.

    • Google Strikes Back Against Chinese Certificate Authority

      Both Google and Mozilla are taking aggressive measures against Chinese certificate authority CNNIC.

    • Invizbox (hands-on): Another flawed Tor “privacy” router debuts

      Invizbox aims to do exactly that. The project follows in the footsteps of Anonabox, the crowdsourced effort that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a router that anonymizes Internet traffic to market, but was later pulled by Kickstarter after its custom hardware claim came under scrutiny.

    • EFF General Counsel Takes On NSA Spying

      Kurt Opsahl talks to Dark Reading about government surveillance and privacy in anticipation of his Interop keynote.

    • Matt DeHart formally arraigned today

      Matt DeHart, Anonymous activist and alleged WikiLeaks courier, was formally arraigned today, but he did not appear in court. Matt is pleading not guilty to all charges against him, so he waved his formal court appearance and pled not guilty by submitting papers to the court. He remains imprisoned in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

    • A year after firestorm, DHS wants access to license-plate tracking system

      The Department of Homeland Security is seeking bids from companies able to provide law enforcement officials with access to a national license-plate tracking system — a year after canceling a similar solicitation over privacy issues.

      [...]

      In a privacy impact assessment issued Thursday, the DHS says that it is not seeking to build a national database or contribute data to an existing system.

  • Civil Rights

    • NarcoNews: CIA Veteran Sees Big Hole in Sterling Espionage Conviction

      A former CIA spy manager is raising a serious question about the way the intelligence agency handled the national-security risk raised in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who was recently convicted on espionage charges for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen.

    • The VICE News Interview: John Kiriakou

      In 2007, John Kiriakou became the first Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official to publicly confirm that agency interrogators waterboarded a high-value detainee, terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah — a revelation that had previously been a closely guarded secret.

      Five years after this unauthorized disclosure to ABC News, the veteran CIA officer pleaded guilty to leaking to journalists the identity of certain individuals who were involved with the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program. He was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison.

    • Guantánamo Bay detainees’ release upon end of Afghanistan war ‘unlikely’

      Typically, when a war ends, so does the combatants’ authority to detain the other side’s fighters. But as the conclusion of the US war in Afghanistan approaches, the inmate population of Guantánamo Bay is likely to be an exception – and, for the Obama administration, the latest complication to its attempt to close the infamous wartime detention complex.

    • With combat over, lawyers for Afghan captives ask Obama to let them go

      With U.S. combat operations officially ended in Afghanistan, some U.S. lawyers for five Afghan detainees at Guantánamo wrote the Obama administration Monday asking that the captives be freed.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Proposals on European net neutrality open ‘two-speed’ internet

      European internet providers would be allowed to profit from “two-speed” data services under proposals being considered in Brussels, opening a transatlantic divide on telecoms regulation after the US banned similar tactics last week.

      In documents seen by the Financial Times, EU member states are proposing rules that would establish a principle of “net neutrality” but still allow telecoms groups to manage the flow of internet traffic to ensure the network worked efficiently.

    • Epic Awards One Of Three Unreal Dev Grants To Makers Of Net Neutrality Game

      It’s been a unique experience for me as a Techdirt writer, one who does not delve into the net neutrality debates and posts very often, to watch the effect the wider coverage about net neutrality has had on the general public. Without being scientific about it, there are certain markers for story penetration I notice and have noticed specifically when it comes to net neutrality. For instance, a couple of months ago, my father called me up with a simple question: “What should my position be on net neutrality?” The question itself isn’t generally useful, but the simple fact that a grandfather is even asking about it means something when it comes to the public consciousness of the topic itself. So too is the appearance of the topic and debates on the Sunday news programs. But maybe the most important indication that net neutrality has become, at the very least, a thing the public is discussing is the topic’s appearance in seemingly unrelated venues. Even if the take was wrong, coverage in political cartoons was something cool to see, for instance. But the topic coming up as the theme of a politically-motivated video game is even more exciting.

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