07.24.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
On Friday, we learned suddenly and without warning that The H website was closing down. In a brief announcement on the site, the reason given for the closing was a failure to monetize and develop a successful business model.
The H was an English language site published by UK based Heise Media UK Ltd., a division of the German company Heise Media Group, which is primarily known for publishing computer magazines. The H first went online in February 2008 as Heise Online after testing the waters for a couple of years with Heise Security. In February 2009, Heise Online was renamed The H.
The site built a solid reputation as a consistant and reliable source for technology news. The H – Open, which focused on open source news, has been an invaluable news and information source for the FOSS community. We are sad to see it go.
-
-
In the wake of the recent revelations that America’s National Security Agency is spying on all and sundry, is it time for the Linux community to take another good, hard look at the NSA-developed Security Enhanced Linux?
-
Decades have passed, and I still have the same problem as a leisure-time hacker. Imagine I put together some little cute diversion: for the sake of this example, imagine I make an app that has a dancing chicken animation and plays a chiptune. If I want people to check it out, I still can’t just send it to them and have them run it. Not on Linux + GNU + X + Gtk + GNOME + Alsa + PulseAudio. It is slightly less bad on the non-free desktop OSs like Windows because I can statically link something together, but there are still VC and DirectX redistributibles to worry about.
-
Server
-
Shutterstock has a nearly insatiable appetite for data storage. From its inception, the company — a global provider of licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations and videos — refused to pay higher prices just to stuff its storage needs into somebody else’s cloud. Instead, the almost 10-year-old image-storing warehousing operation built its own server farm and created its own cloud software system at home.
-
Who says you need millions for a supercomputer? Not Adapteva, which has started shipping its $99 Parallella single-board parallel processing board.
-
Kernel Space
-
Graphics Stack
-
Carsten Haitzler, a.k.a. “Rasterman” and known for his work on the Enlightenment window manager / desktop, has provided some new comments on Enlightenment’s planned support for Wayland.
-
-
-
Benchmarks
-
At the request of many Phoronix readers, the Linux performance benchmarks to share with you today are the results for an OpenGL performance comparison between a dozen different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their latest proprietary graphics drivers when running a slew of Linux games, including Valve’s Team Fortress 2 benchmark, Unvanquished on its OpenGL 3.x renderer, and the new GpuTest workloads.
-
Applications
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Steam’s recently introduced trading card system might just be the most brilliant consumer loyalty program ever devised within the video game industry.
-
You won’t have noticed unless you’re one of the minority of Steam users not running Windows 7, but Team Fortress comes in three flavours these days: Windows (vanilla), Mac (mint), and Linux (green tea?).
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
When I planned this review, I never really understood how difficult things would become to reach a point where I could actually run the Razor-QT desktop for some real-world testing. In a nutshell, oh my it was worth every minute of pain. Want to know more? Read on.
-
XFCE4 panel is nice but it was losing icons when I resized the screen. This is a new problem that might be related to getting composite working again. Whatever the reason, it was annoying enough for me to look at E16′s own systray.
-
In the coming weeks, our two teams will coordinate LXDE-Qt’s first release and Razor-qt’s official final release. The GTK version of LXDE will still be worked on and kept up to date with any improvement to the Qt version for the forseeable future.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Akademy 2013 in Bilbao, the Basque Country, Spain wrapped up on Friday, 19 July. According to one long-time KDE contributor, it was “A most awesome event.”
-
-
-
-
-
So I was bored, and this time, after playing TRAUMA (great game you should get it, but be aware that there is no “real” linux client, “just flash”), I felt like looking into gestures & Qt.
The assistant instantly pointed me to QGestureRecognizer and I was like “Yay! This is gonna be so damn easy!”. But I quickly realized thats not the case. You have to overwrite QGestureRecognizer::recognize and then do all the detection by yourself, then I suddenly was like “hm.. not great, but I can do it”.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
-
Last weekend the GNOME project reached its goal of raising $20,000 to help make our software even more secure and privacy aware. We are hugely excited by this, and would like to say a big thank you to everyone who donated.
-
-
New Releases
-
We are proud to announce that Simplicity Linux 13.7 is now available. Obsidian 13.7 is available here. Desktop 13.7 is available here. For those new to Simplicity Linux, Obsidian is our extremely cut down version, which contains Firefox, a network manager, LXDE and PCManFM as a file manager. But very little else. Simplicity Linux Desktop is our full fat Linux which comes with Skype, the full LibreOffice, Firefox, VLC, and many other pieces of software.
-
-
Screenshots
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Mageia 3 was released in May and after a “postmortem,” plans for Mageia 4 have begun. The development and release schedule are in place and some interesting feature proposals have emerged. A couple have been proposed before, but others are new ideas.
-
Gentoo Family
-
It is usually impossible to satisfy all the needs with a single solution. That’s the problem Gentoo tries to solve through the slogan of «choice». But let’s not fool ourselves, it’s nowhere near the perfection.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
Fedora remains a very popular flavor of Linux, and is favored by some of us at OStatic. Now, it looks like the working model for how Fedora’s ongoing versions are built might forever change. Matthew Miller, who is Fedora’s Cloud Architect, has announced a proposal to reshape the way that the Fedora Project builds its Linux distribution, focusing on more cohesive integration of the distro’s components. ‘Fedora.Next’ is a concept for organizing Fedora around a series of ‘rings’ that would have their own package requirements and component integration rule sets.
-
So… after upgrading Fedora 18 installation to Fedora 19 (using DVD ISO image) via ‘fedup’ tool which was quite event-less* (not quite, read below); decided to upgrade second laptop running Fedora 17 to 19 directly using network (note that F17->F19 upgrade is not supported, IIRC).
-
So you might be aware of an ongoing project to create and deploy an open badge system to reward contributors for doing cool stuff across Fedora. (What are open badges? You can read about them in detail at openbadges.org; the short of it is that it’s an open infrastructure/standard for awarding people digital badges for achievements.)
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Chromebooks are one of the hottest items at the moment. They take an incredibly simplistic approach to computing that also layers on the security of a Linux-based operating system to create an encapsulated environment that runs primarily within a web browser. You may think this is terribly limiting, but with today’s cloud-centric work environments, the likes of Chromebook and Jolicloud are actually very useful.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge campaign on Indiegogo is breaking records left and right, and if it reaches its goal by August 21st, will break the all-time crowdfunding record by a huge margin. In just 12 hours, the campaign raised more than any other on Indiegogo and enough to place within the top 10 on Kickstarter. The phone Mark Shuttleworth has proposed contains some serious hardware and a gorgeous design. Clearly thousands of people want a piece of this vision, but like every project it has its detractors.
-
-
-
Raspberry Pi has allowed people to do a lot of crazy and creative stuff; the little device kind of provides endless possibilities. Raspberry Pi enthusiasts have tried to push the device to its limits and have applied it to projects where it works almost like a full-fledged computer.
-
Red Pitaya has launched a Kickstarter campaign to build an open source Linux-based measurement and control single-board computer. The $359 Red Pitaya, which can replace thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, will initially ship with smartphone apps for oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, waveform generator, frequency response analyzer, and PID controller functions.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Verizon has officially taken wraps of the new 2013 line up of Droid phones from Motorola. The Droid portfolio consists of the Droid Maxx, Droid Ultra and Droid Mini. All the three devices have similar thin Kevlar bodies which make them look strong yet stunning.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Coordinator in Rwanda has said more than 207,026 laptops have already been distributed adding the project has so far covered 407 schools across the country.
-
“Every year, the art and science of community management is becoming more predictable,” said Jono Bacon, the Community Leadership Summit lead organizer. It’s becoming a renaissance, and over the last few years the practice is starting to be written down and documented. It’s evolving.
-
The University of Melbourne will be home to Australia’s first open source geospatial laboratory, which will support urban research and educational excellence through the use of geospatial data and tools.
-
-
At the O’Reilly OSCON 2013 this week in Portland, Oregon, Fusion-io made the announcement that its Atomic Writes API contributed for standardization to the T10 SCSCI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee is now in use in mainstream MySQL databases MariaDB 5.5.31 and Percona Server 5.5.31.
-
-
-
Events
-
The Linux Foundation has announced the schedule and program for LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America events which take place in New Orleans, La., September 16-18, 2013.
-
-
After General Motors introduced the first-of-its-kind Cadillac User Experience (CUE) technology, now standard in the XTS and SRX, Toyota debuted a Linux-based, in-vehicle infotainment system in the new 2014 Lexus IS. This marks only the beginning of a major shift unfolding within the automotive industry, moving from a closed ecosystem with proprietary technology to an open innovation and collaboration environment.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Back in March, Mozilla announced Open Badges 1.0, which it billed as “an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning.” Immediately, the program picked up some enthusiastic backing from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and then, the folks behind Blackboard’s free, hosted CourseSites platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) backed Open Badges.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
here is something new and eye candy in the ownCloud Client, so let me show a bit of what we have worked on recently.
Many users of the ownCloud Client were asking for sync progress information, in fact there was none at all until today which is a bit boring. The reason why we hadn’t it was simply that csync, which is the file synchronizer engine we use, did not have an API to hand over progress information of an actual up- or download to higher levels of the application.
We implemented two callbacks in csync: One that informs about start, end and progress of an up- or download of an individual file. Another one processes the overall progress of the currently running sync run, indicating for example that eight files have to be processed, current is file number four, and x of the overall sum y bytes have been processed already.
-
Databases
-
-
The Open Source Insider blogs likes open source champions, the Apache Cassandra project chair fits that profile.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
-
In parallel with the launch of the new Apache OpenOffice 4.0 release SourceForge has released the new Apache OpenOffice Extensions website.
-
It may be trailing LibreOffice, but OpenOffice is still alive and kicking — now with better Microsoft Office Open XML support.
-
As Apache announced the release of OpenOffice 4.0 with handy sidebar, The Document Foundation was busy sweeping up the last bug reports for the upcoming LibreOffice 4.1 release. In a post to The Document Foundation blog, Italo Vignoli, founder and board member, acknowledged the contributions made by OpenOffice developers while taking stock of the achievements of the LibreOffice project the last couple of years.
-
I still remember the second I pushed the “send” button of the very first TDF press release, on September 28, 2010. A simple gesture, and a giant leap forward for the free office suite ecosystem.
On that day, though, the feeling was completely different.
-
In its first major revision in more than a year, the Apache OpenOffice suite now comes with a sidebar, from which users can launch their favorite tools.
-
OpenOffice 4.0 comes with a handy sidebar that beats the feature overload issue by devoting room on the side of documents for feature controls
-
CMS
-
In a rapidly growing eCommerce industry, many agencies are finding it difficult to keep up with ever-changing standards and regulations, but a newly released white paper on Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance will provide the Drupal community with insight into this essential process. Written and reviewed by experts in the Drupal community, the white paper provides a high-level overview and well-defined next steps to protect businesses accepting credit card payments.
-
Funding
-
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community, has signed a new technology development agreement with OpenGeo, which develops open source geospatial software.
-
BSD
-
Project Releases
-
-
After introducing all those new concepts in 205 this release fixes a few issues in that new code, and adds pretty much all missing documentation for it. Also, lots of bits and pieces that waited to be merged got merged, so we have some new features as well.
-
Popular public transit navigation app HopSpot dropped support for Windows Phone users this weekend, just a few days after it was acquired by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), reports Daniel Eran Dilger of Apple Insider. The app helps people find the most convenient routes using public transportation information for over 300 major cities.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
The modern anti-vaccination scare began in the late 1990s, when a British physician named Andrew Wakefield began warning people that the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) causes autism in children. Medical experts refuted his claims, but parents panicked. Vaccination rates in Britain sank from 92 per cent to 73 per cent. Dr. Wakefield’s research has since been widely condemned as a giant fraud, and many of the current crop of measles victims were never vaccinated because of him.
-
Security
-
Nearly two weeks ago, the Apache Software Foundation updated its namesake Apache HTTP webserver with new 2.0.65 and 2.2.25 releases.
-
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) Tuesday announced a $2.7 billion deal to buy Sourcefire (NASDAQ: FIRE), the 12-year-old intrusion detection and prevention security vendor whose founder invented the open-source Snort IDS.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
US interference in the Bolivian internal affairs and the plans to destabilize the Government of President Evo Morales by agencies of that country were revealed here by the weekly magazine La Epoca.
A three-page report of the mentioned magazine denounces that three US entities and a European ultra-right party are channelling ideas and resources to support the Bolivian opposition.
-
The CIA “repeatedly blocked” the departure of a security team that was ready “within minutes” to respond to the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans, according to Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.)
Wolf revealed on the House floor on Monday that “trusted sources have confirmed” to his office “that the security team was ready to respond within minutes after receiving the initial call for help, but the CIA repeatedly blocked their departure for more than 30 minutes.”
-
The CIA is seeking to reduce the number of its Afghanistan bases of operation from a dozen to as few as six over two years, going with the overall American withdrawal. But even after 2014 it will maintain a significant footprint.
The manpower and equipment will be relocated from Afghanistan to other destinations, particularly Yemen and North Africa, places where Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces are presented, reports The Washington Post. CIA operatives would also be needed for operations not involving anti-insurgency, like the planned supplying of weapons to the Syrian armed opposition.
-
A federal judge ruled last week that it’s too late for the family of deceased CIA bioweapons expert Dr. Frank Olson to sue the CIA for his death.
[...] CIA admitted to spiking his drink as part of the controversial MK-ULTRA program…
-
Riflemen and the US government are taking aim at each other over surveillance drones. Given the expansion and intensification of government surveillance in recent years, this altercation should not come as a surprise. The Federal Aviation Administration warned on Friday that attempting to shoot down drones is punishable by fine and/or prosecution. The warning was a response to a ordinance under consideration in the small Colorado community of Deer Trail, which would distribute drone hunting permits to encourage defense of the town against unwarranted surveillance. The permits would be applicable to any drone incursion (belonging to the US government, a corporation, terrorists, or anyone else) into the sovereign airspace of the town, defined as reaching an altitude of 1,000 feet.
Read more: http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_07_24/Americans-arming-for-drone-hunt-3106/
-
Tiny, bright-red flashes twinkle in the night sky over Obeiraq, accompanied by a short, sharp detonation then a heavy thud. It shakes the houses and their windows. Smoke rises from the valley below. It makes the women “sick” and they stay indoors, but the menfolk strut around in the streets, flaunting their indifference to the unmanned aircraft. “We’re not afraid of drones,” they say.
-
U.S. drone attacks on in North-East Pakistan, south of the Afghan border, are one of the sour points between Islamabad and Washington. According to the Pakistan’s Tribune Express, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif recently withdrew a planned request for the transfer of US drone technology to Pakistan. The reason behind this turn was ‘legal implications’, of drone attacks aginst tribal areas in North-east Pakistan.
-
Manufacturers in the US have produced so many drones that now the US government is in search of a place to use all these products, cofounder of globalexchange.org and author Medea Benjamin told RT.
-
Drones are nuts. After all, they’re robotic war machines that kill on command. But the mad scientists at DARPA are working on something that’s even more nuts: a submarine that can carry an assortment of drones around the sea and launch them into the air. That’s nuts.
-
“There is a knee-jerk reaction to armed drones in Germany. Germans are against the use of force.”
-
Dronestagram is the latest project from renowned “new aesthetic” pioneer James Bridle, an Instagram feed which posts satellite images corresponding to US drone strikes in the Middle-East and Asia. Much like Josh Begley’s Drones+, the Apple-banned smartphone app which sends alerts whenever drone strikes are reported, Bridle says Dronestagram is a way of “making these locations just a little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real.”
-
Finance/Plutocrats
-
Of all future subjects of our new infant overlord, none are more scapegoated than teenage single mums. Let’s not forget about them and their children today.
-
Yesterday our frenzied response to Kate Middleton — dubbed “brilliant” for giving birth to a boy — has exposed just how dissatisfied we are with our personal life stories.
It is not entirely unfathomable that many people would feel a sense of excitement that Kate Middleton has given birth to the third heir to the throne. After all, as social storytelling beings we make meaning of the world, create relationships and derive inspiration from the lives of others. In addition to being perfectly normal — it is healthy and a part of our collective history. Since the beginnings of humankind we’ve sataround fires in the middle of forests, in caves, atop mountains, and at the mouth of rivers sharing stories of great individuals — mostly male monarchs, warriors and magicians — on epic journeys. These stories created wander, helped to explain a mystifying world and engendered a sense of possibility. However, our current preoccupation with the life stories of others — especially rich and famous others like Kate Middleton — has become a social phenomenon.
-
The automobile-driven economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s made Detroit a globally recognized symbol of successful capitalist renewal after the great depression and the war (1929-1945). High-wage auto industry jobs with real security and exemplary benefits were said to prove capitalism’s ability to generate and sustain a large “middle class”, one that could include African Americans, too. Auto-industry jobs became inspirations and models for what workers across America might seek and acquire – those middle-class components of a modern “American Dream”.
[...]
When those capitalists’ decisions condemn Detroit to 40 years of disastrous decline, what kind of society relieves those capitalists of any responsibility to help rebuild that city?
The simple answer to these questions: no genuinely democratic economy could or would work that way.
-
-
I’ve blogged before about how I find it outrageous that the credit scoring models are proprietary, considering the impact they have on so many lives.
The argument given for keeping them secret is that otherwise people would game the models, but that really doesn’t make sense.
After all, the models that the big banks have to deal with through regulation aren’t secret, and they game those models all the time. It’s one of the main functions of the banks, in fact, to figure out how to game the models. So either we don’t mind gaming or we don’t hold up our banks to the same standards as our citizens.
-
A little less than a year ago, an operation called the Bitcoin Savings & Trust (an updated name from what had been the “First Pirate Savings & Trust”) shut down suddenly, right after there was growing evidence that it was a pyramid scheme — or, as some called it, the Bernie Madoff of Bitcoin. The “deal” promised an insane 7% interest weekly. If you know even the slightest thing about compound interest (or can use a calculator for a few rounds), you’d recognize that’s insane and obviously unsustainable in any real world situation.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
At least 117 bills introduced in 2013 fuel a “race to the bottom” in wages, benefits, and worker rights and resemble “model” bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to a new analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of ALECexposed.org.
-
Censorship
-
-
ISPs have a lot of questions to answer. While they may feel that no legislation is better than letting parliament loose on the issue of content restriction, the turf on which they have been fighting with government is extremely narrow, but important.
-
Privacy
-
The Third Amendment’s requirement that “no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
-
This is a great chance to make an important change in the world. Do it.
-
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone suggested that Facebook should offer a paid, ad-free experience for its users for $10 per month. That would be great. An NSA-free option would be even better.
-
The heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday criticized a House amendment targeting funding for the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) issued a joint statement Tuesday that called the amendment from Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) “unwise.”
-
The Obama administration has filed what appears to be the first legal defense of the National Security Administration’s dragnet of American phone data since Edward Snowden first leaked details to the public.
-
-
Congress must use this crucial vote on the NSA’s data dragnet to protect our privacy from the agency’s intent to ‘collect it all’
-
-
US government spending on cloud technology is set to spike in the next two years, though security concerns have scared agencies away from public clouds.
-
There’s a funny catch-22 when it comes to privacy best practices. The very techniques that experts recommend to protect your privacy from government and commercial tracking could be at odds with the antiquated, vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
A number of researchers (including me) recently joined an amicus brief (filed by Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society in the “Weev” case), arguing how security and privacy researchers are put at risk by this law.
-
For the first time since Edward Snowden leaked information on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, the owner of an ISP has publicly discussed how the NSA got him to install equipment to directly spy on one of his customers.
Pete Ashdown, the CEO of XMission, detailed his experience when he received a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 which forced him to allow the federal government to monitor a customer of his.
-
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.
-
NSA leaker Edward Snowden plans to settle in Russia and is ready to begin a court battle if the country’s migration service denies his asylum plea, Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer who assists the whistleblower, told RT.
“It’s hard for me to say what his actions would be in terms of a positive decision [on the asylum plea],” Kucherena said. “We must understand that security is the number one issue in his case. I think the process of adaptation will take some time. It’s an understandable process as he doesn’t know the Russian language, our customs, and our laws.”
“He’s planning to arrange his life here. He plans to get a job. And, I think, that all his further decisions will be made considering the situation he found himself in,” he added.
-
DDG’s trust and support for Microsoft is also a problem. The typical Microsoft partner passes on Microsoft lies, and is themselves technically incompetent, loud, aggressive and rude. That’s Microsoft culture.
-
The House is expected to vote later this week on an amendment to a roughly $600 billion defense spending package that would repeal authorization for the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of phone call metadata in the United States.
-
Opposition to bulk surveillance swells with vote that would ‘end authority for blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act’
-
-
-
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
-
-
The National Security Agency has invited certain members of Congress to a top secret, invitation only meeting to discuss a proposed amendment that could end the NSA’s ability to conduct dragnet surveillance on millions of Americans.
-
Edward Snowden’s sacrifice was not in vain – because many thousands in the United States are rising to take up the battle he started. And they mean to win.
-
However, since NSA supporters were unable to kill the Amash amendment outright, it looks like they’ve moved onto a sneaky alternative move: getting Rep. Richard Nugent to introduce a competing amendment that looks like it does something similar in defunding NSA surveillance, but in reality just reinforces the status quo. In other words, the Nugent amendment is a nefarious red herring, designed to attract votes from Reps away from Amash’s amendment. It’s a pretty scammy trick.
-
The White House said Tuesday night that it opposes a House amendment that challenges the National Security Agency’s authority to monitor and seize massive amounts of communications data.
-
-
The White House is urging lawmakers in the House to reject legislation that would undercut the National Security Agency’s ability to collect phone records of millions of Americans.
The House is likely to vote Wednesday on an amendment to a defense spending bill that would end the NSA’s authority under the Patriot Act, preventing the agency from collecting records unless an individual is under investigation.
-
-
Internet activists are once again rallying netizens to call their representatives. This time, they want Internet users to convince Congress to strip funding from the National Security Agency surveillance program that collects American’s phone records.
The House will vote on Wednesday on an amendment (.PDF) to the defense spending bill that seeks to defund the NSA’s phone metadata collection program, revealed in June by Edward Snowden, and stop the agency from collecting Americans’ phone records unless they’re targets of an investigation.
-
Non-U.S. clients of American cloud hosting companies are clearly rattled by revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency collects huge amounts of customer data from Internet Service Providers and telecommunication companies.
-
Amash’s amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations legislation essentially strips funding away from the National Security Agency if the agency collects data and records from individuals not under investigation. It also obligates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a statement confirming data collection by the NSA as for a target under investigation.
-
-
This week, the House will vote on Rep. Justin Amash’s (R-Mich.) proposed amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations bill, which the NSA is aggressively lobbying against. If the amendment passes, it will be the first legislative action the House has taken in response to the leak regarding NSA surveillance programs. Many Americans fervently oppose the actions of the NSA, and believe that the overreaching capabilities granted to the agency are unconstitutional. I disagree. The NSA’s programs were enacted to protect Americans, and the agency should not have to struggle to maintain the funding required to do its job.
-
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.23.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
The use of free and open source software solutions for office productivity and for desktop PCs is second nature to those working for the town of Lemi in Finland. The administration has been using the vendor independent IT solutions for a decade. Safer, easier and cheaper, reports the town’s treasurer.
-
Many people are familiar with the fact that the world of journalism has contracted in nasty ways in recent years, putting many fine writers out of business and sending them into new fields. The trend has carried over to the blogosphere and many online publications, causing previously high-quality sites to shut down and writers to go silent.
-
Desktop
-
I run three Linux distributions on my laptop:
Debian 7.0 Xfce – because of the rock-solid stability of Debian. It also controls my GRUB2.
Mageia KDE – because I am in love with Mageia since day 1.
Linux Mint Cinnamon – because I really think this is a good combination of convenience, performance and functionality. I must admit that I disliked Mint in their early versions, mostly due to their overly complex menu. In my opinion, the current version does not have this issue.
All of these are 64-bit. The “choice for the day” depends on my mood, but Mageia is the default option in the GRUB config.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
-
In this week’s episode we talk about the most recent IRC meeting held while also mentioning the hostilities that took place against the Ubuntu Forums.
-
Kernel Space
-
Being past the merge window for Linux 3.11, it’s mostly bug-fixes going in but 3.11-rc2 also has the removal of the CSR staging driver that was dropped after losing developer interest and then a bunch of one-line code changes surrounding the removal of __cpuinit markers. These two patches generated most of the noise for 3.11-rc2.
-
Anyone who has ever spent five minutes in the Linux blogosphere is probably already well-aware of Linux creator Linus Torvalds’ propensity for speaking his mind in the plainest of terms.
It was just slightly more than a year ago, after all, that he dropped an “F-bomb” on Nvidia, though that’s by no means been the only example over the years.
-
Graphics Stack
-
A Phoronix reader has shared two NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver “hacks” he’s written for overriding some functionality of the NVIDIA binary blob for GeForce hardware.
-
Besides publishing the OpenGL 4.4 specification today, the Khronos Group also published their provisional draft of the OpenCL 2.0 specification for GPGPU comptuing. OpenCL 2.0 brings several new compute-focused features over OpenCL 1.2.
-
An independent open-source developer has provided a set of four xf86-video-ati X.Org driver patches to boost the 2D rendering performance for Evergreen and Cayman GPUs right now though the optimizations can also be back-ported to R600 and R700 graphics processors too.
-
Rob Clark has posted the second version of his MSM DRM driver, an open-source reverse-engineered kernel Direct Rendering Manager driver for Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon” SoCs.
-
Applications
-
With so many flavors of Linux and the awesome apps in their repositories, finding the right app for getting things done can be tough. In our fifth annual Lifehacker Pack for Linux, we’re highlighting the must-have downloads for better productivity, communication, media management, and more.
-
You are new to Linux, you are searching for a simple method to convert your videos or your music to fit your Mobile’s resolution or your player’s supported formats.
-
BitTorrent released a beta version of a new Linux- and Android-ready peer-to-peer file sync package. BitTorrent Sync currently operates on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops, Android smartphones and tablets, and an evolving list of Linux-based devices, including the Raspberry Pi and numerous NAS products, enabling on-the-go, secure uploads and sync from mobile to storage devices, as well as M2M/IoT scenarios.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
-
The Walking Dead is a hugely popular US series about a post Zombie apocalyptic world, where a group of survivors have to band together to survive. The series was green lighted for a game, which was taken up by the talented Telltale games, resulting in a game that won multiple awards and accolades, along with a top spot in many people’s recommended lists and wish lists. Thus it was only natural for the game to go mobile, which it actually did 6 months previously on the iOS. However, after the long wait, the game finally got the green light on Android too, with The Walking Dead: Assault being officially released on the Android, courtesy of Skybound LLC.
-
-
-
You won’t have noticed unless you’re one of the minority of Steam users not running Windows 7, but Team Fortress comes in three flavours these days: Windows (vanilla), Mac (mint), and Linux (green tea?).
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
The U.S. Navy said on Monday that divers are investigating whether they can salvage the four unarmed bombs dumped by U.S. fighter jets into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park — but in the meantime, not to worry. The ordnance is not a big threat to the environment.
U.S. fighter jet pilots were forced to drop the bombs during a training exercise gone wrong last week. The two AV-8B Harrier jets had launched from the USS Bonhomme Richard during joint exercise with Australia’s military on July 16.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
As you may know, the development of LXDE was very slow in the past years, so the developers of LXDE, in collaboration with the Razor-Qt team have decided to rewrite the entire desktop environment with Qt, renaming the project LXDE-Qt. This information is not new, I have previously written about LXDE-Qt here.
-
-
This is just a brief wrap up about a patch I just submitted: in a nutshell, this patch enables the practical use of the acceleration sensor on Nexus 7 in Linux.
-
I’m back now from Akademy 2013 in Bilbao. It was a great event where I could meet so much great people from the KDE community. The kind of moment you don’t sleep a lot as there are always nice people to share a cool moment, being communicative and creative, and that at the end you feel like: “ho, no, it’s already the end!” 
-
-
This week I’m going to start and finish implementing iTunes importer. After that I’m going to spend some time on tests, repurposing them for the new Importers framework. If most things go well, everything that I have planned should be ready for the GSoC Midterm Evaluation, along with some things I haven’t (i.e. the “framework”).
-
-
While KDE’s KWin has experimental Wayland support in KDE 4.11, it won’t be until about one year from now where the Wayland support for the KDE desktop is fully baked and offered in a release form. The wait should be worth it though with the exciting KDE Plasma Workspaces 2 and KDE Frameworks 5.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Because programming is a craft and not a science, thus the term Gnomecraft!
Note that “GNOME Software App for Fedora 20″ equals ”GNOME Software App for GNOME 3.10″.
-
-
New Releases
-
-
The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” KDE.
-
-
Screenshots
-
Red Hat Family
-
Paul Smith, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat’s U.S. Public Sector businesses addresses misconceptions about open source adoption and shares how it will “future proof” innovation in the public sector.
-
-
Debian Family
-
Lucas Nussbaum, Debian Project Leader, gave an interview to ITWire highlighting ways to boost innovation within the project.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
The High Court in Pretoria’s decision to declare certain sections of the Currency and Exchanges Act unconstitutional opens a door for a parliamentary review of the country’s “antiquated” exchange control system, the DA said on Sunday.
-
-
-
The Ubuntu Edge runs both Android and open source Ubuntu Touch software — and the people behind it want your help to the tune of $32 million Indiegogo.
-
-
-
Ubuntu today has announced the Ubuntu Edge campaign on Indigogo, for a fully converged, beautiful, sleek, phone that can run Ubuntu, Android, and boot a full desktop.
This beautifully crafted smartphone is a proving ground for the most advanced mobile technologies on the horizon, a showpiece for true mobile innovation. A
At the heart of it all is convergence: connect to any monitor and this Ubuntu phone transforms into an Ubuntu PC, with a fully integrated desktop OS and shared access to all files.
-
-
-
-
Manufacturers used to be able to charge hundreds for a new smartphone. Now that everyone has one, prices are plummeting.
-
-
-
Canonical’s ambitious $32 million crowdfunding campaign will make it clear up front what kind of demand the company can expect for a phone that dual-boots Ubuntu phone OS and Android. “This is pretty shrewd,” said analyst Chris Hazelton. “It’s a very competitive market, so this is a risky venture, but getting that funding beforehand and having the cash in hand makes it less risky.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
Canonical is hoping to raise $32 million from enterprises and enthusiasts who are willing to pay for a limited edition Ubuntu for Android phone that has the specification of a laptop and delivers the “full desktop experience” when plugged into a big screen.
-
The Ubuntu Edge is a pioneering device designed to drive innovation in the mobile industry.
-
It disappeared for the weekend but, as of this morning, the Ubuntu website is once again trailing something mysterious…
-
-
Ubuntu Mobile isn’t new; Canonical has already done much to promote its efforts to break into the smartphone mobile software space. But today the company is launching an Indiegogo campaign to fund the development of its first own-branded Ubuntu mobile hardware, the Ubuntu edge. The Edge is a smartphone that hopes to be more than that, by replacing a desktop PC as well.
-
-
Campaign hopes to raise £21.5 million for a new device that will combine the convenience of a mobile with the power of a desktop.
-
Although Apple and Google currently control large majority of smartphone OS market share with iOS and Android respectively, other major large technology brands are keen on introducing alternative operating systems for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The latest entry into the mobile operating system market is Ubuntu, the world’s most popular free operating system for desktops.
-
-
-
Canonical, the company behind one of the most popular operating systems Ubuntu Linux, has launched an insanely ambitious indigo crowd-funding campaign to raise $32 million by August 22 to build the Ubuntu Edge smartphone. That’s precisely 1 million dollar per day to reach that goal. Backers committing $600 on day one, or $830 thereafter, will receive one of these mobile devices in May 2014. The company, as excepted, due to initial hype and excitement has already raised $1 million in the first 5 hours.
-
Canonical last week posted 15 patches so Mesa could support their Mir Display Server and specifically the Mir EGL platform. Those patches haven’t received many comments from upstream Mesa developers, but there were more than 200 comments in our forums. Over the night, Canonical has posted X.Org Server patches for supporting XMir plus the open-source driver patches so it can handle XMir with nested compositing.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Running a Linux-based operating system can be a wonderful experience. Linux distributions have relatively few security problems, are typically stable and are set up to have convenient access to massive amounts of gratis software. Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here, but I feel Linux distributions offer some of the best desktop solutions available today. The problem, as I see it, is that many people either aren’t aware that Linux-based solutions exist or are not comfortable transitioning from their current desktop operating system to something different. I understand the transition can be a difficult one, I made it myself and it wasn’t entirely smooth — there was definitely a learning curve going from Windows to Slackware. Fortunately there are developers out there who recognize that a lack of familiarity is one of the big hurdles to entering the Linux community and they have tackled the task of making Linux distributions that will be feel familiar to new users. One of these distributions is Zorin OS.
-
Despite the popularity of lightweight desktop environments, options like KDE have also had their hand in making desktop Linux a real pleasure to use. Recently, I wrote a distro comparison of Ubuntu vs. Debian, explaining that Debian presents you with various desktops from which to choose while Ubuntu provides only Unity. To take this a step further, I’ll be exploring Kubuntu today so I can expand on that initial comparison.
-
Nary two weeks back, Netrunner 5 Enigma was released. Also known as version 13.06, this is the latest stable release of the Netrunner distribution, based on Kubuntu. As you have seen in my previous reviews, Netrunner tries to combine the classic KDE desktop with web-based applications and cloud services, which should kind of bridge between the two worlds, one of the typical computing device and the other more oriented toward always doing something online, sort of.
-
Today in Open Source: Linux Mint 15 KDE is out! Plus: Take a screenshot tour, watch a video review, and download Linux Mint 15 KDE
-
One of the things that we have been discussing at length in the past few months is the graphics stack in Kubuntu, and how we’re working towards having Plasma Workspaces 2 running on top of Kubuntu-next and Kubuntu-next-next(-next). In this article, I will explain the strategy we have laid out for a smooth transition.
-
-
-
Designed to bridge the Arduino and Raspberry Pi worlds, is the Embedded Pi going to drive the low-cost microcomputer to new heights?
-
Phones
-
Intel (INTC), Samsung and the Linux Foundation are behind a recently launched a $4.04 million application development contest called the Tizen App Challenge aimed at adding some heft to app development for the alternative open source platform.
-
Samsung Electronics has dramatically ramped up their Linux hiring and development efforts in the past three years and they are still on track for hiring another 20,000 Linux and open-source developers.
-
Ballnux
-
Samsung is making an Android Galaxy phone with a retro clamshell look, the throwback design that breaks so easily but apparently just won’t die.
-
Android
-
The Moto X is one of the worst kept secret, and we know almost everything about the upcoming device from Google/Motorola. The rumours, leaks and speculations have already told us about the internal hardware, screen size, customisations. We even saw pictures of Eric Schmidt himself showing off the phone at an event. The only thing we had no idea about was the price. However, an anonymous tipster claims that the Moto X will in fact be even cheaper than Nexus 4!
-
Cyanogen Mod is one of the most preferred builds of custom ROMs among the enthusiats Android crowd. The popularity can be attributed to the relatively stable build and its compatibility with most of the handsets out there.
-
AOKP or Android Kang Project is an open forum of Android ROM development community that has been behind the release of some really good ROMs. But of late there hasn’t been any definitive releases from them, though they have been busy testing their latest ROM behind the scene. Their latest rom is the stable release of AOKP Jelly Bean Milestone 2, a highly customized version of the stock Jellybean version of android.
-
When Android was first released, application downloads did not look promising. One major reason was poor app selection; you can’t download something that isn’t there. As app available grew on Android, so did total downloads. Still, iOS outclassed Android by far when it came to app downloads, especially with such a strong head start.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
“A great start to the week with a warm, sunny, quiet Monday. Well, almost quiet. The first Vivaldi tablets, new dual-core engineering boards and the custom EOMA68 developer workbenches we commissioned have all been shipped out. Don’t get too excited: the tablets are pre-certification (EC/FCC) and are on their way to us so we can verify the Q/A targets we set out. Still … “
-
KDE’s Vivaldi tablet is finally starting to ship… but only for QA testing and the open-source tablets haven’t yet received their certification.
-
-
Software review site Boffin, reveals its top free music making software for the year. Innovation, feature range and accessibility among the factors that determine Boffin’s choices.
-
Frankly, I can’t say I was surprised when I read that RIM’s BlackBerry 10 transmits user email account credentials to RIM servers, which then log into the account. Obviously someone at RIM thought this would be a good idea, but anyone who does anything that requires keeping email private — say, an executive discussing sensitive negotiation strategies with colleagues, or a doctor or other health care worker, or, well, just about everyone — should be appalled that RIM covertly collects their username and password, then logs into the account.
-
Numenta.org has been created as the home for the NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) open source project and community. The project was announced today in a keynote address at the OSCON open source conference.
-
NASA’s Space Apps Challenge recently became the world’s largest open hackathon, with over 8,000 participants spanning 44 countries. Meanwhile, many of the features many of us use every day — sometimes more than once a day — such as Facebook’s Like button and Timeline, debuted at closed (internal, employee-only) hackathon events.
-
NASA has ditched Windows on the International Space Station. But why was it ever there in the first place, wonders Simon?
-
Events
-
Linux wireless networking, Gluster and Ceph distributed storage, the OpenStack cloud and much more are on the agenda for this year’s LinuxCon/CloudOpen North America conference, whose program the Linux Foundation has announced. Here’s a look at some of the highlights that the channel can look forward to at the event, which will take place in New Orleans Sept. 16-18.
-
-
Fall show to feature Android, Tizen tech tips
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Mozilla has announced that it will release updates to Firefox OS every three months, with security updates scheduled every six weeks.
-
Mozilla is busy aligning its entire company around its new Firefox OS mobile platform, which will even soon include embracing a new CEO focused on it. In its pursuit of the perfect cadence for new releases of Firefox OS, Mozilla has announced an aggressive rapid release cycle for improving the operating system. Specifically, it will make feature releases available to partners each quarter and deliver security updates for the most recent two feature releases every six weeks.
-
Mozilla hopes to pump out a new version of its smartphone Firefox OS every three months – and wants to lock mobile networks to this roadmap of updates.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Linux is wildly successful, free and open source software and represents the future of operating systems.
OpenStack is wildly successful, free and open source software and represents the future of cloud computing.
Therefore, OpenStack is like Linux.
As much as it would be nice to wrap up the OpenStack cloud computing platform in a neat little bow and offer it up to the great gods of allegory, there are key differences in the basic origin stories of OpenStack and Linux that make the comparison a little strained.
-
In a move that promises to advance the development of open source Big Data and distributed storage technology, database-as-a-service (DaaS) provider Cloudant has announced the merging of its distributed database platform into the Apache Foundation’s CouchDB project. The decision is a good example of convergence within the open source world, and could have an especially important impact on open source clustering technology.
-
The large numbers of you who watched our recent Regcast All about OpenStack (catch it in the on-demand version if you missed it) show how much interest there is in the project. But no one pretends that OpenStack is anywhere near mature. It is a work in progress and in the short term it will mostly be visible in the service provider community.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
In addition to those customers, Oracle’s Engineered Systems, including Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, and Oracle Database Appliance, all run Oracle Linux.
During Oracle’s most recent fiscal quarter, Ellison reported that the Exa-class systems had their best quarter ever in terms of sales. Over 1,200 engineered systems were sold in the fourth quarter alone, in a year in which Oracle sold over 3,000 engineered systems in total.
Coekaerts added that Oracle customers purchasing standard Oracle x86 servers have support for Oracle Linux included. Additionally, Oracle deploys many customers on Oracle Linux in Oracle Cloud and Oracle Managed Cloud Services.
-
Funding
-
The field of test and measurement is set to benefit from open-source software applications if a Kickstarter fundraising project is successful.
-
The other day I came across a new initiative for funding open source development called the Bitcoin Grant. While interesting at first sight, I was wondering: How is this better than the traditional donation button most open source projects have? The Bitcoin Grant then seems to limit who can donate and how you can use those donations (you can’t pay rent with bitcoins just yet).
-
BSD
-
While FreeBSD 9.2 is expected in about one month for release, further out in the pipeline is FreeBSD 10.0 and with it will come many new end-user features.
It’s not yet been determined when FreeBSD 10.0 will be released, but given their past release cadence, this next major FreeBSD operating system should arrive in 2014. Among the features so far include:
-
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
GNU Parallel 20130722 (‘Engelbart’) has been released.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
The search for a new tuberculosis drug after many decades and first time through a unique model of open drug discovery programme may finally bear fruits in near future, with India all set for the launch of the phase II clinical trial of the drug candidate.
-
Programming
-
Over the weekend I heard from a frustrated developer that AMD has reportedly conceded in their support for Open64. AMD has been a big backer to Open64 in years prior as an alternative to using the GNU Compiler Collection. AMD has their own Open64 fork where they have support for the latest AMD CPU features. The most recent release of AMD’s x86 Open64 compiler is version 4.5.2.1 and this series introduced AMD “Piledriver” Family 15h support, AVX/XOP/FMA3/FMA4/BMI/TBM/F16C intrincs, improved performance, and was updated against Open64.net trunk.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Khronos unveiled today the OpenGL 4.4 specification as the latest industry-standard graphics API. OpenGL 4.4 delivers on buffer placement control, efficient asynchronous queries, shader variable layout, efficient multiple object binding, and a streamlined process for porting of Direct3D applications.
-
For those of you who weren’t raised Catholic (like me), or who don’t have a sort of morbid fascination with religion in general (like me), perhaps I should explain what indulgences are. See, in the Catholic faith, there’s a transitional period (not a place) called Purgatory, where the mildly-sinful undertake purification or punishment before admittance to Heaven. Should you commit no mortal sins, but some lesser sins, you go through this process which you can primarily complete only if enough people on Earth pray for your soul. So you better be nice to those around you, or you could be stuck experiencing the purification of inner-fire for quite a while. But, if you’re not the kind of soul that enjoys such penance-flames, you can obtain indulgences. Indulgences are offered by the Church and they are essentially giant time-erasers for the period you’re supposed to spend in Purgatory. You get them, according to Pope John Paul II, through “only the most important prayers and good works of piety,
charity and penance.”
-
Gmail’s new layout doesn’t just keep your inbox organized, it also gives Google the perfect opportunity to send you unsolicited email ads. These sponsored missives appear as highlighted entries under the Promotions tab, where you can also find deals and updates from online services you subscribe to.
-
Also, please note that when I talk about users I don’t mean folks who don’t know much about computers because they don’t use them all that much. For example if your work does not involve editing electronic files and using office suite and email then I wouldn’t expect you to be an expert. On the other hand, if you have been using Microsoft Word and Outlook on every week day from 9am till 5pm for the last 15 years the I’d at least expect you to know how to double space a document or set up an email signature. If you can’t do these things, and you have to call the help desk on average once or twice a week so that they can remote-in and do it for you, then perhaps you shouldn’t be in this line of work…
-
Having very recently become a parent, I finally have something in common with William and Kate apart from my British nationality. It was not an ‘easy’ birth, if there is such a thing. In short, our little girl got stuck and needed to be wrested out using a suction pump. Her head was temporarily cone shaped as a result which made her look like a comedy alien.
-
-
Health/Nutrition
-
After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, a cancer-causing toxic chemical that’s fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It’s added to the chicken feed on purpose!
-
It is no exaggeration to say that Monsanto has now become the most hated corporation in the world.
-
Security
-
Up to 750 million mobile phones around the world carry SIM cards that contain a programming flaw that could leave their owners vulnerable to fraud. The bug allows a hacker to remotely access personal data and authorise illegal transactions within minutes.
The UN’s International Telecommunications Union is to send an alert to all mobile phone operators after being presented with “hugely significant” evidence of a design flaw by renowned German code-breaker Karsten Nohl.
-
Apple says its developer site was targeted in an attack, and that any information that was taken was encrypted. The site remains down
-
Enterprises spend millions every year on security appliances intended to secure their networks. Yet many of those devices are themselves not secure.
-
The U.S. Marshals Service has lost track of at least 2,000 encrypted two-way radios and other communication devices valued at millions of dollars, according to internal agency documents, creating what some within the agency view as a security risk for federal judges, endangered witnesses and others.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
The former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said he’s going to reveal new details behind the ‘dodgy dossier’ if he disagrees with the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into UK’s role in the Iraq War.
Dearlove provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that was allegedly exaggerated and “sexed-up” by Tony Blair’s government.
The 68-year-old intelligence veteran has spent the last year writing a detailed account of events leading up to the Iraq War, which started in 2003. Initially, he intended to make his work available to historians after his death but Sir Richard told the Daily Mail that he could well change.
-
As the government looks for alternatives to convince the US to call off its drone campaign in the tribal areas, the foreign ministry has asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to drop his plan to ask Washington for the transfer of drone technology from his list of options citing ‘legal implications’.
-
Matthew Aid of Foreign Policy has published an excellent report detailing the secret intelligence gathering partnership between the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
-
A hacktivist who calls himself “The Jester” (styled “th3j35t3r”) has targeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and anybody who offers to help him.
-
In late 2001, a National Security Agency analyst was asked to do something unusual. Instead of locating a target’s cell phone to eavesdrop on his conversation, the analyst was asked for the phone’s location in real-time. It was apparently the beginning of the NSA’s role in the CIA’s drone operations that, a new report compiled by Pakistan suggests, had killed nearly 200 civilians by 2009.
-
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is using phone signals to track locations of militant targets in real time, a technology that has helped Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) locate targets for drone attacks, Washington Post reported.
“The foreign signals that NSA collects are invaluable to national security,” the agency said in a statement released Friday to The Post.
According to current and former counterterrorism officials and experts, NSA has become the single most important intelligence agency in finding al Qaeda and other enemy overseas after Septermber 2011 attacks in Washington.
-
The top U.S. military officer said in a letter released on Monday that American forces could undertake a range of missions to help Syrian rebels if asked by the White House, from providing training to establishing no-fly zones or conducting limited attacks on military targets.
-
Sir Richard Dearlove is considering releasing his own version of events if the Chilcot Inquiry does not reveal the lies Tony Blair used to take Britain into the illegal Iraq war.
-
-
Pakistan on Wednesday lodged a strong protest against the recent drone strikes in North Waziristan that killed 18 persons, and demanded to end them on immediate basis, Geo News reported Wednesday.
-
For a response to President Obama’s comments on the acquittal of George Zimmerman and racism in the United States, we’re joined by Dr. Cornel West, professor at Union Theological Seminary and author of numerous books. On Obama’s remarks comparing himself to Trayvon Martin, West says: “Will that identification hide and conceal the fact there’s a criminal justice system in place that has nearly destroyed two generations of precious, poor black and brown brothers? [Obama] hasn’t said a word until now — five years in office and can’t say a word about a ‘new Jim Crow.’ … Obama and [Attorney General Eric] Holder — will they come through at the federal level for Trayvon Martin? We hope so — [but] don’t hold your breath. There’s going to be many people who say, ‘We see this president is not serious about the criminalizing of poor people.’”
-
Amid recent American efforts to expand military presence within US borders, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was quick to describe the Obama administration as a routine violator of the U.S. Constitution. Dr. Roberts, who served as assistant secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration and played a significant role in creating the economic system that became known as Reaganomics, cited the NSA spying scandal, the drone program and the assassination of American citizens as examples that the government continues to violate the will of the American people. The Voice of Russia contacted Dr. Roberts to inquire about his rather harsh critique of the US government.
Read more: http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_07_23/American-neoconservatives-are-Nazi-to-the-core-Roberts-0118/
-
Leaked internal data produced by Pakistani officials documenting drone strikes on the ground reveal a high civilian death toll, countering US claims that the targeted assassination campaign results in “exceedingly rare” fatalities.
-
The 12-page dossier was compiled for the the authorities in the tribal areas, the Bureau notes, and investigates 75 CIA drone strikes and five attacks by NATO in the region conducted between 2006 and 2009. According to the document, 746 people were killed in the strategic attacks. At least 147 of the victims were civilians, and 94 were children.
-
“I was glad to see him bring it in,” West replied. “He said we must never rationalize killing innocent people in the name of self-defense, and then I thought about our drone policy, which makes us the George Zimmerman of the world in terms of killing innocent folk in the name of self-defense.”
-
New revelations from the CIA’s killer UAV program show how the agency is able to lock Predator drones on targets through their mobile phones–even after they have turned their phones off.
-
A secret document obtained by the Bureau reveals for the first time the Pakistan government’s internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties.
The United States has consistently claimed only a tiny number of non-combatants have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan – despite research by the Bureau and others suggesting that over 400 civilians may have died in the nine-year campaign.
The internal document shows Pakistani officials too found that CIA drone strikes were killing a significant number of civilians – and have been aware of those deaths for many years.
Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes outlined in the document, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children.
-
The US House and Senate intelligence committees have approved CIA weapons shipments to opposition fighters in Syria, allowing the Obama administration to move ahead on the stalled program, senior congressional and administration officials said Monday, according to a report by the Washington Post.
-
Kiriakou was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the administration of President George W. Bush. He was convicted in October of last year of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he provided the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter and sentenced in January of this year. He reported to prison on February 28 (which was also the day that Pfc. Bradley Manning pled guilty to some offenses and read a statement in military court at Fort Meade).
-
Some international tourists to Szczytno are on the hunt of CIA torture traces in this town in north-eastern Poland with 27,970 inhabitants. Szczytno is situated in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodship, but was previously in Olsztyn Voivodship.
-
Pioneering what is commonly being referred to as the “geospatial web or web GIS,” open source geospatial software firm OpenGeo has entered into an investment and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel, Inc., a nonprofit investment firm that identifies commercial technology applications for the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
Must the government take every possible ounce of flesh from Pfc. Bradley Manning in punishing him for his massive data dump to WikiLeaks? The woeful answer is yes.
-
It would be “extremely bad precedent” for the government to convict Manning of “aiding the enemy” for leaking information to such an outlet, Coombs said during the trial. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up that argument, saying that the charges against Manning could have far-reaching implications for other whistleblowers who might leak information for patriotic reasons, but who could still be accused of treason.
-
He drives a truck emblazoned with “WikiLeaks TOP SECRET Mobile Collection Unit” to Fort Meade as he covers Bradley Manning’s trial.
-
-
Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data.
-
-
At a hearing Thursday, military judge Col. Denise Lind refused to toss out ‘aiding the enemy’ and other weakly substantiated charges against Bradley Manning. Alexa O’Brien on her previous rulings and her history of deference to the prosecution.
-
Without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people. That’s what this trial is really about
-
Michael Ratner: Even though judge refused to grant defense motion to dismiss charges of aiding the enemy, Manning still could be found not guilty of that count.
-
Julian Assange is also a emacs user.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
In a creative response to a 2012 World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a new regulation supported by Public Citizen that strengthens the criteria for dolphin-safe labeling. Mexico, which challenged the policy, sought a rollback of the labeling program and has indicated that it may challenge the new regulation and seek WTO authorization to impose trade sanctions against the United States.
-
Photographer Nina Berman had just started focusing on climate and environmental issues when she read an article about fracking and its connection to the possible contamination of New York City’s drinking water. Berman resides in New York and knew very little about how the controversial process of drilling for natural gas via hydraulic fracturing worked and decided to head to Pennsylvania for Gov. Thomas Corbett’s inauguration in 2011.
-
China has become a popular target of environmental ire, drawing criticism for its soaring carbon emissions and perceived intransigence during climate negotiations.
-
The extreme far north (or south) isn’t the only place on Earth that spends the winter locked in perpetual darkness. Beginning in September and ending in March, the Norwegian town of Rjukan is cast into a perpetual shadow. But no longer: This month, engineers are completing The Mirror Project, a system that will shed winter light on Rjukan for the first time ever.
-
Finance
-
While the power of transnational corporations expands, income and wealth disparities are threatening societies.
-
It has now been five years since the beginnings of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). What has been learned – if anything – by international agencies about the nature of the crisis and how to manage macroeconomic policy? In the wake of the crisis, ongoing problems of the Eurozone, slow and fragile growth in the United States and a slowdown of emerging economies, governments around the world have been reviewing the risks to insure economies against the systematic failure of banking and insurance systems.
-
Goldman’s apparent business strategy:
Buy Metro International, a leading aluminum warehousing firm.
Deliberately slow down customer service so that it take 16 months to ship orders instead of six weeks.
Charge customers extra for storage because their aluminum is lying around longer.
Game the regulations requiring that at least 3,000 tons be moved out of storage each day by simply shuffling it between warehouses.
-
Three women alleged to have been turned out of their homes because firms working for G4S had failed to pay rent
-
-
Last week’s bankruptcy filing by the city of Detroit is being used as a test case for a much wider assault on the pensions and health benefits of millions of state and municipal employees around the country.
-
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
A law went into effect this month that ends the ban on U.S. government-made propaganda from being broadcast to Americans. In a remarkably creative spin, the supporters of this law say that allowing Americans to see American propaganda is actually a victory for transparency.
-
Remember the private mercenary army Blackwater that caused such a stir in Iraq during an unprovoked attack in 2007? Apparently, Monsanto and the controversial security firm are in bed together, described by blogger Randy Ananda as “a death-tech firm weds a hit squad.” At this point, you might be wondering what in the world the GM seed giant needs with the services of a ‘shadow army’? It appears as though the corporation found it necessary to contract with Blackwater in order to collect intelligence on anti-Monsanto activists as well infiltrate their ranks.
-
This week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit government watchdog group, released a report – “The Worst Governors in America”, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker came in sixth in the top category. The report has an amusing circus theme and dubs Walker a “Ringmaster,” but it is heavily documented and footnoted to reliable sources and primary documents. The criteria CREW used when assessing the nation’s governors were the following: corruption, transparency, partisan politics, pressuring public officials, cronyism, self-enrichment, scandal and mismanagement.
-
Censorship
-
…belief that he can clean up the web with technology is misguided and even dangerous…
-
Moving onto filtering today, David Cameron has created a very unfortunate debate about what he expects from Internet Service Providers.
-
Today prime minister David Cameron will announce that in future UK Internet subscribers will be required to opt-in if they want to be able to watch adult content online. The theory is that somehow Internet service providers will be able to stop such material having a ‘corroding influence’ on the nation’s children. But can the ISPs pull it off without collateral damage, and can we trust the government to stop there?
-
THE UK GOVERNMENT decision to impose automatic online pornography filtering via UK ISPs today could cause a multiplicity of issues, such as loss of trade for online retailers and a decline in trust from web users.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced in a speech earlier today that after months of negotiation the UK government has been working with four UK ISPs – Virgin Media, Talktalk, Sky and BT – to roll out of an opt-in pornography blocking system in which people will have to choose whether their internet connection will be able to access adult content.
“By the end of this year, when someone sets up a new broadband account the settings to install family friendly filters will be automatically selected,” Cameron said. “If you just click ‘next’ or ‘enter’, then the filters are automatically on.”
-
-
In yet another story of copyright being used as censorship, a clip of Senator Elizabeth Warren responding forcefully to some dubious claims made by some CNBC hosts has been pulled from Warren’s own YouTube account:
-
You know from reading IT-Lex that in Britain, online defamation is no laughing matter. Over the weekend, the Independent posted news of a new, developing legal skirmish involving something that was said on Twitter. Perhaps you remember Pippa Middleton, whose sudden rise to fame threatened to overshadow her sister’s (royal) wedding. Last year, Pippa released a book of cooking and entertaining tips, entitled “Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Families and Friends”. Why? Who knows – but it’s a question that was asked by The Telegraph. Reviews were savage, and apparently sales weren’t too strong either. Not surprisingly, this book opened Pippa up to some internet mockery, and that’s where the current issues arise.
-
UK PRIME MINISTER Dave Cameron is getting ready to announce a UK system for accessing adult content, an opt-in one that will probably be worse than no controls whatsoever.
We had a whiff of this last week when ISPs were reacting to a letter from the government that asked them to kick in cash for craziness and consider making people think that the system would be default-on rather than an opt-in choice.
The ISPs confirmed the letter and it was not well received, but the government decided to push on with its plans anyway.
-
David Cameron’s quest to clean up the dark corners of the internet continues. As I’ve written before, his policies are ignorant and technically implausible. His latest attack on Google and its competitors is showboating of the most transparent kind. The Prime Minister has scented blood after Google’s public shaming over tax and sees easy poll gains in pursuing the internet giant on the understandably emotive topic of child sexual abuse.
-
-
Privacy
-
The security official said that NSA remains adamant that Snowden’s revelations caused serious damage and believes that it knows the extent of the material that was downloaded.
-
-
-
Online activists hope to use Congress’ power of the purse to remove funding from domestic surveillance; they are rallying behind an amendment set for a vote on Tuesday.
-
While many news outlets are discussing the exposure of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, far fewer are discussing the “Federal Data Services Hub,” a database created by the Affordable Care Act.
-
-
-
Never mind the non-stop collection of metadata and other sneaky surveillance tools being implemented by the US: a new report has revealed the National Security Agency’s spy powers allow the government to grab location data on just about anyone.
-
By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off.
-
The National Security Agency workforce has grown by at least one-third, to about 33,000 employees, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the agency has expanded its headquarters and operations to rival the size of the Pentagon.
-
Last month’s realisation that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) — by means of a top-secret program codenamed “PRISM,” has been trawling the audio, video, photo, email, and phone records of millions of Americans at home and abroad, serves as a stark reminder to those of us living in supposed “liberal democracies” that we’ve increasingly allowed state-surveillance mechanisms to become normalised and domesticated in a post 9/11 world.
-
Fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has become the winner of this year’s Whistleblower Award established by German human rights organizations, the German branch of Transparency International said in a statement, according to RIA Novosti.
“This year’s winner of the Whistleblower Award is Edward Snowden,” said the statement posted on TI Germany website on Monday, July 22.
-
-
Paltalk COO and President Wilson Kriegel discusses the company’s growth and the NSA leaker Ed Snowden’s mention of the company with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West”
-
Britain’s Guardian newspaper has repeatedly declared its support for whistle-blower Edward Snowden to be put on trial in the United States.
-
One of the ways that the US National Security Agency taps into internet traffic is by going straight to the major data hubs that international traffic passes through. But secretly gathering that data isn’t so simple: for every tap into the transmissions, some data is lost — and someone monitoring it for intruders is bound to notice.
-
Litt acknowledged that public discussion about these kinds of activities should have been taking place before Snowden leaked data revealing the programs’ existence. Now exposed and with details at least partially disclosed, intelligence community officials are working on declassifying and publicly releasing program information, a plan for which Litt said he is optimistic.
-
-
The former American intelligence operative Edward Snowden is still trapped in transit. A previous NSA whistleblower tells Channel 4 News about the “ruthless” government campaign against him.
-
Decades ago, long before the Reagan and Bushes, the government had already expanded its domestic surveillance activity beyond that of any time in history. Created in 1952, the NSA immediately became the biggest American intelligence agency, with more than 30,000 employees at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and listening posts around the world. Part of the Defense Department, it is the successor to the State Department’s “Black Chamber” and American military eavesdropping and code-breaking operations that date to the early days of telegraph and telephone communications.
-
The WikiLeaks Party has written to Australia’s Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim formally complaining about the recently revealed news that the telco signed a secret agreement a decade ago with US Government agencies such as the FBI and the Department of Justice that provided American law enforcement with access to all of the telco’s traffic passing in and out of the US.
The text of Telstra’s deal was published last week by independent media outlet Crikey (PDF) and has caused consternation in Australia’s technology community, due to the breadth of the access provided by Telstra. Telstra was one signatory to the deal, which came about due to its joint venture Reach landing submarine telecommunications cable into the US.
-
Startpage.com is my search engine of choice.
-
We’ve covered the NSA revelations and subsequent government petitions at some length, but here’s a new twist to the story of the government’s pervasive monitoring program — a view of the activity from an ISP’s perspective. According to Pete Ashdown, the CEO of XMission, a Utah ISP, the company received its first FISA warrant “request” in 2010. There’s no way to challenge FISA warrants and no legal recourse — so Ashdown had no choice but to install a server, one of the NSA’s own machines, in their data center.
-
The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, apparently aware of the stigma associated with their names, has a new modus operandi: Work through interfaith partners whenever possible. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is using that tactic in its lawsuit against the National Security Agency, letting the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles take the lead.
-
-
Germany’s two main intelligence services used a special surveillance programme of the US to collect vast amounts of communications data, even as the government continued to deny prior knowledge of such operations, a report claimed Sunday.
-
Revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs made by Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old ex-NSA contractor currently searching for a safe haven so he can escape espionage charges, have rocked not only U.S. residents, but the nation’s allies as well.
-
Nicolás Maduro reiterated his rejection and condemnation of the statements issued by Samantha Power, the Washington ambassador nominee to the United Nations, on Venezuela. “When she went to Congress, she went crazy and started to attack Venezuela just like that. She started to say that she is going to the UN to monitor and make clear what the repression on political and civil institutions in Venezuela is, and that she will address the lack of democracy in Venezuela”
-
Intelligence agencies in Germany and the US have been collaborating, according to a new report from a German magazine. The German government has been using bulk data collected by the National Security Agency.
-
In a detailed account on Foreign Policy, the Central intelligence Agency, in concert with the National Security Agency, has been demonstrated to conduct what is referred to as “black bag” operations, or the manual hacking of a target’s computer by uploading spyware onto anything ranging from personal laptops to large-scale servers. When a specific target is out of the NSA’s reach, it calls on the CIA to do, in its own parlance, a “surreptitious entry.”
-
Since the early days of the Cold War, the FBI and CIA have bent the law to spy on American citizens, starting with Eastern European refugees who had sought sanctuary in this country, writes Richard Rashke.
-
He is the billionaire Google boss under fire for not doing enough to protect children from internet porn.
Yet today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that 58-year-old Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, does fiercely protect one thing: his own private life, which is as colorful and complex as the ever-changing ‘Google doodle,’ which pops up each time the search engine is launched.
In the past few years, the unlikely sex symbol with thinning hair and pockmarked skin has embarked on a string of affairs with younger women, including a vivacious television host who dubbed him ‘Dr Strangelove,’ a leggy blonde public relations executive and a sexy Vietnamese concert pianist.
-
-
I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety—if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life—with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.
Read more: A Letter to Edward Snowden | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/175339/letter-edward-snowden#ixzz2Zkz7joBC
Follow us: @thenation on Twitter | TheNationMagazine on Facebook
-
-
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Monday promised a full review of Germany’s intelligence services amid public anger over media reports that they were cooperating with their U.S. counterparts in domestic spying.
-
-
Germans are very protective of their privacy because of the historical experience during the Nazi era and Stasi following the war, Annie Machon a former intelligence officer for MI5 has told RT.
-
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Monday announced a probe into ties between its secret services and US agencies whose sweeping online surveillance was revealed by fugitive intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.
-
Whatever your civil liberties stance, the technologies underpinning the National Security Agency’s data collection and analysis programs, such as PRISM, spell opportunity for companies looking to connect a different set of dots — identifying potential customers, spotting fraud or cybercrime in its early stages, or improving products and services.
The pillars of the NSA’s architecture are big data systems, particularly a distributed data store called Accumulo, machine learning and natural language processing software, and scale-out cloud hardware (we delve into all three in much more depth in our full report).
-
-
The US’ National Security Agency could be rejigged as a self-funded entity fulfilling its missions while saving taxpayers billions of dollars and also providing them with a host of useful services.
Its substantial computing platform and its superior security knowledge could jumpstart new jobs and businesses if the agency had a commercial arm.
The NSA is interested in the tiniest fraction of the data it collects, the bits about finding terrorists. The rest of the data is useless to it but it keeps it anyway. It’s a highly valuable resource to others.
-
-
Pete Ashdown, the CEO of small Utah ISP XMission, says that in 2010 he received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant that allowed the federal government to monitor the Internet activity of one of his customers. Ashdown was also given a gag order, preventing him from talking about key details relating to the warrant. In an article on BuzzFeed, he explained how the government “wanted to come in and put in equipment on my network to monitor a single customer.” Federal agents came in and set up a duplicate port that tapped into the customer’s traffic and allowed the government to see everything the person sent and received. The executive noted that the ending result was “a little box in our systems room that was capturing all the traffic to this customer.”
-
Among the snooping revelations of recent weeks, there have been tantalizing bits of evidence that the NSA is tapping fiber-optic cables that carry nearly all international phone and Internet data.
The idea that the NSA is sweeping up vast data streams via cables and other infrastructure — often described as the “backbone of the Internet” — is not new. In late 2005, the New York Times first described the tapping, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. More details emerged in early 2006 when an AT&T whistleblower came forward.
-
In Louisiana, the wife of a former soldier is scaling back on Facebook posts and considering unfriending old acquaintances, worried an innocuous joke or long-lost associate might one day land her in a government probe. In California, a college student encrypts chats and emails, saying he’s not planning anything sinister but shouldn’t have to sweat snoopers. And in Canada, a lawyer is rethinking the data products he uses to ensure his clients’ privacy.
-
-
These actions might be dastardly all on their own, but when you measure them against how the United States has behaved when the shoes were on the other foot, you’re left with a dose of hypocrisy that would kill most lab rats. Take, for instance, the case of Michael Christopher Meili, security guard in Switzerland (chocolate!) for UBS, their mega-bank. He revealed some of UBS’ shady dealings when it came to the banking documents of Jewish clients during the holocaust.
-
While the government and defenders of the NSA surveillance program continue to want to paint Ed Snowden out to be a spy and trying to “aid the enemy,” public opinion continues to side with Snowden and believe that he’s a clear whistleblower, calling attention to government excess. Glenn Greenwald has published a fascinating email exchange between Snowden and former Senator Gordon Humphrey, who apparently sent an unsolicited email to Snowden to thank him for exposing government wrongs.
-
-
In one sentence, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) dismisses public outcry over the NSA’s global surveillance program — and reports NSA spying will continue.
-
July 28th marks the 35th anniversary of the political assassination of two Puerto Rican independence activists, Carlos Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado, in the infamous Cerro Maravillai case. This case, which was widely followed among Puerto Ricans, involved an agent provocateur that led the activists to an ambush that resulted in their brutal murder by paramilitary agents within the colonial police force. The event led to two investigations, the second of which revealed a conspiracy to cover up both the assassination plot as well as the destruction and manipulation of evidence carried out by the colonial police and justice department, and well as the federal justice department and FBI. Cerro Maravilla symbolizes for many the most outstanding recent example of repressive measures, from surveillance to political assassination, unleashed by US imperialism against the anticolonial movement in Puerto Rico.
-
What happens when a former top-level State Department official asks the government to reveal if it’s reading his communications? John Kael Weston on his adventures in our national-security state.
-
In a new report about the rapid expansion of the US National Security Agency, The Washington Post details a cellphone location tracking program whose existence the agency initially seemed to deny following disclosures from whistleblower Edward Snowden. As part of the agency’s considerable post-9/11 growth, the NSA assembled a team in the basement of its headquarters in Fort Meade whose purpose is to track the locations of cellphones in real time, The Post reports.
-
He notes that this particular monitoring experience ended about two years ago, and he wonders if he’ll hear from them for talking about the experience, but he’s willing to face up to that. Of course, there are very, very few ISP owners who are willing to stand up and talk like this. Beyond Ashdown, the short list includes Nicholas Merrill and I’m not sure who else. If more internet companies were willing to speak up, it would help bring more clarity to what’s going on, even if they faced some significant backlash in doing so.
-
Civil Rights
-
A nursing student at Pima Community College (PCC) has filed a lawsuit claiming that she was illegally suspended after she complained that her classmates were speaking in Spanish and orally translating English to Spanish so excessively that she was failing to learn.
-
-
He can order anyone indefinitely detained. He can throw them in military dungeons. He can deny them due process and judicial fairness.
-
President Obama was a late convert to the Bush Administration’s antiterror detention policies, but his latter-day position has now been vindicated. A panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals voted 3-0 last week to reject a lower court order that would have limited the ability of Congress to authorize the President to detain enemy combatants and those who aid and abet them.
-
White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.
-
The Fourth Circuit — which covers CIA, JSOC, and NSA’s territory — just ruled that journalists who are witnesses to alleged crimes (or participants, the opinion ominously notes) must testify in the trial.
-
She says she had no warning that someone was going to search her car after she left to catch her flight. So the woman contacted News10NBC.
We found out it happened to her because she valet parked her car. Those are the only cars that get inspected.
-
“In 2008, in a piece you wrote, ‘Why am I a socialist?’ you wrote this: ‘The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake,” host Paul Jay says to Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges during the latest installment of an interview on The Real News Network’s “Reality Inserts Itself.” He then asks: “Do you still believe that?”
Hedges responds: “Yes, because we have allowed ourselves to embrace an ideology which, at its core, states that all governance is about maximizing corporate profit at the expense of the citizenry. For what do we have structures of government, for what do we have institutions of state, if not to hold up all the citizenry, and especially the most vulnerable?”
-
-
Two recent news reveal that Homo sapiens aren’t always loyal to a tyrannical regime. Edward Snowden opened the valve so that crude secrets could flow out of NSA’s pipelines—to benefit humanity. And, in protest of America’s “dirty wars,” Brandon Toy publicly resigned last week from his job at the US Defense contractor General Dynamics. In his resignation letter, published on Common Dreams, Toy wrote: “I have always believed that if every foot soldier threw down his rifle war would end. I hereby throw mine down.”
-
The US led NSA’s ‘phone signal tracking’ program has reportedly helped Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) locate militant targets for drone attacksin Pakistan.
-
DRM
-
Speaking at Image’s annual Image Expo event, Stephenson declared that—effectively immediately—all digital comics sold through the company’s revamped website would be free of digital rights management (DRM) technology. This decision makes Image the first major comic book publisher to sell its digital content without the chains that have frustrated many readers for years.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
The embattled porn-trolling operation known as Prenda Law is in hot water, largely due to a tough sanctions order penned by US District Judge Otis Wright. That order required Prenda to pay $81,000 in sanctions and also referred lawyers connected to the group to criminal investigators.
-
Finland is the first country in the world in which Parliament will vote on a “fairer” copyright law that has been crowdsourced by the public. The proposal, which obtained the required 50,000 Finnish votes just a day before the deadline, seeks to decriminalize file-sharing and legalize the copying of items that people already own.
-
A citizens’ initiative for more reasonable application of copyright law passed the 50,000 signature mark on Monday, meaning it will go to Parliament for debate. Meanwhile, a call for a national referendum on continued EU membership expired without gaining sufficient voter backing.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.21.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Desktop
-
ChromeBook and ChromeBox users on Beta track must immediately check their settings, the Chrome OS Beta channel has been updated to version 29.0.1537.32. The new updated brings with it bug fixes, security patches and several new features and improvements. The update will be rolling out to all the devices over next few days.
-
Kernel Space
-
The Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 performance for OpenGL doesn’t change much if trying out the experimental Linux 3.11 kernel.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Ian Romanick of Intel went ahead this week and branched the code-base for Mesa 9.2. Feature-development on Mesa 9.2 is now over and it’s a period of bug-fixing ahead of the official Mesa 9.2 release in August.
As shared earlier when talking about the Mesa release process changes, upstream developers have been planning for an August Mesa 9.2 release and after that point will likely be switching to pushing out new releases every three months rather than six.
-
A lot of Linux desktop users are looking forward to the full port of the Enlightenment desktop to Wayland.
-
Benchmarks
-
Coming out today are our first Linux 3.11 kernel file-system benchmarks. Being benchmarked from a higher-end OCZ Vertex 3 SATA 3.0 SSD connected to an Intel Core i7 “Haswell” system are the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems.
-
To complement the EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and F2FS benchmark results that were published yesterday from the Linux 3.11 kernel and its predecessors, here are some Btrfs tuning benchmarks on the Linux 3.11 kernel with various performance-sensitive Btrfs mount options being tried.
-
Applications
-
It’s really important to keep track of your financial position. Online banking can keep you up to date about your account activity and balance, but not every bank offers more tools than that in order to better track your finances.
-
Install Sayonara Audio Player 0.4.0 in Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy/Ubuntu 13.04 Raring/Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal/Ubuntu 12.04 Precise/11.10/11.04/Linux Mint 15/14/13/12/11/previous Ubuntu & Mint Versions/and other Ubuntu Derivatives
-
Proprietary
-
Whilst Linux is an excellent system for programmers, it’s certainly a little wanting for people who deal with creative graphics. There are tools like Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender and Digikam and so on to help fill this gap, but one area which isn’t talked about so often are CAD tools. As an architecture student and a Linux user, I can safely say that the options are disappointing. It certainly is possible to have a complete graphics workflow on Linux, but it’s not as good as on Windows.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Over recent years, libferris has been using Qt to mount some Web stuff as a filesystem. I have a subclass of QIODevice which acts as an intermediary to allow one to write to a std::ostream and stream that data to the Web, over a POST for example. For those interested, that code is in Ferris/FerrisQt.cpp of the tarball. It’s a bit of a shame that Qt heavy web code isn’t in KIO or that the two virtual filesystems are not closer linked, but I digress.
-
Games
-
-
Valve reminds us that Dota 2 for Mac and Linux, shortly after the game was taken out of beta on the PC.
-
DoTA, or Defense of the Ancients, was mod made for the game Warcraft III. It was so popular that the mod spawned a cult following. The following was so great that the mod was noticed by Valve, who decided that a standalone game based on the Source Engine would be a profitable venture.
-
-
Following the official launch for Windows earlier this month, Valve’s, er, Dota clone Dota 2 is now available for Mac and Linux. This sentence is a hilarious joke about how Linux users are already well-prepared for complex systems with unfriendly communities, but Mac users are in for a hell of a ride. Laughs.
-
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
Developers behind the lightweight Qt-based Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt desktops met up at KDE’s Akademy 2013 conference. During the annual KDE developer conference, the two lightweight desktops decided to merge their efforts around LXDE-Qt.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
-
The slides and the video of the talk are both already available. If you’ve seen the talk, please consider leaving me some feedback – it’s always appreciated.
-
I arrived back home from Akademy just a day ago and I already miss it. I enjoyed every single moment of it and had lots and lots of fun. Thanks everyone for making this such an awesome event, and especially to the local team. They did an incredible job!
-
-
Some time ago, VFX artist Paul Geraskin created a video to show off how well Krita and the sculpting application 3D-Coat combined in his workflow:
-
What a cool time! I am still thrilled, now two days home after Akademy and QtCS, which took place the last week in Bilbao. Several great reports about what happened there and what was discussed can already be found in the net:
-
-
ROSA Desktop R1 GNOME is the edition of the R line of desktop distributions from ROSA Laboratory that uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment. The beta edition that was supposed to be a Release Candidate was made available for download earlier today.
This article offers a few screen shots from a test installation of this beta edition in a virtual environment. Note that while the GNOME 3 edition of the R series is still in the beta stage of development, stable editions of the KDE and LXDE desktop environments have already been released.
-
New Releases
-
Dear guys, we did our best to turn the DEFT 8 beta version into stable – also by listening to your precious suggestions/feedback – and here we are! 
-
Red Hat Family
-
Proving to be as hip as the company he leads, Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says a viral debate over whether the sign atop the company’s tower in downtown Raleigh not only doesn’t bother him, he welcomes it.
-
Fedora
-
We had a meeting on IRC with a general overview and some things we need to sort out with our migration to ansible. You can read the meeting minutes at: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meetbot/fedora-meeting-1/2013-07-17/infrastructure-ansible-meetup.2013-07-17-19.00.html help or comments always welcome. Many of the outstanding questions are things we likely will discuss and finish planning at the upcoming flocktofedora conference. There’s also now a wiki page with this information on it too: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_ansible_migration
-
Unlike the Fedora KDE desktop, which featured a full cast of native KDE applications, including using Konqueror as the default Web browser, Korora 19 KDE shipped with a mix of native KDE and non-native KDE applications. For example, Firefox is the default Web browser, which is a far better Web browser than Konqueror.
-
Debian Family
-
This week I made two releases of my mail client. Immediately after both releases I found bugs. Despite having been using the github source tree on my box for reading mail for days.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical is back to trying to get upstream Mesa/Gallium3D to support their Mir Display Server. In their current form, the support comes across 15 patches for bringing up the Mir EGL platform.
-
This has been a good week for the build. I’ve got the DVD drives wrapped, more paracord has arrived (enough to do the top), the side windows are ready to cut and I finally got sponsored, thanks to IceModz.com .
I’ve also got around to planning the mount and door for the ITX board and Mac Mini. They will be mounted sideways, possibly with a mount in the middle, possibly with just zip ties. This will be connected to the bottom 4 5.25″ drive mounts and a front USB panel. I’ll try to add a door too, but i might not be able to.
-
We expect to see the first Ubuntu OS-powered smartphone unveiled later in the year and in the meantime, Canonical is demoing its upcoming platform on a couple of Nexus devices, Nexus 4 and Nexus 10.
-
Canonical plans to introduce something next week, and there’s a good chance it’ll be a phone-related announcement about something called Edge. While we’ll have to wait a few days for all the details, some folks did a little sleuthing around the Ubuntu website and found a series of pictures with “Edge” in the name.
-
On the Ubuntu web-site has been a teaser about “the line where two surfaces meet” and a 4-day countdown (ending 22 July). There’s been wild speculation about this countdown and now it appears it will be an announcement of Ubuntu Edge, the first Ubuntu-powered smartphone.
-
Ubuntu for Android hasn’t turned out to be quite the “wide open” project we’d anticipated. That particular project, which would turn a smartphone and smartdock into a desktop PC, is still having its kinks worked out and deals are still attempting to be made. The future of that is still uncertain, but the folks at Canonical have something else up their sleeves worth showing.
-
-
Phones
-
Ballnux
-
Chinese Multinational Telecom company ZTE has finally entered Indian smartphone market. The world’s fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer has launched 6 new smartphones and 4 3G data cards in India. The smartphones are all priced between Rs 5,000 – Rs15,000. For the distribution of its smartphones, ZTE has signed a strategic partnership with Pune based Calyx Telecommunications.
-
Android
-
Nexus 7 II is perhaps one of the most awaited devices of this year, with rumours and leaks surfacing on the internet every other day. It seems that the internet public won’t stop speculating until there is an official release or confirmation from Google. In keeping with the trend of daily leaks, this time, another picture surfaced, supposedly listing the features of the new Nexus 7 II.
-
Motorola has sent invite for an event for August 1st. While event invite didn’t reveal much detail, it clearly has the Words ‘Moto X’ in big letters. The invite image has nothing more than a few people sitting around. However, on closer observation one can see that two of those people are holding Moto X, one in white and the other in black. Below ‘Moto X’, we can only see ‘August 1’, and ‘New York’.
-
Google’s green robot has something brewing, and signs point to it being an improved Nexus 7 tablet and an updated version of the Android operating system.
-
With digital privacy, security and anonymity in the public consciousness, thanks to information revealed by Edward Snowden, any tool or application that can help you communicate securely with your friends is always welcome.
-
The Sony Xperia Z Ultra, the massive, almost tablet, phone from Sony has been confirmed to be launched worldwide recently. Not to be left too far behind, especially since Hong Kong will be getting the same later this month, an online retailer by the name of Saholic has started listing the phone as being available starting from July 31st. The price, however, has not been mentioned. Though given that the Hong Kong version is going to retail for around $799, we can expect it to retail at around Rs. 47,500.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
How nostalgic! Today I powered on my wife’s Asus Eee PC 901. That is a tiny 8.9 inch netbook that came with 1Gb RAM, 20Gb SSD, and Linux pre-installed. My wife kept it at her mother’s house, but brought it back two weeks ago.
-
OLPC is a non-profit organization but to produce a product for the world it needs revenue and the established markets for IT has that. Since most of the devices in that market are for grown-ups, it makes sense for OLPC to ship units there at market-prices as a source of revenue and also to improve the life of children there. They can then ship units at subsidized prices to the rest of the world. Think about it. That’s not much different than the previous “by two, give one” campaign. Whatever works…
-
VLC, one of the most popular media player applications of all-time, is finally available again in the Apple App Store.
-
I am pleased to announce that Daniel Hinojosa has rejoined our team as Community Manager.
-
Facebook’s HipHop VM (HHVM) did a new release last week and now it’s even faster! HHVM 2.1 also supports more language functionality.
-
Software review website Boffin finally announces its top picks for open source audio converter software. The Boffin choices include much-anticipated software along with lesser known newcomers. Professional and high quality audio conversion is today commonly available to consumers. With the ubiquity of technology and financial accessibility of audio converter software, more people have the chance of converting their audio files to formats compatible with their own music devices.
-
-
Following a two-year absence from the iOS App Store, popular media player VLC is back. Version 2.0.1 of VideoLAN’s free open-source player hit the store on Friday, and just like before, it’s an unadorned universal app — compatible with select iPhones, iPod touch devices and iPads — that claims to play pretty much any video file you can throw at it.
-
Netflix, aside from delivering streaming video to consumers, also wants to provide open-source software — Netflix OSS – to tech vendors. Netflix, in its quest to fill gaps in Amazon Web Services has come up with more than a dozen tools — including the popular Chaos Monkey for testing web application resiliency – that are now available on Github to any cloud providers. The goal is to help these third parties make their own cloud infrastructure more robust, flexible and glitch free.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Chrome has always been a flexible browser with a lot of extensions. The browser has also kind of served as a test base for Google’s own PC OS called; you guessed it, Chrome OS. If you look into the Chrome Browser extension gallery, a remote desktop extension can be found that enables the user to remote control a PC running Chrome.
-
-
Mozilla
-
If you are not an Apple iOS fanatic, or much impressed with Android either and taking an interest in Mozilla’s Mobile Operating System FireFox OS, you might be happy to hear that Mozilla has released FireFox OS 1.1. Also if you are following Mozilla’s Mobile OS, you might have a Geeksphone in your hand, complementing the geek in you, because it’s the only device known to support FireFox OS for now.
-
One of the world’s leading open source tech brands has settled on the Brewery Blocks for its Portland outpost.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla Corp. said today it will open an office in the Brewery Blocks in the Pearl District this month. It will be Mozilla’s first U.S. office outside of the Bay Area.
-
Great discussions are par for the course here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Check out these discussions and add your own thoughts to make them even more wonderful!
-
Last time I had tried Firefox OS was back in December 2012 (Run Firefox OS in GNOME). At that time Firefox Simulator Extension (through WebBrowser) was only available for Windows (perhaps for Mac too), so for that post I had to install all the development environment to try it. Which was cool anyway!
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
On July 19th, 2010, the CTO of NASA joined with Rackspace to announce a new effort, known as OpenStack.
-
Cloud computing is designed to harness the power of networks of computers and communications in a cost effective way. Cloud systems offer cheap access to huge computational, storage, and network resources. These systems offer per-user and per-application isolation and customization via a service interface that is often implemented using high-level language technologies, well-defined Application Programming Interfaces, and web services.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Let’s say you want to use an office suite on your favorite Linux distribution. All right, which one? This is an interesting question really, and often left without a good answer. Unlike most other categories, where friendly wars are most welcome, the office suite competition takes a back bench in the digital combat. So you know your way around browsers, media players or chat programs. What about office programs?
-
Funding
-
OpenIncubate is a joint project by Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures in Boston, and The Valley Fund, located in Menlo Park, CA. The firms hope to boost open-source startups in each region with mentoring and seed funding.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Public Services/Government
-
Science
-
-
In the past 100 million years, fish with spiky dorsal and anal fins — an effective anti-predator device — have occupied every nook and cranny of the planet, said Peter Wainwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis. The group includes more than 90 percent of coral reef fish species and almost everything humans commercially fish, including bass, pollock and tilapia.
-
The fraction 22/7 has been used since antiquity as a simple rational approximation of π. The fraction decimal expansion is 3.(142857); since π is about 3.141592653589793, the approximation has three correct digits. Of course we can do much better with computers, and billions of digits are now known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_π is a nice review also explaining some fast computation methods. For example if you want to obtain a lot of π digits in a short time you may like the series by Ramanujan, yielding very good approximations even with a small number of terms; but that’s not the point now.
-
Hardware
-
The retail channel is currently facing serious excessive inventory troubles as most retailers are still unable to finish digesting their Ivy Bridge-based PC inventories and could be working on clearing the inventories for the rest of 2013, according to sources from channel retailers.
-
Wintel just cannot compete against FLOSS on ARM if M$ and Intel don’t toss their high-priced model. OEMs are fleeing to */Linux on small cheap computers. In my own home Wintel is dead. All of my PCs do run Intel or AMD except for tablets and smartphones but my next purchase may well be an ARMed PC. I have spent more money on a new motherboard and PSU to keep Beast alive than it would cost to get a good ARMed system up and running. For example, I could buy the up-coming descendant of Trimslice, Utilite.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
The pesticides blamed for killing at least 25 children in India are widely used around the world, including in the United States, and health experts have raised safety concerns about this class of chemicals in the past.
-
Security
-
Smartphones are susceptible to malware and carriers have enabled NSA snooping
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government’s spying on American citizens is that it’s only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there’s a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of “terrorism” and “weapon of mass destruction” are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.
-
It can’t be said often enough: the TSA isn’t law enforcement. The TSA isn’t law enforcement.
-
The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, has told the Senate that the Obama administration is actively considering the use of military force in Syria.
-
Venezuela has announced it is ending efforts to improve diplomatic relations with Washington after comments by the woman nominated as the next envoy to the UN vowed to oppose “a crackdown on civil society” in the “repressive” OPEC nation.
President Nicolas Maduro has responded angrily by demanding an apology from the United States, arguing that they have no moral right to criticise his government.
-
Newly-appointed foreign minister says ‘everything will be re-evaluated’ following the ouster of Morsi; in Cairo, security forces raid office of Iranian TV channel.
-
Egyptian security forces on Saturday evening raided the office of Iranian Al Alam TV channel in Cairo and detained its director for questioning, a correspondent of Al Alam told Xinhua.
-
A year ago, Nasser Al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar Al-Awlaki, along with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, sued over the constitutionality of the CIA’s drone program, which they contended had killed Al-Awlaki, his sixteen year old son Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan, all US citizens. It wasn’t until this May, however, that the White House, via a letter from Eric Holder to Congress, admitted responsibility for the killings. According to Holder, only the older Al-Awlaki was specifically targeted by the US. The disclosure came only two months after a federal appeals court ruled the CIA could not decline to confirm or deny a drone program that had become secret-in-name-only. And despite President Obama’s occasional lip service to contemplation or discussion, government stonewalling continues.
-
-
Central Australia’s Pine Gap spy base has played a key role in the United States’ controversial drone strikes involving the ”targeted killing” of al-Qaeda and Taliban chiefs, Fairfax Media can reveal.
Former personnel at the Australian-American base have described the facility’s success in locating and tracking al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders – and other insurgent activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan – as ”outstanding”.
-
-
The UK communications giant, BT, is facing a government investigation for allegedly aiding lethal and illegal US drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.
The human rights group, Reprieve, has lodged a formal complaint with the UK Government against the company, arguing that it has breached guidelines on responsible business behaviour drawn up by the 34-country Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Reprieve has obtained details of a $23 million deal agreed last September between BT and the US government’s Defense Information Systems Agency to connect the US drone base at Camp Lemonnier in African republic Djibouti by fibre-optic cable to RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, which serves as a major US communications base.
-
Fallout from the airstrikes, locals warn, threatens to doom any attempts at collaboration – the feeling of powerlessness they fuel has bred an atmosphere of distrust that’s left many here leery of even international humanitarian organizations.
-
Interestingly, citing the justification for this attack, TTP’s spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told journalists that foreigners were targeted to convey message to the world against drone attacks. But the victims belonged to Pakistan’s friendly countries including China which supported the country’s stance against drone attacks on all the international forums. Even Russians, on many occasions, have condemned the brutal use of kinetic actions through drones. Such an action at this stage clearly indicates that TTP in fact was sponsored by hostile agencies to undertake this operation.
-
The lawsuit charges that the killings violated the Constitution, including its most elementary protection against the deprivation of life without due process of law. Seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, the Justice Department has maintained that such killings are immune from judicial review. The administration argues that due process does not require judicial process and that we should trust the executive’s judgment when it takes the lives of its own citizens abroad.
-
Mandela was labeled a terrorist by the United States. So was the entire ANC. Even as late as 2008 the U.S. State Department had to pass special waivers so that Mandela or any ANC leader could visit the United States because he and the ANC were still on the “terrorist watch list.”
-
“The foundations of the secret war were laid by a conservative Republican president and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited,” Mazzetti writes at one point. History will have to decide who deserves the harsher judgment.
-
Recorded Future is an American-Swedish startup backed by both Google Ventures and American intelligence agencies. Their goal? To predict the future using bits and pieces of online information.
-
Fear of alienating Russia was a factor in the government’s decision to refuse a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the home secretary, Theresa May, has admitted.
The government said last week that it had decided not to grant a request from a senior judge for an inquiry into the former Russian spy’s apparent murder in 2006, in a decision that Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, said was political.
-
-
-
“There is no ‘Leon Panetta exception’ to the Constitution,” ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi said.
-
As Edward Snowden is linked to one country after the next, the media has its eye fixed on where he will next request asylum. (Today, it’s Russia.) Meanwhile, back at US headquarters, as NSA officials speak in a House Judiciary Committee hearing, the agency is still doing what it’s doing. To get more information on exactly what that means, the TED Blog wrote to two security experts, Bruce Schneier (watch his talk) and Mikko Hypponen (see his talk), to ask them about what it is we should be worried about. Turns out, pretty much everything.
-
A federal judge said Friday that she finds “disconcerting” the Obama administration’s position that courts have no role in a lawsuit over the 2011 drone-strike killings of three U.S. citizens in Yemen, including an al-Qaida cleric.
U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer made the comment at a hearing on a government motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The suit was filed by relatives of the three men killed in the drone strikes, charging that the attacks violated the Constitution. It named as defendants then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, then-CIA Director David Petraeus and two commanders in the military’s Special Operations forces, and seeks unspecified compensatory damages.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
-
-
Manning was arrested in May 2010 after allegedly leaking more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, 400,000 U.S. Army reports about Iraq and another 90,000 about Afghanistan, as well as the material used in the “Collateral Murder” video produced by WikiLeaks: videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Garani airstrike in Afghanistan. At the time, it constituted the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Much of it was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.
-
-
The Manning Trial, with all its state-like ghastliness, the prosecution pawing and bruising those who disagree with it into submission, has thrown up a few distinct and disturbing trends. Ecclesiastes 1:9 claims there is nothing new under the sun, and we have been greeted to the predictable prosecution seeking to paint WikiLeaks as the spectre haunting global security. This is backhanded flattery of sorts – the organisation has to be seen by the security establishment as innately wicked and corrosive to state “values” (constipated secrecy, sinister deception, orchestrated dissimulation).
It is therefore incumbent that every feature of the WikiLeaks’ experiment be attacked: its journalism (qualified or otherwise), its sources, its backers. Army Private first class Bradley Manning is but the important conduit, and this entire enterprise on the part of the U.S. government is an attempt to punish the flow of information all cogs and channels.
-
-
A US military judge has refused to dismiss a charge that whistleblower Bradley Manning aided the enemy, including Osama bin Laden, by handing classified material to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Col Denise Lind ruled out any possibility that the most serious charge facing private Manning at his court martial could be dropped, rejecting a motion put forward by the whistleblower’s lawyer.
-
Private first class Bradley Manning, the young American soldier who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, on Thursday edged closer to spending the rest of his life in a military prison cell – with the key thrown away.
-
Wikileaks has suggested that it will begin a campaign to fly the fugitive leaker Edward Snowden away from the grasp of the American authorities.
-
Governments take information very seriously, believe that even though we pay for it, they own it — and therefore think it right and proper to keep it hidden from us.
Governments do that because they know that information truly is power. And if governments hold all the significant information, governments hold all the significant power.
-
After Julian Assange revealed US war crimes and US politicians called for his assassination, Gillard branded Assange an anarchistic criminal.
-
It is widely believed by members of the international community that Assange’s extradition to Sweden is a vindictive ruse to ultimately thrust him into the legal jurisdiction of the United States to face charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of State Department documents. Sweden has consistently declined offers to interview Assange in Britain, reinforcing this perception.
-
These world developments – and the vacuum left by traditional oppositional left-parties or “anti-imperialist” movements, suggest the need of uniting Libertarian, Let-Liberal, and Pirate-Party movements, and followers of the emergent Whistleblowing movement, in a broad political Human-Rights front. This political effort aiming to enhance political awareness in a world society lamed by government-controlled social-networking and subliminal-implanted consumerism.
-
President Barack Obama’s administration has developed a reputation for aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers or individuals responsible for national security leaks. The policy adopted by the administration was influenced by former director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, who requested a “tally of the number of government officials or employees who had been prosecuted for leaking national security secrets,” according to the New York Times.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Peru last week initiated a new program that will provide electricity to more than two million of its poorest residents using solar panels.
-
Finance
-
-
Self-sacrifice, fear and lowered expectations are the new normal in post-recession America
-
Demonstrators protesting about non-payment of tax by large corporations shut several branches of HSBC across the country on Saturday.
UK Uncut targeted 13 locations and succeeded in shutting branches in Glasgow, Sheffield, Brixton and Regent Street in London – branches which HSBC initially said would be “open as usual”.
The group arrived at the Regent Street branch at about noon, 30 minutes after it had been shut “temporarily”, to protest against the government’s welfare cuts by “transforming” it into a food bank.
-
THE Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, is known for wearing down opponents by digging in his heels and biding his time. “Life is about resisting,” he texted Rosalía Iglesias, wife of his Popular Party’s (PP) former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, as a scandal engulfed him two years ago. Now Mr Bárcenas’s decision to go public in the press and before a magistrate about two decades of illicit PP financing, along with the leaking of text messages, is testing Mr Rajoy’s own capacity for resistance.
Four years after investigators began unravelling a web of PP corruption, Mr Bárcenas started to sing on July 15th. In an interview with El Mundo, he had already claimed there were systematic cash payments to Mr Rajoy and other bigwigs. On July 17th the paper published 14 pages of secret accounts, which tally with similar ones in its rival, El País. They show donations by construction firms that won big public contracts from PP governments. It is increasingly apparent that Mr Rajoy ran a party in which personal graft and illegal funding were common.
-
Charter schools and their proponents argue that charters must take any student who wants to attend– and randomly select students through a lottery if too many apply – and, as such, can’t control who enrolls. Yet some experts are concerned that this trend is an example of the next phase of white flight, following a long history of white families seeking out homogeneous neighborhoods and schools.
School choice was once seen as a means of helping to diversify schools in spite of residential segregation. But in practice, researchers have found charter schools to be segregated as well. While much attention and research on charter school segregation have focused on predominantly black schools located in cities, pockets of mostly white charters are popping up in diversifying suburbs.
-
In reality, this trade agreement is not about promoting prosperity for all, but powerful industry lobbies trying to dodge regulation
-
Censorship
-
David Cameron is to warn internet companies that they have a “moral duty” to reduce the accessibility of child pornography, threatening legislation if firms do not act.
-
Today we were expecting an announcement from David Cameron on the Andrew Marr Show previewing a speech on Monday about filters to stop children accessing adult pornography. Instead we have an announcement about paedophiles on the Internet. These are very different issues, needing different policy responses.
-
The Zambian government has stepped up its harassment of independent media outlets by arresting journalists and jamming two news websites.
In a country where the state already exercises control over most media, the authorities have blocked domestic access to Zambian Watchdog, and Zambia Reports.
Both sites run articles critical of the government led by President Michael Sata. Zambian Watchdog was forced into exile in 2009. Its journalists operate anonymously within Zambia, and the editors live in exile.
Police arrested freelance journalist Wilson Pondamali on Wednesday (17 July) while he was travelling home from the capital, Lusaka, and accused him of being a contributor to Zambian Watchdog.
-
There are times when I’m not sure that the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, actually understands this technology stuff. An example is this threat in a TV interview in England today.
-
When Yahoo! Inc acquired Tumblr last year, it assured the users that it would not police adult content on the social network. But now, Tumblr has just introduced changes to the way it treats Not Safe for Work (NSFW) content and adult blogs. It may not be considered as censorship yet, but it may impact how content with sensitive themes could be searched within the site.
-
Privacy
-
Journalist Glenn Greenwald says new reports from the trove of NSA data supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden can be expected in the next few days. Speaking on a German talkshow, he said they would be even “more explosive in Germany” than previous reporting.
-
The House Appropriations Committee unanimously passed legislation to ensure Americans’ email is private, is covered by the Fourth Amendment and cannot be searched by federal authorities without a warrant.
The legislation was approved by the committee Wednesday afternoon as an amendment to a must-pass spending bill that funds the Treasury, the White House, the federal judiciary and more than two dozen independent agencies — including the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
-
After multiple leaks that have been made of various spy programs as Prism, many users begin to see over their shoulders looking for alternatives to the various services offered by companies that are allegedly involved in these activities. If you are one of those who have undertaken this kind of exodus looking for more reliable service then let me introduce you a substitute for Gmail…
-
-
When such figures as Albert Einstein fled the Nazis, the US provided a haven. Now it’s time for Berlin to offer asylum to the persecuted
-
Reports that the US National Security Agency is spying on European allies and bugging embassies have been met with strong condemnation in Germany, where chancellor Angela Merkel angrily denounced the agency’s activities earlier this month as “unacceptable.” But new documents obtained by Der Spiegel reportedly show that German intelligence services actually make significant use of a powerful NSA spying program used to monitor internet communications.
-
A former US National Security Agency employee says President Barack Obama lies about the spy agency’s interception of personal communications because the NSA has transcribed Americans’ phone calls.
-
How do you go about securing your personal email content? Cryptoparties will teach you. They have been booming in Germany ever since the NSA scandal broke.
-
Google’s “back up my data feature” for Android may be a convenient and easy way to back up files, but it also may put network security at risk by exposing the passwords of encrypted Wi-Fi networks.
-
A German who posted a Facebook event calling for an afternoon walk to the US Dagger Complex to “observe NSA spies in action” ended up being spied on himself. The event and the response from authorities has gone viral.
-
The biggest names in telecommunications industry have launched a new lobbying group headed by two Washington insiders to advocate for privacy policies that could affect millions of consumers nationwide.
-
-
The Russian lawyer for NSA leaker Edward Snowden predicts his client will soon get temporary asylum in Russia
-
There’s been more pushback on privacy from the private sector ever since leaked documents revealed the existence of massive NSA spying programs that tap into consumer services. But the owner of XMission, a small ISP in Utah, has been especially adversarial towards the secret FISA court orders which force companies to give data to the government. After publishing a detailed list of government orders the company has received, CEO Pete Ashdown has offered some clues as to what happens when an internet service provider is forced to comply with a FISA surveillance order.
-
We have long noted that the government is spying on just about everything we do.
The NSA has pretended that it only spies on a small number of potential terrorists. But NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis inadvertently admitted that the NSA could spy on just about all Americans.
-
Der Speigel magazine has revealed German intelligence operated one of NSA’s spying programs. Chancellor Angela Merkel had denied any previous knowledge of NSA’s tactics, adding that she first learned about them through the media.
-
-
Here in the United States, it remains to be seen whether anyone actually cares enough to do something about the illegal activity while being bombarded with the false claims that the out of control surveillance program “has kept us safe.” It is interesting to observe in passing that the revelations derived from Snowden’s whistleblowing strongly suggest that the hippies and other counter-culture types who, back in the 1960s, protested that the government could not be trusted actually had it right all along.
-
-
Former President Jimmy Carter announced support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden this week, saying that his uncovering of the agency’s massive surveillance programs had proven “beneficial.”
Speaking at a closed-door event in Atlanta covered by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Carter also criticized the NSA’s domestic spying as damaging to the core of the nation’s principles.
-
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration’s NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
-
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration faced a growing Congressional backlash against the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance operations on Wednesday, as lawmakers from both parties called for the vast collection of private data on millions of Americans to be scaled back.
-
-
Protesters held up fake cameras in what they described as a bid to “spy” on the heavily secured military complex allegedly housing a snooping facility of the National Security Agency.
-
US imperialism spreads across Latin America through military bases and trade deals, corporate exploitation and debt. It also relies on a vast communications surveillance network, the recent uncovering of which laid bare Washington’s reach into the region’s streets and halls of power. Yet more than McDonald’s and bullets, an empire depends on fear, and fear of the empire is lacking these days in Latin America.
The controversy stirred up by Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reached the region on July 7th, when the first of a series of articles drawing from the leaks were published in the major Brazilian newspaper O Globo. The articles outlined how the US National Security Agency (NSA) had for years been spying on and indiscriminately collecting the emails and telephone records of millions of people in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, just as it had done in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
-
Angela Merkel and her ministers claim they first learned about the US government’s comprehensive spying programs from press reports. But SPIEGEL has learned that German intelligence services themselves use one of the NSA’s most valuable tools.
-
What can literary fiction teach us about recent revelations that the National Security Agency has aggressively been gathering massive amounts of data on American citizens? The novel one usually turns to, of course, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its terrifying vision of the Thought Police. Even President Obama, in response to questions about the NSA, has been forced to deny that the government has engaged in “Big Brother” tactics. Orwell’s book, however, isn’t the most compelling or accurate literary prediction of modern surveillance. That award goes to a less obvious title: J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
-
The journalist who published files leaked by fugitive U.S. leaker Edward Snowden says new reports from the data Snowden supplied would be more volatile.
[...]
The newspaper said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua Washington would end all sales of gasoline and other refined-oil products to Venezuela if Snowden is given refuge in that country.
Kerry made the statements during a phone call a week ago when he told Jaua Washington revoked U.S. visas of Venezuelan government officials and business leaders in retaliation for President Nicolas Maduro’s asylum offer to Snowden last month, the Spanish report said, citing sources familiar with the conversation.
-
-
As you may know, both the ACLU and EPIC have brought legal challenges to the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records and related traffic data (metadata). We at the Center for Internet and Society are writing an amicus brief on behalf of experts in metadata analysis to educate the Courts about how revealing such information can be. If you are potentially interested in signing on, please email me at jennifer at law dot stanford dot edu by July 25th. Also, if you have pointers to cutting edge research on this topic, please feel free to send the citations to me.
-
-
Surveys show Merkel and her conservatives remain frontrunners overall for the September 22 federal election, but two-thirds of German voters are dissatisfied with her government’s efforts to bring clarity to the murky affair.
-
-
-
Underlining the difficulties India faces while dealing with cases of cyber crimes, Mr. Menon has said: “The basic infrastructure for telephony and Internet data (including the root servers and Internet service providers or ISPs) is overwhelmingly U.S.-owned and based.”
-
-
-
I was curious about the NSA’s massive data processing center, so I went and took a look. That didn’t make the NSA too happy.
-
Retailers are using a combination of video cameras, WiFi signals from smartphones and apps to track shoppers in their stores. The New York Times reported over the weekend about Nordstrom’s experimentation with this technology, drawing some reactions that what it’s doing is “creepy.” The retailer says it is tracking shoppers who physically browse at its stores just as online retailers track those who click and buy.
-
Civil Rights
-
A DHS memo recently sent out to employees warns that workers found reading about the NSA leaks online could lose their job or be otherwise penalized.
-
The travesty calling itself “the Bradley Manning court-martial”, the kangaroo tribunal calling itself “the FISA court”, and the emptiness of what the Obama DOJ calls “your constitutional rights”
-
-
Will CFAA reform end with Aaron’s Law? Join TechFreedom and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on July 22 for drinks and a discussion of the future of CFAA reform.
-
-
In a major ruling on press freedoms, a divided federal appeals court on Friday ruled that James Risen, an author and a reporter for The New York Times, must testify in the criminal trial of a former Central Intelligence Agency official charged with providing him with classified information.
-
Following Kevin Rudd’s announcement, asylum seekers who arrive in Australian waters by boat will no longer have the chance to be settled in Australia. Three experts react
-
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.
-
-
-
-
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, one of the country’s most widely read history books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state’s top education officials: “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”
[...]
We know about Gov. Daniels’ email tantrum thanks to the Associated Press, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Scott Jenkins, Daniels’ education advisor, wrote back quickly to tell the governor that A People’s History of the United States was used in a class for prospective teachers on social movements at Indiana University.
Daniels fired back: “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn’t?”
After more back and forth, Daniels approved a statewide “cleanup” of what earns credit for professional development: “Go for it. Disqualify propaganda and highlight (if there is any) the more useful offerings.”
-
Ah, the rule of law. How often we hear our government leaders angrily demand that the rest of the world adhere to this sacred stricture, most recently as it demands that countries — even countries with which the US has signed no extradition treaty like Russia or China — honor the US charges leveled against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and send him to the US for trial.
But the rule of law, in truth, means little to the US, which routinely thumbs its nose at the whole notion.
-
In an extremely rare, last-minute move weeks after the government rested its case, military judge Col. Denise Lind allowed prosecutors to expand their rebuttal case, making way for unsupported accusations against PFC Bradley Manning. The late addition far exceeded the usual limits of a simple rebuttal, once again raising supporters’ and journalists’ suspicions about the validity and fairness of the proceedings.
In a cynical move, the government prosecution recalled former Specialist Jihrleah Showman, a supervisor against whom Manning had filed an Equal Opportunity complaint. Following Manning’s complaint, Showman was admonished for her use of homophobic language in conversation and workplace signage. In the years since, she has vied for media appearances, augmented by her own vitriolic Tweets, attacking Manning as well as his supporters. Now, at the eleventh hour, she claims to recall a conversation with the 25-year-old army private in which he allegedly shared anti-American opinions.
According to the defense, Ms. Showman is lending an intentional and inaccurate spin to comments Manning made regarding his refusal to follow any authority blindly as an “automaton” (in Manning’s own words) so that they conform to the prosecution’s characterization of someone disloyal to the United States.
-
Several signs have cropped up on Bay Area highways, telling drivers that drones are enforcing speed limits. The California Highway Patrol told KPIX 5 the signs are fakes and that they do not have drones.
“As people are driving by and they see something like this, it’s definitely a distraction,” said Officer Andrew Barclay of the California Highway Patrol.
-
If you fret about the possibility that drones soon may be hovering over your neighborhood, you may want to avoid Blue Eye Investigations’ website.
-
For my own benefit and perhaps yours, I’ve done a little research into who Michael Hastings was and what he did that deserves attention. I explore the possibility that his death was no accident. I admit that I have no proof beyond speculation. Hopefully I can give you enough information to make your own judgments. In a world where American Presidents openly arrogate to themselves the right to kill people deemed enemies of the United States, all things suddenly become possible. When the basic right of habeas corpus can be denied to American citizens, based upon unproven allegations of their being threats to this country, isn’t it possible for those with the power to detain and to eliminate individuals, to make decisions as to someone’s existence doing harm to this country? Finally, doesn’t this unconstitutional expansion of powers give individuals with government connections the leeway to take revenge on those who expose them? While I’m not privy to knowledge of the actions of those in power and can claim no inside information, I certainly can speculate based on the experience of my lifetime. This then is my speculation about the death and life of Michael Hastings in the context of current life in these United States.
-
America’s a police state. It’s ruthless. Iron fist authority rules. International law’s quaint and out-of-date. US statute protections aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Constitutional rights don’t matter. They never did for most people. It’s truer now than ever. They’re null and void. Executive diktat power rules. Congress and federal courts go along. They’re complicit.
They support sweeping lawlessness. It’s unprecedented. It affects domestic and geopolitical issues. No one’s safe anywhere.
-
I’m not sure how old I was when I was first instructed that boys don’t cry – at a guess, maybe six or seven. Once it began, it came at me from all angles: family, teachers, friends, the myriad voices of media and culture. Like pretty much all boys, I learned that tears and sobs were markers of failure. Whether facing up to playground beatings, bullies or teachers, the rules of the game were simple: if you cry, you lose. As little boys begin to construct the identities of grown men, the toughest lesson to learn is toughness itself. Never show weakness, never show fragility and above all, never let them see your tears.
-
A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.
I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate. As much as the readers who saw the segment we posted yesterday, which was mainly on whether we could forestall an ecological crisis, tended to think that Hedges was too apocalyptic, I suspect they’ll have the opposite reaction today, that his take is too positive.
-
Last Friday afternoon the president injected himself into the Trayvon/Zimmerman mix again by doing what he excels at, namely, increasing the racial divide, blaming the “white Hispanic,” condemning guns and upbraiding essentially everyone but the stoned and violent truant named, Trayvon.
-
-
The Section 1021 of the NDAA allows “detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities” for “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.” The court is technically correct in stating that the law does not specifically mention U.S. citizens when it uses the term “person,” but like the vaguely worded “supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” it appears to be all-encompassing and subject solely to the president’s discretionary whims.
-
-
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the people and Constitution Wednesday when it vacated a permanent injunction barring the enforcement of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens.
-
Without proof that the Obama administration’s military detention law will target them specifically, a group of journalists opposed to it lack standing to sue, the 2nd Circuit ruled.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges filed suit days after President Barack Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which Hedges claims has dangerously vague language that could be used against reporters, activists and human-rights workers.
-
-
A group of journalists and activists are preparing to challenge a U.S. court decision upholding the Obama administration’s ability to indefinitely detain individuals. The ruling, plaintiffs say, deals a blow to civil liberties in the name of national security, and could even be used to detain U.S. citizens without due process.
-
-
-
An anti-war activist criticizes a Federal Appeals Court for overthrowing a ban on National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) statue which allows President Obama to indefinitely detain Americans.
-
Release of prisoners who have been in jail for decades comes as part of agreement to enter preliminary peace talks in US
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
This is very curious. Monsanto may be many things, but it is not a company that gives up. However, there is a clue in the last sentence of the above quotation: “at the moment the firm was unwilling to apply for approval of any GM plants”. That suggests this is only a temporary halt, and that it will be back.
So why might it do that? Is there anything happening that might have triggered this move?
Why, yes: TAFTA/TTIP. In fact, the issue of GM crops is likely to be one of the biggest sticking points. The US side is insisting that “Sanitary and Phytosanitary” (SPS) measures must address GM foodstuffs, with the European side adamant that it won’t drop its precautionary principle.
-
-
Copyrights
-
Three weeks from now thousands of Pirate Bay supporters will gather in a festival area located a few kilometers north of Stockholm. At least, if the organizers can get them to pay for a ticket. The Pirate team needs the public to chip in, and they hope to raise 450,000 Swedish kronor ($68,000) through a crowd-funding campaign. The local Pirate Party is in charge of the event and promises visitors live music, food, alcohol and plenty of opportunities to share.
-
Yes, we’ve had the debate over and over and over again during the years (so much so that I’m not even going to dig up the links) concerning whether or not copyright is like “property.” However, reading an article by Alex Cummings on “the end of ownership,” it really drives home why copyright can often be anti-property rights, in that it takes away the standard types of “rights” that people have in property they’ve purchased. Cummings’ piece focuses on the secondary market for copyright-covered content, and how the content industries have been trying for over a century to stamp such things out, but were long held back by important concepts like the first sale right. However, in an all digital world, they’re having a lot more luck in killing off secondary markets:
-
Earlier this year, police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft announced that four individuals connected to movie piracy had been arrested following raids in central England. Little was said about the men but TorrentFreak can now reveal that they included members of two release groups and a former admin of UnleashTheNet, the torrent site run by the busted release group IMAGiNE.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.20.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Kernel Space
-
Condemning Torvalds in public may satisfy the need for self-expression. It may publicly align you with the forces of Progress and Good. However, one thing it will never do is to improve civility within the kernel project. Even if thousands of people express their outrage, it won’t do anything.
-
The Linux 3.11-rc2 kernel isn’t even out yet, but Intel’s open-source developers have already begun lining up DRM kernel graphics driver changes for the Linux 3.12 kernel.
-
Graphics Stack
-
The Direct3D 9 state tracker could prove to be the most important project since the original release of the Mesa graphics library.
-
Benchmarks
-
Due to the incredible rate at which Chris Wilson has been pushing out new xf86-video-intel X.Org driver releases to optimize his “SNA” acceleration architecture, here are updated Intel Core i7 “Haswell” SNA vs. UXA 2D performance benchmarks.
-
Benchmarks published this week on Phoronix showed that Ubuntu 13.10 can outperform Apple OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” with regard to OpenGL performance. However, when compared to Microsoft Windows, the open-source Intel Linux driver continues to come up short.
-
Applications
-
You want to write an article, a report or even a book in a professional way, wondering about the layout, the text styling and the fonts to use, tired from coding in Tex/LaTeX starting from scratch.
-
Here’s how you can get the free BitTorrent Sync app for Linux computers.
BitTorrent Sync lets you sync files and folders across Windows, Linux, Android and Mac devices. Your files and folders are encrypted, and they are never stored in the cloud or on a server.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Anyone can set up and run a single server instance on a cloud. That’s easy. Few people can set up multiple server instances on a cloud that can efficiently and automatically shift gears to match the rise and fall of user demand. That’s hard. And that’s where cloud configuration management programs such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansile come in.
-
Wine or Emulation
-
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.6
is now available.
-
Games
-
-
DOTA 2 has long been available for the PC as a beta version, and has since seen an official release earlier this month. Valve has announced today that both Mac and Linux gamers can now join in on the fun with the release of official clients that support their operating systems.
-
-
-
-
I’ve been playing one form or another of electronic Mahjongg for a number of years. One of the first games I remember was Activision’s Shanghai for my Atari ST back in the late 80′s. In modern times I mostly play KMahjongg. GNOME has a pretty good flavor too… but since I’ve been using KDE for so long, I’ve got more time in with KMahjongg. One feature of the Atari ST version that I miss was the competitive mode that had two flavors: 1) two player, take off as many tiles as you can before you choke and hand it off to the other player, or 2) Take off one tile and pass it to the next player… or at least that is how I remember it. KDE has a second flavor of Mahjongg for online play named Kajongg but I haven’t figured that out yet. Anyone played Kajongg?
-
Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Valve that was released back in 2004 and that has recently been ported on the Linux platform. The patches have started arriving.
Porting a complex title such as Half-Life 2 is a very difficult task, and the developers have released a lot of updates, even after the game exited the Beta version.
-
-
The Steam Summer Sale is in full effect, but there are a lot of other promotions available, besides the ones featured on the main website, and the Valve Complete Pack is one of them.
-
-
-
Looks like the official DOTA2 game has just hit Linux, you should now see DOTA2 alongside DOTA2 Test! Great to see Linux has another free to play game that’s extremely popular, it’s the number 1 game on Steam constantly.
-
Cradle, a “science-fiction first-person quest” game that’s powered by the visually astounding Unigine Engine, is finally showing signs of life.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
I’ve been gone for eight days and returned just a few hours ago to Berlin. It doesn’t feel like that. The last days went by in a blur of awesomeness! The reason why I didn’t write a single blog post in between is just that I never had a spare minute for that. I arrived on Thursday and instantly enjoyed the warmth of Spain / the Basque country and had a tasty and cheap Menu del Dia at a local Restaurant with fellow KDABians and other KDE friends. Then just a few hours later the first party started, near the old district of the city – amazing! More and more hackers and helpers arrived, the atmosphere was once again so good. The social aspect of this years Akademy was without comparison in my opinion – seriously: Hats off to the local team, you did an amazing job!
-
Some time ago, VFX artist Paul Geraskin created a video to show off how well Krita and the sculpting application3D-Coat combined in his workflow:
-
We conducted a large study about strengths and weaknesses of file managers in may 2013. In this article we present the results regarding demographics of participants and in particular their motifs.
-
Overall I think this was one of the best Akademies I have attended so far. The atmosphere was just great, the location was overall quite good and the weather was awesome.
-
-
KDE developer Sergio Martens went on an emergency bug fixing marathon recently, discovering and fixing several bugs related excess memory usage across many core KDE applications and KDE PIM. These improvements are expected to land in KDE 4.11. Why impromptu? It turns out that Sergio’s quest for additional DDR ram locally, fell short of expectations. Since he was not able to procure the needed ram, he decided to instead go on a bug hunt, finding inappropriate memory use in many places.
-
Thanks in part to a computer hardware retailer being closed, KDE 4.11 (and KDE 4.12) will offer improved system memory usage.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Currently the latest version towards to 3.10 GNOME Series is the unstable 3.9.4 and so far 3.9.4 while fixes around 100 bugs, it didn’t include any major new UI features. That was quite unexpected for Shell that has used us to constant changes in every unstable iteration.
Version 3.9.5 will change all these as it will include some really really cool things that GNOME Devs did. We are talking about the re-designed Aggregate System Menu that will debut in 3.10.
-
Piggy backing on some of the Unity LibreOffice Application Menubar work and the existing support for the MacOSX equivalent. I finally got around to adding a GNOME3 application menu to LibreOffice
-
-
ROSA Desktop R1 GNOME is the edition of the R line of desktop distributions from ROSA Laboratory that uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment. The beta edition that was supposed to be a Release Candidate was made available for download earlier today.
-
Screenshots
-
Debian Family
-
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical is preparing to make some sort of Ubuntu-related announcement next week. On July 18th the company updated the Ubuntu homepage with a 4-day countdown, a picture of a diagonal line down the center of a black rectangle, and the text “The line where / two surfaces meet.”
-
-
I am a cool geek (I think) and I want my Ubuntu box to be as cool as possible. Lately, Ubuntu is losing users and fans, but I do not care. Even if everybody starts to hate Ubuntu, I will use it. I love to explore things. At the moment Ubuntu is my home. Now, let me add some hot features to my Ubuntu box.
-
-
WigWag developed a home automation kit that combines a Linux-based 6LoWPAN router with sensor units running the open-source Contiki OS. Controllable via an Android smartphone app in conjunction with a WigWag cloud service, users can add ZigBee, Bluetooth, and other modules to expand the home network, and a development kit includes shields for the Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
-
Chinese consumer electronics giant TCL will build its next-generation Smart TV systems using the Linux-based Opera Devices Software Development Kit (SDK). The Opera Devices SDK, as well as the Opera TV browser and Opera TV Store, will be embedded within four new Internet-connected TVs that will be sold globally starting in the third quarter.
-
Does the Raspberry Pi’s first official accessory live up to its high-resolution hype, or is its outlook blurred?
-
The Raspberry Foundation has denied rumours that its low-cost educational computers could be manufactured in Brazil in the next few months.
-
Phones
-
Ballnux
-
MoDaCo.SWITCH is an application being developed by Paul O’Brien to switch between Sense and Google Play edition UI in a quick and convenient manner. Although the beta version hasn’t been released yet, the android modder working on it has started accepting requests for taking part in the beta.
-
Android
-
Most probably the official Android 4.3 Jelly Bean update for Nexus 4 is only a week away at the Google event scheduled for 24th July, but like most geeks out there, if the “waiting” part isn’t your area of expertise, fortunately the update has been leaked. You can be one of the first to find out what it looks like and get the first hand experience of it, if you are not hesitant enough to try it.
-
The Nexus 4 running Android version 4.3 Jelly bean came to light recently. It seems that the Android OS version isn’t the only fresh aspect as the device also came with Google Play Store version 4.2.3 bringing in some inconspicuous upgrades.
-
-
Google: 1.5 million Android activations a day, reminds us just how popular Android is http://phandroid.com/2013/07/18/google-larry-page-android-activations/ http://www.zdnet.com/android-closing-apples-ios-developer-revenue-gap-7000018151/
-
-
South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission watchdog has acquitted Google of anti-competitive charges following a two-year-long investigation, Yonhap News reports.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, who previous founded MIT’s Media Lab, founded One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which works with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to deliver low-cost laptops to children in developing nations. But this week, OLPC announced something a little bit different.
-
Windows RT flopped but, seriously, is there any tablet OS that take on Android and iOS?
-
-
-
When VLC for iOS left the App Store in mid-2011 after months of contention between its creators, the real owners of VLC (VideoLAN) and Apple, thousands of users were sorry to see it go. The free app allowed for playback of video files, such as MKVs and other esoteric file formats that Apple’s native player didn’t support and other developers charged up to $10 for.
-
-
Open source virtualization is still a niche technology, despite the rise of multi-hypervisor infrastructures.
Recent open source virtualization software releases have packed in new features with impressive specs, and there’s a clear appetite for VMware Inc. alternatives in enterprise data centers.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
If you’re reading this web page using Chrome or Safari, beware: you are probably angering the universe. There is reason to believe, you see, that the universe — the collection of all the planets, stars, galaxies, matter, and energy that have ever existed, and the sum total of all that we do and will know — is actually partial to Mozilla products. Which means that there is reason to believe that the universe would really prefer, as you browse the web that connects our tiny little world, that you use Firefox.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
-
-
Although Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate as a provider of cloud computing infrastructure and services, interest in hybrid clouds and open source cloud infrastructure is on the rise. Many of the smartest forecasters on the cloud scene called this trend out years ago, realizing that organizations would demand flexible, hybrid cloud platforms that allow public and private deployments that can fit with existing workflows.
-
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model where an organization outsources the equipment used to support storage, hardware, servers and networking components. In other words, IaaS offers access to computer resource in a virtualised environment, known as the Cloud, across a public connection. With IaaS individuals can rent cloud infrastructure, server storage and networking on demand.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Berlin, July 18, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.7 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, which will be the last maintenance release of the leading free office suite’s 3.6 series. All users, from enterprises to individual end users, are encouraged to update to the current and stable 4.0 series, or have a look at the upcoming 4.1 version.
-
Funding
-
Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures and a new firm, The Valley Fund–have formed an accelerator called OpenIncubate for open-source startups. It offers joint funding, workspace and help for companies that are using open-source software frameworks to contribute to the emergence of the software-defined data center. Each firm has committed $1 million to the effort, according to The Valley Fund General Partner Steve O’Hara, with investments ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.
-
The Greater Boston startup scene is beginning to resemble the NICU at Mass. General — incubators everywhere. The latest is OpenIncubate, which launched Thursday, offering funding and workspace to entrepreneurs committed to open-source computing.
-
All systems are go for OpenIncubate, a new accelerator seeking startups focused on open IT infrastructure. Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures and The Valley Fund are behind the accelerator, which plans to officially launch Thursday and hopes to shake up staid, proprietary corners of IT.
-
Earlier this month, SourceForge–known as a central hosting and services site for countless open source projects–unveiled a beta version of a service called DevShare. DevShare is an opt-in revenue-sharing program “aimed at giving developers a better way to monetize their projects in a transparent, honest and sustainable way.” The plan presents a way for developers of open source projects to monetize downloads and usage of their creations. After a few weeks of beta testing, some interesting reviews are coming in.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
The latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
-
Code-wise, I’ve been getting my hands dirty with some digital grease over the past few months, and it’s been fun. Most of the fun has resolved around learning Python, which appears to be the language of choice these days.
Python is almost a requirement everywhere you turn. Many introductory programming classes use Python as the main or default high-level programming language.
-
Project Releases
-
-
The OISF development team is pleased to announce Suricata 1.4.4. This is a small but important update over the 1.4.3 release, fixing some important bugs.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Think home electric car charging equipment is too expensive? Well, maybe you heard about The Juicebox, the new 240-volt charger available for a bargain basement price of $99. Sounds great, but expect to face additional costs, possible safety concerns and, like a piece of furniture from Ikea, once you get it home the device must be assembled.
-
Programming
-
While not as widely-used as GCC’s libstdc++ or even LLVM’s libc++ for a C++ standard library, since 2005 Apache has backed the stdcxx C++ standard library. The Apache C++ Standard Library has been a free implementation of the ISO/IEC 14882 standard for C++ and came to the Apache Software Foundation after Rogue Wave Software open-sourced their commercial implementation the better part of a decade ago.
-
The LLVM debugger is back to having ELF core file support for 64-bit Linux.
The LLVM Debugger, LLDB, that is of growing interest to companies and is showing much promise for developers continues to see better Linux support.
-
Summer is an ideal season for jolting your mind into action by expanding your reading horizons. So shut off the computer and the television, put away the various gadgets, close your email and pick up a good book. There are plenty of entertaining choices for your reading pleasure, but the following titles are ones that I have enjoyed. They all address the serious pursuit of justice/happiness side of the written word.
-
After winning a landmark federal forfeiture case against the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Russell Caswell, owner of the Motel Caswell in Tewksbury, is headed to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to take part in a legislative briefing called “Policing For Profit” on the campaign to reform the federal civil-forfeiture laws.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
-
We spend the hour with Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of a groundbreaking new documentary called “The Act of Killing.” The film is set in Indonesia, where, beginning in 1965, military and paramilitary forces slaughtered up to a million Indonesians after overthrowing the democratically elected government. That military was backed by the United States and led by General Suharto, who would rule Indonesia for decades. There has been no truth and reconciliation commission, nor have any of the murderers been brought to justice. As the film reveals, Indonesia is a country where the killers are to this day celebrated as heroes by many. Oppenheimer spent more than eight years interviewing the Indonesian death squad leaders, and in “The Act of Killing,” he works with them to re-enact the real-life killings in the style of American movies in which the men love to watch — this includes classic Hollywood gangster movies and lavish musical numbers. A key figure he follows is Anwar Congo, who killed hundreds,
if not a thousand people with his own hands and is now revered as a founding father of an active right-wing paramilitary organization. We also ask Oppenheimer to discusses the film’s impact in Indonesia, where he screened it for survivors and journalists who have launched new investigations into the massacres. The film is co-directed by Christine Cynn and an Indonesian co-director who remains anonymous for fear of retribution, as does much of the Indonesian film crew. Its executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. “The Act of Killing” opens today in New York City, and comes to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., on July 26, then to theaters nationwide.
-
In five states of the U.S.—Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Utah, and South Carolina—you are a criminal for exposing public health dangers and animal rights abuses. If a person takes pictures or films at animal facilities, that person can be prosecuted under laws modeled after a document called “Animal and Ecological Terrorism in America.”
How did such an obscene thing come to be? As we have documented at REALfarmacy, there is a little-known but powerful group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that introduces model bills across the country on behalf of its corporate members.
-
NYPD Vehicles have been spotted on multiple occasions cruising around the city with their windows down, blaring Darth Vader’s infamous theme song.
-
The blast occurred in the arrivals hall of terminal three, Xinhua news agency reported. The agency gave no immediate details on the cause of the blast or the potential number of casualties.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
U.S. whistleblower and international hero Bradley Manning has just been awarded the 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Bureau, itself a former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Manning is a nominee this year
-
I traveled to Ft. Meade, Maryland today to observe the trial of Army PFC. Bradley Manning. The 25-year-old Oklahoma native has admitted to providing Wikileaks with more than 700,000 leaked documents, which included battle reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department diplomatic cables, and military videos from combat zones.
-
Finance
-
The corporations now ruling the world owe their dominance to the application of economist Milton Friedman’s ideas
-
Reader Mark Surich was looking for a lawyer with Croatian connections to help with a family matter back in the old country. He Googled some candidate lawyers and in one search came up with this federal indictment. It makes very interesting reading and shows one way H-1B visa fraud can be conducted.
The lawyer under indictment is Marijan Cvjeticanin. Please understand that this is just an indictment, not a conviction. I’m not saying this guy is guilty of anything. My point here is to describe the crime of which he is accused, which I find very interesting. He could be innocent for all I know, but the crime, itself, is I think fairly common and worth understanding.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
But, as Scahill pointed out, issuing a correction via Twitter for something you said on the air was insufficient. Baldwin apparently agreed, because later on in her show she said, “And earlier we said that he was killed in the same drone strike that killed his father. That was not the case. We regret that mistake.”
Accuracy, of course, is a big deal in journalism– and thus it’s a big deal for people who want to hold journalism accountable. Baldwin’s initial response was unfortunate, but she eventually made the right call. Would she have made the same decision if there wasn’t such a public effort to get her to correct the record? Probably not.
-
To protect profits threatened by a lawsuit over its controversial herbicide atrazine, Syngenta Crop Protection launched an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign that included hiring a detective agency to investigate scientists on a federal advisory panel, looking into the personal life of a judge and commissioning a psychological profile of a leading scientist critical of atrazine.
-
Censorship
-
Exactly two months ago, when we heard that Yahoo was buying Tumblr for over a billion dollars in cash, I posed a somewhat provocative question.
To wit: What was Yahoo gonna do with all that porn on Tumblr?
-
It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but their targeting of open source software is something new. In an attempt to remove pirated copies of Game of Thrones from the Internet, HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.
-
Privacy
-
newspaper’s Glenn Greenwald,” writes former NSA director Michael Hayden today in a CNN op-ed, is “more deserving of the Justice Department’s characterization of a co-conspirator than Fox’s James Rosen ever was.” Hayden’s smear came in a column in which he argues that Edward Snowden, whose story Greenwald has been telling in the Guardian, “will likely prove to be the most costly leaker of American secrets in the history of the Republic.”
Those thuggish words are particularly disturbing coming from a figure who is, as CNN’s editor’s note at the top of the column explains, still tied to military and intelligence elites.
-
Testimony elicited during a Wednesday oversight hearing in Washington revealed that the United States intelligence community regularly collects email and telephone metadata from way more persons than previously thought.
-
Representative Justin Amash of Michigan is on his way to forcing the first legislative showdown over the National Security Agency’s controversial policy of collecting the phone logs of every American.
-
President then established an internal watchdog group within spy agency.
-
The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the “public interest,” does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.
-
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Friday to try to smooth tensions caused by allegations that the United States spied on Brazilian Internet communications, Rousseff’s office said.
-
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Friday to try to smooth tensions caused by allegations that the United States spied on Brazilian Internet communications, Rousseff’s office said.
Latin America’s largest nation has said Washington’s explanations about the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs have been unsatisfactory.
“He lamented the negative repercussions in Brazil and reiterated the U.S. government’s willingness to provide more information on the matter,” Rousseff’s communications minister, Helena Chagas, told reporters after the 25-minute telephone call.
-
If the Obama administration elects not to act before Friday evening, the National Security Agency could for the first time in years be unable to collect the phone records of millions of Americans.
It’s been but six weeks since NSA leaker Edward Snowden first started exposing the surveillance policies used by the United States government, and that month-and-a-half has provided President Barack Obama with a number of opportunities to engage the Congress and citizenry alike with regards to striking a proper balance between privacy and security. But while the recently disclosed surveillance programs could be stopped at any time, Friday allows the administration the opportunity to not renew one of those policies for the first time since the public began to pipe up.
-
While some current members of Congress continue to rally for the prosecution of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, a long-serving United States senator has sent a letter of support to the NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower.
According to correspondence published Tuesday by the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, former two-term senator Gordon Humphrey (R-New Hampshire) wrote the exiled Mr. Snowden to say, “you have done the right thing in exposing what I regard as massive violation of the United States Constitution.”
-
When people say the feds are monitoring what people are doing online, what does that mean? How does that work? When, and where, does it start?
Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, an internet service provider in Utah, knows. He received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers, through his facility. He also received a broad gag order. In his own words:
The first thing I do when I get a law enforcement request is look for a court signature on it. Then I pass it to my attorneys and say, “Is this legitimate? Does this qualify as a warrant?” If it does, then we will respond to it. We are very up front that we respond to warrants.
If it isn’t, then the attorneys write back: “We don’t believe it is in jurisdiction or is constitutional. We are happy to respond if you do get an FBI request in jurisdiction or you get a court order to do so.”
The FISA request was a tricky one, because it was a warrant through the FISA court — whether you believe that is legitimate or not. I have a hard time with secret courts. I ran it past my attorney and asked, “Is there anyway we can fight this?” and he said “No. It is legitimate.”
-
The Obama administration has renewed the authority for the National Security Agency to regularly collect the phone records of millions of Americas as allowed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
-
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 19 (IPS) – A wide variety of individuals and organisations have filed lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency (NSA) and other federal agencies and officials for conducting a massive, dragnet spying operation on U.S. citizens that was recently confirmed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
-
Latest revelation an indication of how Obama administration has opened up hidden world of mass communications surveillance
-
Two senators urged President Barack Obama on Friday to consider recommending a new site for the September international summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, if Moscow continues to allow National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to remain in the country.
-
President Barack Obama may cancel a scheduled trip to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in September as the standoff over the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor seeking asylum there, takes its toll on already strained relations between the United States and Russia, officials said Thursday.
-
White House and Congress Urge National Security Agency to Rethink Its Approach to Terrorism-Related Surveillance
-
-
Mozilla is joining with over 60 leading technology companies, startups, investors, technology trade groups and public interest groups today to call on the US government to allow the release of information pertaining to national security requests for user data.
Mozilla is one of the organizers behind today’s letter. We gathered the signatures of a broad range of Internet and VC leaders for many of whom this is their first time publicly weighing in on this issue. Mozilla has also been one of the leading groups behind the StopWatching.Us campaign, which has gathered over 550,000 signatures and brought together one of the most diverse coalitions of public interest organizations ever assembled on an Internet policy topic.
-
What kind of society do we want to live in? That’s the philosophical question at the heart of the debate about the National Security Agency collecting call logs and Internet content on millions of Americans in the name of finding terrorists. I hang my head in disbelief at the continual framing of the debate in solely practical terms. I instinctively think in philosophical terms.
When the news broke, I had a visceral reaction. The confirmation of the existence of these sweeping programs was like a punch in the gut for this centrist civil libertarian. Yet people whom I know and many pundits and politicians simply shrugged. They seemed uninterested in taking a stand. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland said in 1937 that “the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”
-
The National Security Agency is implementing new security measures because of the disclosures by former NSA employee Edward Snowden, a top defense official said. First among the new procedures is a “two-man rule”, often used in guarding nuclear weapons.
-
A coalition of 19 groups in San Francisco is suing the US National Security Agency. The groups, supporting everything from religion and digital rights to drugs and the environment, demand that a federal judge immediately stop the activity of the “unconstitutional program”. At least 3 federal lawsuits have been previously lodged in the country, challenging the US government’s surveillance programs. Tomas Moore, principal attorney at “The Moore Law Team”. And the plaintiffs attorney in the lawsuit, shares his opinion on the issue with the Voice of Russia.
Read more: http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_07_19/Lawsuits-against-NSA-will-bring-any-of-them-substantial-results-3271/
-
In the digital age, it’s difficult to define exactly what is public and when we should reasonably expect privacy. Revelations regarding the surveillance reach of the NSA have many questioning who knows what and how much.
On a daily basis, your activity is being monitored by companies through one simple device – your cell phone. And they know more about you than the government.
-
-
-
-
People outside of the United States have been alarmed by revelations about the degree of NSA access to information held by American technology companies given that foreigners are not granted the same privacy protections as U.S. citizens. Daniel Bangert, a 28-year-old German man, has been following news articles about the Edward Snowden leaks closely. Last month, after discovering that the NSA has a facility near his home in Griesheim, he posted a screed to Facebook lamenting “hav[ing] the NSA spies on my doorstep.”
-
On Friday, the secret court that oversees cases related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewed the order that enables the NSA to compel telecom companies to hand over records whenever it wants. Translation: No end in sight to the NSA spying on phone records.
-
As of this morning, the Feds didn’t want to say if they’d asked the FISA court to renew the order allowing it to collect the data on every single phone call from Verizon (and likely every other major phone carrier, though it’s unclear if the orders for those others also expired today).
-
The American Civil Liberties Union is warning that law enforcement officials are using license plate scanners to amass massive and unregulated databases that can be used to track law-abiding citizens as their go about their daily lives.
-
-
The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing “the Internet’s backbone.” How does that work?
-
In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, my co-blogger Randy Barnett argues that massive-scale collection of communications metadata by the NSA violates the Fourth Amendment because it is an unreasonable seizure. Randy’s colleague Laura K. Donohue recently argued in the Washington Post that such collection violates the Fourth Amendment as an unreasonable search. Jennifer Granick and Chris Sprigman made a similar argument in the New York Times.
-
From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to films like Minority Report and The Lives of Others, our law and culture are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad and why we should be wary of it. To the extent that the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context and why it matters. We’ve been able to live with this state of affairs largely because the threat of constant surveillance has been relegated to the realms of science fiction and failed totalitarian states.
-
The NSA finally admitted Wednesday why it wants to track your phone’s metadata, like the stats of who you call and when.
They’re looking to see if you ever call anybody who’s called anybody who’s called anybody who might be of real interest.
-
Nineteen organizations including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency today for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by EFF.
-
Civil Rights
-
Unprecedented federal review rules that the FBI may have exaggerated forensics in case of Willie Jerome Manning – a decision that puts other convictions in doubt
-
-
The internet, social networks and mobile phones enhance human freedoms to come together around social, political and economic issues, to build associations and networks, and to assemble online to advocate for and to defend human rights. This has been reflected in demonstrations and protests in the middle-east and North Africa; anti- austerity protests in Greece, Italy and Spain; “Occupy” protests; advocacy and protests against the Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) and PROTECT IP (PIPA) bills in the United States; student protests in Quebec and Chile; and protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
-
The Interception of Communications Commissioner (ICC) 2012 Annual Report has raised serious questions about whether the commissioner’s office is actually fit for purpose. The report has failed to make any mention of Tempora and PRISM whilst at the same time seriously lacks the impression that the ICC has been enforcing serious oversight of the way security agencies acquire and use communications data.
-
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced Friday that he will hold hearings this fall on the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the NRA in spreading “Stand Your Ground” laws across the country, which the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered last year, after launching ALECexposed.org.
-
A federal appeals court has delivered a blow to investigative journalism in America by ruling that reporters have no first amendment protection that would safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial.
In a two-to-one ruling from the fourth circuit appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, two judges ruled that a New York Times reporter, James Risen, must give evidence at the criminal trial of a former CIA agent who is being prosecuted for unauthorised leaking of state secrets.
-
Eighty-six of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo have already been cleared for release. In May, President Obama announced a series of steps his administration intended to undertake to release the men, including lifting a moratorium on the transfer of Yemeni prisoners. The reviews of individual cases are another step toward reducing the population of the prison.
-
A New York City McDonald’s crew walked out Friday, saying they were forced to work without air conditioning amid record-high temperatures. One worker collapsed from the heat.
-
Prominent anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Aleksey Navalny has been found guilty of embezzlement on a large scale, and sentenced to 5 years in jail.
[...]
Navalny was also the man who coined the phrase “party of crooks and thieves,” which became a ubiquitous nickname in opposition circles for the country’s ruling United Russia party.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Although The H has produced many widely read stories, it has not been possible to effectively monetise that traffic to produce a working business model.
Because of this, after four and a half years as The H and six years online, The H is, sadly, closing its doors. We thank all our readers for their deep interest and engagement. Work is taking place to create an archive to ensure that the content of the site will remain publicly accessible.
-
Desktop
-
Henry Blodget in Business Insider: “In the late 1990s, a single technology company became so unfathomably rich and powerful — and so hellbent on dominating not just its own industry but a massive and rapidly growing new one — that the U.S. government dragged the company into court and threatened to break it up over anti-trust violations.
[...]
Now, thanks to the rise of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Windows’ global share has been cut in half, to about 30%. More remarkably, Android is now a bigger platform than Windows.
-
Server
-
If you think provisioning, monitoring, managing and maintaining the virtualized resources on IBM mainframes can be complex, you’d be entirely correct. Yet simplifying those processes and increasing the productivity of mainframe sysadmins have been among CSL International’s primary goals since the company’s founding in 2004. Overall, CSL International should be a perfect fit for IBM.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
The 3.10 Linux kernel release late last month brought a raft of new features worth celebrating for Linux developers and sysadmins alike. This release was especially satisfying, though, to kernel developer Kent Overstreet who saw years of hard work pay off with the inclusion of the Bcache patch set in 3.10.
Bcache allows Linux machines to use flash-based SSDs (solid-state drives) as cache for other, slower and less expensive, hard disk drives. It can be used in servers, workstations, high-end storage arrays, or “anywhere you want IO to be faster, really,” Overstreet said.
-
Greg Stoner of AMD and representing the HSA Foundation talked last week at the Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event about the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as it concerns ARM.
-
Linus Torvalds is usually complaining about too many pull requests during the Linux kernel development cycle when past its merge window, but this time around he’s complaining about too few patches this week. He’s also proclaimed himself the Goldilocks of kernel development.
This week there’s been much drama in the Linux kernel development world over Intel’s Sarah Sharp and others wanting Torvalds and others to be less “verbally abusive” on the Linux kernel mailing list when criticizing kernel patches and other work. There’s been a proposal to discuss the tone of the Linux kernel mailing list at the upcoming Linux Kernel Summit.
With developers discussing their views on appropriate behaviour for the Linux kernel mailing list, it’s taken away from kernel development time and that’s making Linus less than happy.
-
When Sarah Sharp was a 20-year-old university student in Portland, she took on an extra-credit project writing USB driver code for the Linux kernel. She was too young to stay past 10 p.m. in some of the brew pubs where the local Linux-heads met, but she hung in as long as she could, learned a lot about Linux, and embraced the community.
-
Linux creator Linus Torvalds is an interesting fellow. He is notorious for speaking his mind, demeaning developers and using profanity — behavior which is appreciated by some members of the Linux community. On July 14, the RC-1 of Linux Kernel 3.11 was announced. Continuing his quirky behavior, Mr. Torvalds has named it “Linux for Workgroups”.
-
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
David Airlie publicly announced plans today for his new Virgil project, a virtual GPU capable of 3D acceleration for QEMU. Guest OpenGL (and potentially Direct3D) commands from the virtualized KVM/QEMU guest are passed onto the host for hardware acceleration.
-
-
-
Sam Spilsbury, the Compiz developer and former Canonical employee, has made progress in being able to run the XBMC media application directly on Wayland.
-
Linux desktop systems can now have working support for Microsoft’s Direct3D 9 API via a new Gallium3D state tracker. Unlike the earlier Direct3D 10/11 state tracker for Gallium3D on Linux, this new code actually can run D3D9 games and at better performance than what’s offered by Wine.
-
While Radeon DPM for Linux 3.11 is most of what Linux enthusiasts are talking about, the Nouveau changes in Linux 3.11 include support for H.264 and MPEG2 video decoding. The necessary user-space driver changes have now been made for supporting this accelerated video decode process from Nouveau Gallium3D.
-
Vadim Girlin has merged another set of patches concerning his “SB” shader optimization back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver, including some code that has the potential to affect the performance.
-
Just days after the first release candidate of the Linux 3.11 kernel, additional user testing of the new Radeon dynamic power management support has revealed more bugs in the open-source driver. Fortunately, there’s already another pull request for Linux 3.11 to take care of some more Radeon “DPM” issues.
-
Yesterday I shared open-source Linux graphics benchmarks showing the Intel Ivy Bridge performance improving on Mesa 9.2 over the earlier releases of this important open-source Linux graphics driver component. However, for the latest-generation Intel “Haswell” graphics, Mesa 9.2 is an even more important upgrade. Here’s a look at the performance benefits in moving from Mesa 9.1 to the soon-to-be-released Mesa 9.2.
-
Applications
-
traGtor is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the awesome conversion tool ffmpeg for the use with Linux-OS. It is written in Python and uses the GTK-Engine (standard in GNOME desktops) for displaying it’s interface. The goal of traGtor is not to bring you all of the features ffmpeg offers, but to be a fast and user friendly choice for converting a single media file into any other format. For a full ffmpeg featuring GUI please refer to the other great projects listed below. This GUI is written for not dealing too much with command lines, options and parameters and so on, and refers mostly to the real keyboard haters.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine or Emulation
-
This release represents 16 months of development effort and around 10,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new Mac driver, the full support for window transparency, and the new Mono package for .NET applications support.
-
Games
-
We have seen Valve pushing all of its games and of course their platform steam towards linux lately, but it appears that they aren’t the only ones who have set their minds towards open source adoption. Crytek is planning on taking its first step towards open source with their powerful CryEngine 3 game development tool, as it now plans to bring it to Linux.
-
Surprise Attack Games to focus on local independent teams
-
-
-
There’s finally a Phoronix Test Suite test profile for being able to benchmark Valve’s Team Fortress 2 on Steam in a (semi-) automated manner on Linux.
-
Valve has released a new stable version for its Steam for Linux client, but the developers have mistakenly launched a Beta version instead.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
-
The other day I went to buy a DDR stick but the shop was closed so the only solution was to sit down and fix some memory hungry applications ;).
-
Who is KDE? I did some 30 second interviews on the booze cruise last night to give you a flavour.
-
The Color Balance Filter is one of the easiest way to add an “atmosphere” to an image and now this can be done very easily in Krita. The filter can be applied to separate ranges of the image i.e Highlights, Shadows or Midtones to get the desired results. The implementation included making everything from scratch that is designing the User interface and then writing the code for the transformation of the image.
-
Hamsi Manager, a file manager that can process multiple files at once and which aims to be really simple to use, is now at version 1.2.2.
-
KDE-Services, a program that extends the features of the right mouse click on the Dolphin File Manager for KDE-4 graphical environment and specially designed for OSes based on Red Hat, is now at version 1.8-6.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
ROSA has primarily been a customized KDE desktop distribution. But today the ROSA folks announced an officially supported GNOME 3 variation of their Fresh R1 release. And, ROSA somehow managed to make GNOME 3 consistent with the look of their ROSA desktop.
-
-
Slackware Family
-
Slackware Linux turned 20 years old yesterday and no one gave them a party. Even I, who commonly remembered the illustrious distribution’s birthdays in my now former column, had to be reminded by LWN. Well, that won’t do. Let’s look back at some history of Slack.
As I look back over my history with Slack, I’m struck by how many distributions were once based on Slackware. Most are no longer maintained, but some names may still be familiar. GoblinX was a strange looking but quite stable and fun distribution. It’s biggest issue in adoption is their pay-to-play business model that often fails in Linuxville. Austrumi is a tiny distro from Latvia, a tiny Northern European country most Americans’ education didn’t include. It was fast and stable and looks to be abandoned. Ultima 4 was trying to provide an easy to use Slackware and Mutagenix was a really cool distro that has disappeared off the face of the Earth. But Slackware is still here. There are many more derivative epitaphs, but the oldest surviving Linux distribution is 20 years old and is still very actively and enthusiastically maintained.
-
Slackware Linux, a complete 32-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system that is currently based around the 3.2 Linux kernel series, has just reached the venerable age of 20.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Cigna , a global health service company that offers health, life, accident, dental, and disability insurance, and related health services, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cigna has been named the 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Cigna was recognized during a ceremony at Red Hat Summit for its innovative use of Red Hat technologies to revitalize the company’s IT infrastructure and solidify the company’s position as a leader in the health care industry. Cigna also won an Innovation Award in the “Outstanding Open Source Architecture” category.
-
OK, I hear you loud and clear. Disagreement with my view of Red Hat’s sign atop its downtown Raleigh building – “hideously out of place” – has been clear, but polite.
I thank you for the polite part.
-
Red Hat’s “cereal box sign,” the red billboard crowning the top of what is now known as Red Hat Tower, may be meeting controversy online, but officials at the open-source software company say they’re hearing nothing but compliments.
-
Raleigh’s skyline got a bold new splash of color this month, and it has some people in downtown buzzing.
Software company Red Hat unveiled a bright red sign atop its Wilmington Street high-rise building. However, the reviews range from great to downright ugly.
-
Fedora
-
Fans of the Enlightenment desktop / window manager may finally see the lightweight solution packaged for Fedora 20.
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
The results have been tallied and Debian got the most votes in our Community Distro Poll. We would call them the “winner,” but this wasn’t about winners and losers. It was about trying to reach a consensus on what we mean by the term “community distro.” We asked, “Which GNU/Linux distros do you consider to be legitimate community distros?” Choices weren’t limited to one; voters could choose as many as they wanted and even add more through a text box supplied by choosing “Other.”
-
Derivatives
-
As I’ve said in the past, the DistroWatch.com listing of page hit rankings is a good way to see if one’s distro’s page is being looked at. With folks looking at the pages, one would hope that downloads and actual use of the distro would follow. So while it may not give an accurate description of actual use of the distro, the page hit rankings do give folks an idea which distros are doing well and which may not be.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
I now use Scientific Linux with the Trinity desktop
-
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu platform, told Mobile World Live that it is “in a good starting position” with developers as it looks to build its presence in the mobile space.
-
With Apple’s OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” having better OpenGL performance and in compliance with OpenGL 4.1 rather than being GL3-limited as with existing OS X releases, new benchmarks were carried out at Phoronix to see how well Apple’s OpenGL driver stack on the current OS X 10.9 developer preview compared to Ubuntu Linux when testing the Intel graphics driver.
-
A minimal countdown has appeared on the official Ubuntu homepage – but what is it counting down to?
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Linaro has developed a new way for Linux and Android developers to implement ARM’s Big.Little multi-core load balancing architecture, in a manner that optimizes power/performance tradeoffs. In addition to the In-kernel Switcher (IKS) released in May, the new Global Task Scheduler (GTS) offers faster, more granular scheduling control, support for non-symmetrical core combos, and the ability to run all cores simultaneously.
-
If you’re particularly bad at spelling, then this pen can help you out. It’s the Lernstift smart pen, and it vibrates gently whenever its user makes a spelling error. It looks like a regular pen on the outside, but it packs some pretty unique and sophisticated tech on the inside. The Lernstift actually has an embedded Linux inside it’s tiny frame, which is equipped with a motion sensor, memory, and processor, along with a WiFi and vibrating module.
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
All of the netizens, who are somewhat enlightened on the Android scene, have been holding their wallets under immense restraint for the next Nexus pricing to be announced. Now finally there might be concrete evidence suggesting a price point for the upcoming device.
-
The Nexus 7 rumours have been floating around the internet for quite a long time. However, like all secrets that end up being leaked, this is the first time that definitive pictures of Nexus 7 have been revealed and leaked over the internet.
-
If you thought Google Glass was going to march forward without any competition, think again. GlassUp, an Italian startup company, has already collected over $30,000 of seed money on campaign funding site Indiegogo for its GlassUp concept. According to project leaders, the GlassUp device will focus on Android phone users who want to view messages and notifications, in addition to other possible augmented reality information, on glasses via Bluetooth.
GlassUp has already been shown at CeBIT, and is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory with a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display. Project leaders note that they will still produce the project even if they don’t reach crowdsourced funding goals, as they have investors. They also note this: “We are in agreements with some of the most famous eyewear brands for the design, so the final ones will be trendier and more varied.”
-
We reported yesterday that Google is planning an event on the 24th of July where Sundar Pichai will possibly be unveiling the next Nexus 7 and Android 4.3, but today we’ve got word that Android 4.3 for the Nexus has already been leaked.
-
-
At last week’s Linaro Connect Europe 2013 conference, there was a presentation regarding bringing Android’s HWComposer on Linux KMS.
-
Google Glass has been in the hands of developers on Google’s Explorer programme for a while now, but some of those who have got their hands on the high-tech specs have been pushing the boundaries of what Google wants them to do.
One hacker has successfully managed to get facial recognition technology to run on Glass, despite Google explicitly stating in its developer policy that this isn’t allowed. Stephen Balaban, founder of Lambda Labs in San Francisco, is challenging Google and hoping that others will do the same, actively encouraging people to use the hashtag #ihackglass on Twitter.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
After all the leaks, rumours and speculations, HTC has finally officially announced the HTC One Mini. HTC had teased the announcement of One Mini on twitter earlier, and now they have finally revealed the first look.
-
Part of the OS wars is definitely the competition between tablets and notebooks. In a recent bit of spam, a retailer sent me these choices:
* “New! Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Now available! Starting at $199.99″
* “Save $49 – Acer Gateway 15.6″ notebook for $379.99″
-
Today in Open Source: Tons of free apps and games. Plus: Linux Mint 15 Xfce install guide, and Ubuntu versus Debian!
-
Its top recommended free audio converter software revealed today by Boffin, after the site reviewers assessed numerous candidates.
-
Events
-
The schedule for the 2013 GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, has been finalized, and registration is open.
-
LinuxCon, CloudOpen and Co-Located Events Become Largest Technical Gathering of Linux and Open Cloud Professionals in North America
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
At a time when your ISP is tracking your online activities, sites you visit are doing the same (even the one you do not visit are able to track you), Google is not to be left out in the game, and the NSA is tracking everybody else, it’s easy to be depressed.
-
Back in March, I wrote about the odd little attack by the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on Mozilla’s plans to put control of cookies firmly in the hands of users. Alas, the IAB seems not to have come to its senses since then, but has instead doubled down, and launched one of the most bizarre assaults on Mozilla and the open Web that I have ever read. I warmly recommend you to read it – I suspect you will find it as entertaining in its utter absurdity as I do.
It’s entitled “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”, which is strange, because what follows is a rambling moan about precisely those values, and Mozilla for daring to adhere to them. As you might expect, Mozilla has not “lost its values”, it’s defending them here just as it has always defended them. Here’s the central argument of the IAB piece.
-
It was only a few weeks ago when the news broke that Mozilla would join forces with Stanford’s Center for Internet Society to support a new Cookie Clearinghouse that will oversee easy-to-use “allow lists” and “block lists” to help Internet users protect their privacy. The privacy scheme could have become a default setup in the Firefox browser, and paved the way for usage in other browsers. As that news broke, it seemed likely that it might draw a caustic reaction from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has blasted Mozilla’s attempts to control online ads and cookies before.
-
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) blasted Mozilla over its third party cookie blocking plans and said that the non-profit organization has an anti-business bent.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Three years ago, on July 19th, 2010, Rackspace and NASA introduced OpenStack. Then, it was just another cloud stack project, a promising one but only one among many. Fast forward to today and OpenStack’s list of backers is a technology giant’s who’s who: HP, IBM, Red Hat, VMware, the list goes on and on. How did this happen?
-
-
Say you want a private cloud, but you also want to be able to expand out into the public cloud when you must? What can you do? One answer is use Eucalyptus 3.3, which can work hand in glove with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
-
Healthcare
-
Conservatives have argued that unchecked immigration contributes to the rising costs of health care because immigrants do not put the same amount of money into healthcare as citizens do. As Seth Freed Wessler of Colorlines reports, a recent study proves otherwise.
-
Funding
-
Investors from three venture firms are joining to launch OpenIncubate and support the rise of startups keen on advancing open-source hardware and software.
-
BSD
-
While the popular kernel DRM drivers are still being ported to OpenBSD, support for the OpenBSD operating system within Mesa is being improved.
-
Project Releases
-
It’s time for another big release of the Blender open-source 3D modelling software. Blender 2.68 contains fixes and enhancements throughout the entire multi-platform program.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
In the fall of 2010, I asked the biology class I teach at Western Carolina University for volunteers to help map the campus. Three years later, dozens of students have participated in learning how to use aerial photography and cartography techniques created by Public Lab.
-
I recently spoke with Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Larry also serves on the boards of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University. I asked Larry about UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project.
-
Open Access/Content
-
awyers representing MIT are filing a motion to intervene in my FOIA lawsuit over thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz.
I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit. In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding. Other requestors reported receiving the same respons
-
We recently noted that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had ordered Homeland Security to release the Secret Service file on Aaron Swartz that had been requested by Wired reporter/editor Kevin Poulsen. However, MIT has now stepped into the case trying to block the release of the information. The judge has consented to putting a stay on the initial order until MIT can file its motion.
MIT’s concern — as it was in a separate legal fight concerning releasing the evidence used against Aaron — is apparently that the released documents will reveal which MIT employees helped with the investigation, and that could lead to unwarranted harassment. However, as Poulsen notes, the documents that have already been released have been redacting those names, so it’s unlikely that these further releases would leave those same names unredacted.
-
Free online courses have run into a backlash of late. But a handful of community colleges may have found a way to dial up open-source content to help tackle one of higher education’s thorniest problems: remedial education.
-
Open Hardware
-
Last month, Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project, held a workshop at the Foundation Achille Castiglioni in Milan called: Arduino and the light.
-
Programming
-
GitHub has created a social network where programmers get together and get work done without bosses, e-mails, or meetings.
-
SourceForge is offering to share download revenue with open source developers. Here’s how the plan stacks up
-
Duetto is an alternative open-source project to EmScripten, the LLVM-based project for compiling C/C++ code-bases into JavaScript for execution by modern HTML5 web-browsers. Duetto is still LLVM-based and relies on JavaScript, but there’s a few changes over EmScripten.
-
Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left of this tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically verifiable and rooted in reality.
-
Science
-
As drones, bipedal robots, and algorithm technologies continue to improve, the world of autonomous everything is looming. Perhaps looming isn’t the right word, but I feel compelled to set an ominous tone in order to provide an interesting conclusion. Beyond the iPad, synchronized quad-copters, and even 3D printers, one of the world’s most powerful forms of emerging technology is the ability to make more machines and devices autonomous.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
Drones aren’t just for killing “enemy combatants” and nearby innocents, with a band of rubberstamp judges appointed by conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, providing flimsy legal cover. These flying robots (or “unmanned aerial vehicles”) engage in a wide array of activities. They patrol farmers’ fields and monitor crops planted on steep hills. Some engage in surveillance on the US border and act as eyes and ears for the police in cities like New York, while journalists have begun to make use of them.
-
Damning evidence against the intelligence gathering, targeting the militants in Pakistan via drone was brought to light in March 2011 when 40 people were killed in a drone attack attending a tribal meeting in North Waziristan, mostly civilians. The intelligence gathering on potential targets is obviously faulty.
-
Residents of a small Colorado town will be able to buy licenses to shoot down U.S. government drones, if a proposed ordinance is passed by the community of Deer Trail.
-
President Obama’s nominee to head the FBI told senators that he opposed the use of drones to kill Americans inside the United States unless they qualified as “imminent threats” to the security of the homeland.
-
The Air Force was ready to drop the RQ-4B Block 30, but a Northrup Grumman lobbying campaign convinced Congress to resuscitate it.
-
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) usually gets all the credit for the first US drone targeted killing beyond the conventional battlefield.
-
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington will hear a challenge to the Obama administration’s approach to targeted killings. I find myself frustrated by how little progress we’ve made.
-
Bureau data suggests the CIA is killing fewer people in each strike in Pakistan.
-
A former CIA station chief who was convicted in Italy of kidnapping a terror suspect has been arrested in Panama, according to Italian authorities.
-
-
Robert Seldon Lady was convicted in absentia by Italian court for 2003 abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan
-
A former CIA base chief in Italy who was convicted in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a street in Milan has been detained in Panama, the Italian justice ministry said.
An Italian official familiar with Italy’s investigation and prosecution of Robert Seldon Lady said the former CIA official entered Panama, traveled to Costa Rica, and that officials there then sent him back to Panama where he was detained. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because only Italy’s justice ministry was publicly discussing the case.
-
Former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric, has been arrested in Panama, Italian judicial sources told Reuters on Thursday.
-
ormer Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed the presence of American nuclear warheads in bunkers at the Netherlands’ Volkel air base.
-
Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua can’t protect the NSA whistle-blower from rendition at the hands of the CIA
-
What is CIA Director John Brennan holding in his hands? Marcy Wheeler reports that it’s the CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the post-9/11 CIA torture program.
-
A FORMER CIA station chief who was convicted in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a street of Milan has been detained in Panama.
-
The suit, brought by Olson’s family in federal court in Washington, was filed too late and is barred under an earlier settlement, a judge ruled today. Eric and Nils Olson alleged their father, who the CIA admitted was given LSD a few days before his death, didn’t jump from a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York, but rather was pushed.
-
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The country of Peru is looking to provide free electricity to over 2 million of its poorest citizens by harvesting energy from the sun. Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino said that the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program will provide electricity to poor households through the installation of photovoltaic panels.
-
Finance
-
Detroit has become the largest city in US history to file for bankruptcy after accumulating spiralling long term debt estimated at $18.5 billion.
-
The Government was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply by selling the state owned NHS plasma supplier to a US private equity firm.
The Department of Health overlooked several healthcare or pharmaceutical firms and at least one blood plasma specialist before choosing to sell an 80 per cent stake in Plasma Resources UK to Bain Capital, the company co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a £230m deal. The Government will retain a 20 per stake and a share of potential future profits.
-
The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and likely further decline is a fluke or whether it tells us something about the dystopia that the United States is becoming. It seems to me that the city’s problems are the difficulties of the country as a whole, especially the issues of deindustrialization, robotification, structural unemployment, the rise of the 1% in gated communities, and the racial divide. The mayor has called on families living in the largely depopulated west of the city to come in toward the center, so that they can be taken care of. It struck me as post-apocalyptic. Sometimes the abandoned neighborhoods accidentally catch fire, and 30 buildings will abruptly go up in smoke.
-
Moscow plays host today to the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting, the crowning jewel of which is the freshly unveiled Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. Released under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this document sets out 15 specific recommendations for national governments to implement in order to stem the widespread abuse of tax loopholes by multinational companies.
At the center of the issue has been the asymmetry between tightly integrated global corporations and the fragmented, piecemeal responses from individual states. One of the best known and most derided examples of this is the practice of setting up shell companies in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland, which are then used to account for profits from higher-tax nations — something that Google, Facebook, and Starbucks have all been accused of. The new Action Plan tackles this issue head-on, by urging that tax should be paid in the territory where goods or services are sold, not where the company is based. That would thwart Amazon’s practice of booking its Europe-wide profits in Luxembourg, forcing it to compete on the same terms as local retailers.
-
Censorship
-
Though immigration figured prominently on the national political agenda in February 2013, an analysis by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of news coverage during that month shows that immigrants themselves are not getting their say. The study examined all ABC, CBS and NBC news programs, the PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Situation Room, Fox News’ Special Report and MSNBC’s Hardball for all of February. It found 54 reports on immigration featuring 157 news sources during that time.
-
Courts have not been forthcoming with access to website blocking orders, citing administrative reasons for refusing to treat them as public documents.
-
”
The second documentary showed in the series was “High tech, low life.” The cameras followed two citizen journalists as they reported what they saw in China, where censorship is prevalent and penalties for those reporting on unfavorable topics can be strict.
-
Internet Service Providers have agreed to roll out network level filtering to protect children online, following significant political pressure. We have sent them 20 questions on how their Internet filtering systems will work – questions policy makers have failed to ask.
-
The below letter was sent to TalkTalk, Virgin, BSkyB and BT. We’ve written a blog post about this, which has some more background.
-
Tia Lessen and Carl Deal are far from giving up after public television pulled funding for their film “Citizen Koch:” the filmmakers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the funds necessary to release their documentary on money, power and democracy.
-
When Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) purchased Tumblr in May for $1.1 billion in cash, many wondered what changes Yahoo would bring to the hip microblogging service. One of the top questions was what Yahoo would do with the massive amount of pornographic content hosted on Tumblr pages.
-
Privacy
-
The headaches for Huawei Technologies Co. keep growing, fresh after the U.K. government said that it would conduct a review of the Chinese company’s cybersecurity arrangements and a former U.S. intelligence official reportedly accused it of spying for Beijing.
-
Huawei Technologies Co. strongly denied a former U.S. intelligence official’s reported remarks that accused the telecommunications equipment supplier of spying for the Chinese government, saying that such “unsubstantiated” accusations are distractions from real cybersecurity issues.
-
Officials decline to comment on whether they will seek to renew order that permits bulk collection of Americans’ phone records
-
I love this question simply because it means I’m making progress getting companies up to speed on their IT requirements. What set this encounter apart was the unexpected question that followed: “What about the sovereignty of our data?”
I have researched data sovereignty issues for my clients since the NSA’s PRISM project first hit the news – and I think I’m about ready to answer this question. So let’s take a look at what I’ve learnt about data sovereignty.
-
Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organisations including Apple, Google and Facebook have written to the US government asking for more disclosures on the government’s national security-related requests for user data.
-
-
Fugitive security contractor Edward Snowden“did this country a service” by igniting a debate about the reach of the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance programs, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said today.
-
The plot thickens as the NSA’s data collection net widens. NSA leaks reveal that governments are tapping into “the Internet’s backbone” to siphon off huge quantities of data. That is, government programs in the US and UK are able to gain access to tremendous amounts of data by accessing networks of undersea fiber optic cable, according to a report from The Atlantic.
-
If you head over to the Play Store, you can download US Prism Plus and lend a helping hand! The app will take pictures from your mobile device, automatically, and send them to the NSA twitter account. That’s right, all you have to do is download the app and you’re on your way to being a helpful citizen.
-
The European Parliament (EP) is calling for the appearance and testimony of Edward Snowden and General Keith Alexander in the incipient investigation into National Security Agency (NSA) information-gathering programs that have affected Europeans. The NSA’s internet surveillance program, PRISM, is of particular interest. These two individuals, for very different reasons, will be very difficult to get a hold of. One is stranded without travel documents in a Russian airport and the other is America’s greatest spymaster. The EP will get its investigation, but it will not get its desired results and likely neither of these two testimonies.
-
The National Security Agency appears to be tracking data from more people—way, way more people—than it had previously admitted, the Atlantic Wire reported. In congressional testimony yesterday, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis “casually” indicated that the agency looks “two to three hops” from terror suspects. That means the agency monitor not only the people terror suspects talk to on the phone, but also who those people talk to—and then who those people talk to.
-
The world might be fed up with the idea of government surveillance, but that hasn’t quelled the intelligence community’s thirst for more data and better tools to analyze it. The latest example: On Thursday, geospatial data expert OpenGeo announced a investment from In-Q-Tel, an arm of the U.S. intelligence community, originally spun out of the CIA, that makes strategic investments in technologies that could benefit the community’s mission.
Reading through In-Q-Tel’s list of investments is like reading a who’s who of data startups: 10gen, Cloudera, Narrative Science, Palantir and Platfora are among the companies into which it has put money. When it comes to technologies that can store lots of data or new types of data, or analyze or visualize data in novel ways, In-Q-Tel is interested.
-
There’s been lots of talk about electronic surveillance and government-sponsored hacking lately, but Foreign Policy takes a fascinating look at how the Central Intelligence Agency’s digital “black bag” squads get access the old fashioned way — by breaking into peoples’ houses.
-
Crocodile tears to mask US imperialism’s role as the enemy of African liberation
-
A coalition of 19 organizations s formed to file a lawsuit Tuesday (PDF) against the National Security Administration, alleging that the government is supporting “an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”
-
-
-
The U.S. National Security Agency and Department of Justice exceeded their legal authority to conduct surveillance when collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. residents, several U.S. lawmakers said Wednesday.
-
-
We thought you might be getting a little bored while you’re stuck in the airport, so we sent you some reading material. We don’t know if you like Linux, but given your technical background, we hope it’ll be of interest. It’s just a tiny indication of our gratitude.
-
Classified presentation slides detailing aspects of PRISM were leaked by a former NSA contractor. On June 6th, The Guardian and The Washington Post published reports based on the leaked slides, which state that the NSA has “direct access” to the servers of Google, Facebook, and others. In the days since the leak, the implicated companies have vehemently denied knowledge of and participation in PRISM, and have rejected allegations that the US government is able to directly tap into their users’ data.
Both the companies and the government insist that data is only collected with court approval and for specific targets. As The Washington Post reported, PRISM is said to merely be a streamlined system — varying between companies — that allows them to expedite court-approved data collection requests. Because there are few technical details about how PRISM operates, and because of the fact that the FISA court operates in secret, critics are concerned about the extent of the program and whether it violates the constitutional rights of US citizens.
-
The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications.
-
The Obama administration tried to placate Europe’s anger over spying programs. Not as ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharp. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was “useful.”
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in the wake of the NSA Scandals criticized the American political system. “America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the “Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta.
-
Edward Snowden is unlikely to make new revelations since “he doesn’t want to end up in a cage like Bradley Manning”, said The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, adding that he himself decides what to publish from the thousands of leaked documents.
-
Civil Rights
-
Information revealed by a Truthout Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was included in testimony presented to a federal judge in New York City who ruled this week to permanently block the United States military from enforcing part of a law allowing it to indefinitely detain anyone – including US citizens – accused of aiding terrorist organizations.
-
With arms tied down and feet shackled, Yasiin Bey writhes in anguish as a feeding tube is shoved into his right nostril. Groaning in extreme discomfort as his handlers push the tube deeper, Bey – better known as Mos Def – breaks into sobs as he begs for the torment to stop. “This is me, please, stop! I can’t do it anymore.”
-
After years of fighting impunity for U.S. torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights welcomes reports that Panama has detained former CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady in response to an international arrest warrant for his role in the “extraordinary rendition” of Abu Omar from Milan to Egypt. While the United States refuses to investigate or prosecute its own officials for torture and other serious breaches of domestic and international law, other countries like Italy have been willing to place the demands of justice above politics.
-
According to the Global Research, there are approximately 2 million prisoners in the United States occupying state, federal, and private prisons. The vast majority of this population is made up of Blacks and Hispanics. By the number, America maintains 25 percent of the total prison population on the planet – half a million more prisoners than the next largest jailer, China, which has five times the population of the US. California Prison Focus concludes “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.”
-
-
The Second Circuit has permanently vacated the injunction issued by the District Court against NDAA 2012 indefinite detention powers. The case has been remanded to District Court Judge Kathryn Forrest. who originally issued the injunction.
-
The Obama administration has won the latest battle in their fight to indefinitely detain US citizens and foreigners suspected of being affiliated with terrorists under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
-
-
Judge Lewis Kaplan’s excellent Second Circuit opinion in Hedges yesterday should end the controversy over whether the 2012 NDAA expands or merely codifies the government’s AUMF detention authority—though it almost surely won’t. The key discussion begins on page 33 and represents as lucid and straightforward an account of how to read the detention language of Section 1021 as I have seen.
-
New historical research says hungry aboriginal children and adults were once used as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments by the Canadian government.
-
The supposed “irony” of whistle-blower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela has become a media meme. Numerous articles, op-eds, reports and editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and MSNBC have hammered on this idea since the news first broke that Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was a predictable retread of the same meme last year when Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the Ecuadorian government deliberated his asylum request for months.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
Since last week, after citizen groups started criticizing the EU Commission over its leaked draft regulation threatening to kill Net neutrality, Commissioner Neelie Kroes and her staff have tried to defend their proposal on Twitter, arguing that these criticisms were “misleading European citizens”. Here is a summary of what was said, not said, and how it reveals that these criticisms are absolutely right.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.18.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
Some may argue that there will not be a “year of desktop GNU/Linux” etc. but there definitely is a day, in Italy at least.
-
To some, the desktop is an anachronism; a style of input that’s increasingly redundant in a world of tablets and smartphones. But I don’t agree, and I think there’s plenty of evidence to show the desktop is going to be around for some time yet. And more importantly, Linux may become the only viable option. I’m primarily a KDE user, and as such, I’ve been mostly shielded from the turbulence created by several desktops reinventing themselves. KDE went through a similar period and I’m glad it’s now firmly in the past. But like many Linux users, I have more than one installation and use more than one desktop environment.
-
We asked in the latest TuxRadar podcast for the reasons that you change distro. The most frequent one was the choice of desktop. But you don’t have to ditch your whole distro in order to get a new user interface: you can follow our Technical Editor Ben’s advice and find the desktop that’s right for you, so you end up bossing your Linux machine around rather than it controlling you
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
And Churchill’s generally racist views of non-whites are pretty well-established. He spoke of his “jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” and declared of the Kurds, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…[It] would spread a lively terror.”
-
So that is the state of network television coverage of a whistleblower, held without trial for 3 years, who revealed information that made headlines in the most powerful news outlets around the world for months. That is how U.S. television networks are covering a trial where the U.S. government is attempting to argue that publishing information that finds its way into the hands of U.S. enemies is in fact “aiding the enemy”– a stunning legal strategy that holds the potential to criminalize investigative journalism.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
Linus Torvalds views so-called “professional” behavior as a hindrance to progress, and his argument for more a freewheeling, less polite work environment is as convincing as it is brazen.
-
Intel’s Ironlake hardware may be very old and not nearly as nice as the latest generation Haswell parts, but shipped today was a new patch-set for implementing hardware context support.
-
Graphics Stack
-
AMD’s Alex Deucher has submitted another Radeon DRM pull request for the Linux 3.11 kernel to provide more fixes. This time the bug-fixes are “all over the place” for this open-source graphics driver.
-
A set of twelve patches were published on Monday by an Intel OTC developer for allowing support for OpenGL layered rendering as needed for OpenGL 3.2 / GLSL 1.50 support.
-
As promised, now that Linux 3.11-rc1 has been released, it’s time for the new dynamic power management support of the Linux 3.11 kernel for AMD Radeon graphics. This first article previews the possible OpenGL performance gains for an AMD APU when enabling “DPM” for allowing the graphics core to properly re-clock based upon its workload.
-
Video acceleration support for the GLAMOR library, the open-source way of accelerating 2D X.Org operations via the 3D engine, is still coming and is being worked on by a student this summer.
One of the 2013 X.Org GSoC projects is adding X-Video support to GLAMOR. GLAMOR is the 2D acceleration library required by the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs with the RadeonSI driver stack while it can optionally be used for older Radeon GPUs or Intel hardware too.
-
With Mesa 9.2 due to be released next month, here’s the very latest Git benchmarks of Mesa 9.2-devel on an Intel Core i5 Ultrabook with HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” graphics compared to the stable Mesa release versions going back to Mesa 8.0.
-
This is an interesting article by Paolo Rotolo, it’s a comparison of MIR (in the Xmir version that will be present on Ubuntu 13.10) and the current Xorg.
-
Benchmarks
-
With the Linux 3.11-rc1 release, it’s time now at Phoronix to start benchmarking the Linux 3.11 kernel. The first tests to run over the weekend were of Intel Ivy Bridge graphics, where a few regressions were spotted.
-
Beyond Apple’s forthcoming OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” release finally bring OpenGL 4.0 support to Apple hardware, there’s also GL performance improvements to make OS X more competitive with other operating systems for gaming.
-
Applications
-
JOE’s terminal-based interface is reminiscent of early Unix and Linux tools like WordStar and Turbo C editors. I cut my computing teeth at the start of the PC era on early Apple and IBM PC systems, so the keyboard style and terminal atmosphere of JOE are both fun and productive for me. Many of JOE’s keyboard commands are similar to the look and feel of text editors I used with pre-Windows DOS PCs.
-
No, there’s SSH in my browser! Although it may not be as logical of a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, for Chromebook users, an HTML5 SSH client is pretty amazing. Granted, Google’s “crosh” shell has SSH abilities, but it’s a very limited implementation. With the Chrome extension “Secure Shell”, it’s easy to SSH in to remote servers and interact like a traditional terminal window—mostly.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
At the beginning of the year Canonical announced its plans to take on the mobile OS market with a mobile version of Ubuntu. Since then, the project has continued to improve and has even made its way to numerous Android devices for testing purposes.
-
-
Valve have been talking about, and slowly making the jump to Linux for a while now, but it looks like Crytek are looking to make a similar move to the open source operating system.
-
-
The following article is not about presenting every single open source game in existence, but more like selecting the best out of popular gaming categories that are really modern, enjoyable and alive as projects.
-
Swell afternoon to you guys, wherever you are. Four summers ago, I wrote my first, very extensive tutorial on how to get and install Linux games. It was quite relevant back then, and most of it is still true now, but it’s time for a fresh guide that reflects the new, modern reality. However, the old howto still has a lot of useful information, so don’t miss it.
-
The gameplay in Toki Tori is a blend of two genres. While it looks like a platform game, it’s a puzzle game at heart. Looks very colourful too!
Originally ported to Linux for the Humble Bundle for Android the game is now also available on Steam, this includes Achievements and Cloud support as well.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
KDE Ships First Release Candidate of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11
-
After the presentations during the first two days of Akademy, people moved into action. Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops provided the opportunity to discuss, plan and hack. Being Akademy, there was also time away from work for relaxation and camaraderie. Akademy attendees, if there is anything missing, please add in comments.
-
I have been thinking of writing a review of Netrunner for quite sometime. I missed out when 12.12 was released. Further, I downloaded the 64-bit Netrunner 13.06 for two weeks or so testing it out, thinking of writing a review later. But, an opportunity came this weekend. Before actually jumping on to the test, an introduction to those who are not aware of Netrunner.
-
This is just a very quick announcement that new rootfs tarballs of the current development branch of Plasma Active are available for ArchosG9 and Nexus7. These snapshots are not made based on Mer latest but on an older version. Additionally, to the stock Plasma Active installation these tarballs contain my nemo-compatibility package as well as some Nemomobile apps to show the general practicability of running Nemomobile apps on Plasma Active. The rootfs tarballs are available here:
-
-
-
-
tl;dr: If you are a committed KDE contributor and not a KDE e.V. member, you are doing it wrong. If you are a KDE user, consider helping the KDE User Working Group. Read KDE e.V.’s quarterly reports.
-
-
UberStudent has been built from the ground-up to be both educate its users and to deliver the tools necessary to succeed in tertiary education
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
It looks to be a big week for Red Hat (RHT) Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud. The open source company unveiled the 5.10 version of RHEL at about the same time it announced the operating system was being made available on the free usage tier of Amazon (AMZN) Web Services EC2.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
South Africa-based operator group MTN became the latest member of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, after Mark Shuttleworth told Mobile World Live in an exclusive interview that relationships with these partners are “essential” to the success of the Ubuntu platform in the mobile space.
-
One week after Mir 0.0.6, a Canonical engineer has now tagged Mir 0.0.7 for their experimental display server for Ubuntu Linux.
-
MTN has become the first African network operator to join Canonical’s Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), which will influence the development of the smartphone operating system Ubuntu.
-
-
Trademark filing report reveals Canonical’s plans to release next Ubuntu for Mobile OS based smartphone dubbed as Ubuntu Edge.
-
-
A few months ago, armed with your responses from one of our podcast’s Open Ballot questions, we visited the Cambridge HQ of the Raspberry Pi Foundation to quiz its founder about hardware upgrades, education and what success has meant for the project. The result was an epic 7,000 word interview, the first half of which we published in Linux Format issue 173. But as we didn’t have enough space in the magazine, we thought we’d put the interview online in it’s entirety. And here it is!
-
The team behind Raspberry Pi should fix this promptly. Raspberry Pi has emerged as nothing less than the true solution that players like the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) folks were looking for when they proposed creating sub-$100 computers. Raspberry Pis are making it into school systems in parts of the world where kids don’t have computers, and there is even now a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces.
-
Few would dispute the value of standards for fostering interoperability, and here in the open source community that tends to be viewed as a particularly important goal.
-
Phones
-
Finnish smartphone startup wants to take on the established giants, UI-changing backplate, fridge-friendly OS and all.
-
-
Ballnux
-
Flip phones, if you didn’t know are the rage in Asian countries like Japan and Korea and they’ve always been that way. Even the advent of the Android, iOS and other touch sensitive devices hasn’t managed to shake the trend which clearly shows how much that design is admired. Apparently, Samsung is reportedly working on giving the best of both worlds with an Android flip phone called Samsung Galaxy Folder. It sounds like an awkward design choice but it would certainly interest a flip phone admirer.
-
Android
-
NanoTech Entertainment is accepting pre-orders on a $299 4K UltraHD media and game player device that runs Android 4.2 on an quad-core Nvidia Tegra 4 SoC. Designed for gaming, multimedia play, and web browsing, the Nuvola NP-1 may well be the world’s most advanced Android media player.
-
BitTorrent today announced the open beta release of its file synchronization tool Sync, and the debut of an Android app. You can download the latest version now for Windows, Mac, and Linux over at labs.bittorrent.com as well as for Android from Google Play.
-
Here’s some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.
-
GlassUp, an Italian startup, has started taking pre-orders on Indiegogo for an Android eyewear display system billed as a simpler, lower-cost alternative to Google Glass. The GlassUp device is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory to a nearby mobile device, providing a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display of incoming messages and notifications.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit that aims to bring computing to the developing world, has launched its XO Learning Tablet through Walmart.
-
Cloudsmith represents “a crack team of developers” with experience in creating programming languages, tools, virtual machines and enterprise applications, said Luke Kanies, CEO of the Portland, Ore., firm. All seven members of the company will join Puppet.
-
“Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated,” Musk posted on his Twitter page. Musk also released another detail in response to Ramin Schadlu (@schadlu) about whether this new technology will be proprietary. “I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source,” Musk replied.
-
-
Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has received a US$20 million investment that it will use to expand its development team to speed up feature rollouts for its Web-based office suite, the company announced on Thursday.
The biggest chunk of the money will go into the expansion of the engineering department, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. The office development team, which now consists of 15 people, will be doubled in the next 12 months or so, he said.
-
-
BitTorrent’s cross-platform file syncing software could provide some relief for privacy- and security-minded individuals, since data is not housed in a central hub. However, BitTorrent is not exactly the most trusted name on the Internet, thanks to widespread use of its P2P software for piracy. BitTorrent has taken pains to distance itself from such activities, but the association persists.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Chrome beta for Android has had an update, it’s version 29 and it’s bringing in a few features which are about the same league as updates released in April and May so nothing major but it is noteworthy. It’s noteworthy because Chrome beta for Android now has the latest variety of WebRTC, providing you the luxury of having a face to face chat without the need of any plugins. Not only can you have a good chat with another user but you can now Cube Slam your friend’s face right from your phone thanks to the WebRTC support. Just head over to the WebRTC page for getting the first hand experience of it.
-
Mozilla
-
T-Mobile will begin its rollout of phones based on Mozilla’s Firefox OS when it puts the Alcatel One Touch on sale in Poland next week.
-
Meanwhile, I’ll go and do some work for Mozilla, trying to improve site compatibility for Firefox on Android. I’ll probably be more useful to the web there than at Opera, in the near future.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Not surprisingly, a number of open source private cloud technologies have emerged as alternatives commercial software. They feature varying degrees of maturity and adoption. Among these open source platforms are offerings from Eucalyptus, Citrix CloudPlatform, OpenNebula and OpenStack.
-
Rackspace has been pushing the OpenStack cloud computing platform forward since its inception, and in its latest example of OpenStack-centric innovation, the company has now released an update to its Android app that lets administrators manage Rackspace OpenStack clouds while on the go.
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
-
-
Customer and Partner Momentum Enable Oracle Linux to Achieve Fastest Growing Enterprise Linux Status
-
CMS
-
Everyone loves the promise of Open Source Software (OSS). It’s free (or almost free); it’s built by passionate communities of developers; you can “look under the hood”; and there’s no vendor lock-in. Add to that, that the rate of innovation is supposed to be faster with OSS — why would anyone choose to work with anything else?
-
Funding
-
A Kickstarter project promising faster, cheaper Level 2 240V, 15 kW charging has reached its goal, with the first units expected to deliver this month.
-
Open-source code is a huge boon startups and the internet at large — it allows for apps and services that would take months or even years of coding to spring up without much extra work. But there’s also a distinct problem with open source: It doesn’t pay.
-
The Kickstarter crowd-funding development platform has successfully worked for funding many computer games, a few interesting hardware projects, and other initiatives, but would it work for having an open-source graphics processor? A company may be turning to Kickstarter to open-source their 2D and 3D graphics designs.
-
Project Releases
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Frederick Kaufman has penned a provocative article for Slate’s Future Tense column in which he makes the case for open-source genetically modified foods. “It will help fight climate change,” he says, “and stick one in Monsanto’s eye.” What’s more, it’s an approach that still favors scientific advancement.
-
Open Data
-
The U.S. government’s portal for the data it creates, Next.Data.gov, is getting a revamp that should make it easier to view and reuse government data.
-
Programming
-
That omission is problematic because unlicensed code’s copyright rests with its author, without the coder having to do anything to claim it. Yet GitHub’s legalese makes it plain that accepting forking is a condition for using the service but is otherwise vague on where rights rest.
-
The LLVM compiler infrastructure may be generating some speedier binaries by default for the -O3 optimization level by turning on the straight-line SLP vectorizer.
-
-
-
GitHub has emerged to be one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) tool for collaborative online version control and development. While it is often associated with open source software development, that’s not always a requirement.
-
GitHub, the popular open-source development community site, is finally getting its licensing act together. It’s high time since Black Duck has found that 77-percent of GitHub projects have no declared open-source license.
-
It’s relatively easy to deal with those who pour forth hatred online. But the greater threat comes from the more subtle spreaders of misery and doubt
-
Health/Nutrition
-
The fast food burrito chain Chipotle, which advertises “food with integrity,” became the first restaurant chain in the United States to label genetically modified ingredients in its food in March 2013.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have sparked concerns about potential human health effects and confirmed environmental effects. Chipotle has 1,450 restaurants as of June 2013 and $2.7 billion in annual revenue, so the labeling is no small potatoes.
-
Lawyers for Liberty University have announced that they will seek to take the case back to the Supreme Court.
-
Security
-
If you felt a twinge of angst after reading Ars’ May feature that showed how password crackers ransack even long passwords such as “qeadzcwrsfxv1331″, you weren’t alone. The upshot was clear: If long passwords containing numbers, symbols, and upper- and lower-case letters are this easy to break, what are users to do?
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
In France, Greenpeace activists got past security and climbed reactor structures at the Tricastin nuclear power plant. They unfurled a banner which read: TRICASTIN ACCIDENT NUCLÉAIRE: PRÉSIDENT DE LA CATASTROPHE? (Tricastin Nuclear Accident: President of the Disaster?). Earlier this morning, other activists projected a crack onto the superstructure of the plant illustrating that French President, Hollande, needs to shut down 20 nuclear reactors in the country by 2020 in keeping with his promise to cut nuclear power from three-quarters to half by 2025.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a conservative advocacy group founded and funded by David Koch, is spearheading an ad campaign aimed at young women attacking the 2010 federal health reform law dubbed “ObamaCare.” It is spending more than $1 million to run the ad in Virginia and Ohio, with plans to expand it to a total of seven states.
-
Privacy
-
-
We met with Helen Goodman MP last month to talk about mobile companies developing marketing and analytics products based on data about their customers without clear consent. After that meeting, she was able to secure the Commons debate on the issue.
-
The ISC has today made a statement on it’s investigation into PRISM, following the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
While it appears the investigation was limited to PRISM, as opposed to Tempora or any of the other programmes we now know to be operational, it reaffirms that the statutory basis for PRISM at least is the 1994 Intelligence Services Act.
-
Ah, Stewart Baker. We’ve mentioned him a few times in the past. He’s the former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security and General Counsel for the NSA. He’s, as you may have guessed, strongly in the “pro-surveillance” camp, and has even attacked some of the journalists who revealed the NSA leaks, claiming that by revealing the truth they’re no longer journalists, but advocates. He’s taking part in a House Judiciary Committee hearing looking into oversight on the administration’s use of FISA and his testimony is quite incredible. It goes way beyond what we’ve seen from others. While it repeats his baseless and confused attack that some journalists who were key players in this story were evil “advocates” rather than journalists, that’s nothing compared to his lack of regard for the Constitution and basic civil liberties. In fact, he very clearly blames 9/11 on civil liberties advocates, and fears that all this talk about surveillance may lead to a repeat event.
-
The Justice Department has proposed changing its policies on leak investigations so that it would be more difficult to secretly seize reporters’ records, in response to widespread criticism about the department’s practices.
-
Back in the Founder’s time, paper was state-of-the-art for containing information so “papers” contained a person’s information. Today, in addition to paper, we have digital media to contain our information. Without probable cause, the blanket seizure of data on every American is unconstitutional.
Judge Richard A. Posner contends that this data collection is not a grave threat to civil liberties.
-
There have been several articles in the press recently about users flocking to DuckDuckGo in the wake of the recent NSA snooping revelations. If you are in this category this post is meant for you.
If you use DuckDuckGo solely for the myriad of other benefits, such as reducing advertiser tracking, filter boxing, etc. move along nothing to see here. DuckDuckGo will provide you at least that level of “privacy”.
[...]
If Google’s servers can be compromised by a bunch of Chinese hackers, and if the computers controlling Iran’s uranium enrichment equipment can be compromised without even being connected to the internet, how long would a service like DuckDuckGo (or Verizon Internet Services) standup against a concerted effort by the NSA?
-
The National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting massive amounts of information about people in the United States and throughout the world. From details about every phone call to collections of people’s activities online–the US government is creating a monumental amount of data on each individual person in existence. The balance between privacy and security is always difficult, and the ethics of the NSA’s practices be will debated for the near future. However, as a physician I worry about something just as difficult. Excellent reasons exist why I as a physician do not order every test on every patient. I know that amassing too much data can be harmful.
-
The latest effort to distract attention from the NSA revelations is more absurd than most
[...]
Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It’s particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly “blackmailing” and “threatening” the US government. That is just absurd.
-
A retired federal judge, who formerly served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, on Tuesday praised the growing public discussion about government surveillance fostered by the leaks of classified information by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whom the Obama administration has charged with espionage and who remains a fugitive.
-
Remember 1997? That’s when Carnivore was in use by the FBI. Soon after we heard rumours of an AT&T Room 641A, where the NSA would have a colocated interception facility that would tap into all communications being handled by that telco. Then all the rage about ECHELON, a SIGINT collection network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States of America).
-
Yesterday’s New York Times story on the secret legal opinions of the FISA court prompts a natural question: How should the FISA court reach its decisions, and how do we know it is doing so correctly? That breaks down into two questions. First, what procedures should the FISA court use to reach legal conclusions? And second, when or how should those legal conclusions be made public? The latter has received much more attention than the former. Like a lot of people, I tend to think that it wouldn’t impact national security for the FISA court to release more information about its decisions, at least in those cases when the judges consider abstract legal issues.. Perhaps the court could issue opinions in redacted form; perhaps it could simply release a summary of its legal conclusions and reasoning. Either way, a lot of people have voiced opinions on that issue. In this post, I want to focus on the first question that hasn’t received as much attention: What procedures should the FISA court use to reach its legal conclusions?
-
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Orin Kerr has a thought-provoking post on one route to reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court: have Congress give an adversarial role to the Oversight Section at DOJ’s National Security Division, such that security-cleared DOJ lawyers would “have a right to file a motion to oppose any application before the FISC,” and such a motion would then trigger litigation and a dispositive ruling with many–if not most–of the hallmarks of adversarial process. Such a reform, in Orin’s view, would thereby ameliorate, if not eliminate, at least some of the oft-repeated concerns with the ex parte FISC process. And as importantly from the government’s perspective, Orin would have such a motion follow the initial issuance of an order/certification by the FISA Court, so that the litigation isn’t slowing down the government’s ability to actually conduct the authorized surveillance. Such an approach, Orin writes, “offers a middle ground that may please no one.”
-
…do not allow users to be anonymous.
-
Remember the 2011 attack that crippled Sony’s PlayStation Network, leaked almost a quarter million users’ information and generally was a nuisance? It’s still cleaning up after that mess. Earlier this year, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped the company’s European wing with a £250,000 fine ($377,575), saying it should have been better prepared for the attack — now Sony’s agreed to pay up. The electronics giant still maintains that the charge is without merit, but ceded to the penalty to avoid disclosing details about its security procedures. Apparently, the two months of free PS+ wasn’t enough to make everybody forget.
-
The secret surveillance court that approved the U.S. government’s broad collection of millions of Americans’ e-mail and telephone records called Monday for the Obama administration to declassify and release as much as it can of one of the court’s early legal decisions sanctioning that collection.
The chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Justice Department to begin a review to see how much it can reasonably declassify from a 2008 opinion — a ruling in which the court allegedly ordered Yahoo to turn over the records of its customers’ online communications.
-
A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.
-
German intelligence authorities have denied a report that the US agency at the center of a major snooping scandal is building a new base in Germany. The US Army claims the facility will deal with military intelligence.
-
Former US President Jimmy Carter lambasted US intelligence methods as undemocratic and described Edward Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country.
Carter lashed out at the US political system when the issue of the previously top-secret NSA surveillance program was touched upon at the Atlantic Bridge meeting on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia.
-
-
-
Much of the American public is in favor of the NSA conducting widespread surveillance. So much, in fact, that a lawsuit challenging the NSA’s power is unlikely to succeed, Steven Rambam, the founder and CEO of Pallorium investigative agency, told RT.
-
Americans are apparently blasé about government eavesdropping.
In the days after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Washington spies extensively on its own citizens, polls found that about half of Americans have no problem with such snooping, as long as it protects them from terrorism.
But a scandal unfolding here in South Korea illustrates how such domestic snooping can easily harm a democracy.
The imbroglio — which has sparked student protests and candlelight vigils around Seoul — actually consists of two episodes rolled into one.
-
The largest Internet companies in the United States have joined forces with top civil liberties groups to call on the White House and Congress to increase the transparency surrounding the government’s controversial National Security Agency surveillance programs. Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter are among the tech giants that have signed a letter to the feds, asking for the right to disclose more information about national security data requests. Notably absent are the nation’s largest phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which have remained silent about their participation in the government’s snooping program.
-
-
Tech companies and privacy groups petition the White House and Congress, urging “greater transparency” over secret demands for accessing private user data.
-
A top defense official says the National Security Agency is implementing new security measures because of the disclosures by former NSA-systems-analyst-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden.
-
So far, this attempt at justification has satisfied no one. Neither has U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s baffling claim of ignorance on the topic.
-
A top official at the National Security Agency explained to members of Congress on Wednesday that it spies on people who know people who know people who might be terrorists.
-
Whether it’s ethically right or wrong to investigate deep into suspects’ networks of connections, the NSA certainly has the processing power to do it. “Three hops” away isn’t much when you can map potentially trillions of identities.
-
The lawmakers’ criticisms came at a hearing with administration officials who sought to defend the once-secret government telephone snooping made public last month by former government contractor Edward Snowden.
-
Both Republicans and Democrats express reservations about NSA programs during hearing.
-
The interview of Snowden describes that prior to his release of classified intelligence documents, NSA and other nation’s intelligence agencies conducted the broad surveillance. Snowden also asserted that NSA shares surveillance and cooperates with other nations including Israel.
-
Unlike most sane people, I spend a lot of time fretting over LinkedIn. More specifically, I think about LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature. How does LinkedIn know I may know these people? What do my alleged connections say about me? And just where is LinkedIn getting its information? I have deep suspicions, but no proof.
Lately, though, things have taken a turn for the absurd. Looking at my endlessly scrolling list of People You May Know, I discovered Latvians. Not just four or five Latvians – more like 40 or 50 Latvians, most of whom aren’t even distantly connected to me.
-
Civil Rights
-
A nineteen-year-old has been jailed since March 27, 2013. He’s been beaten — by other inmates, allegedly. He’s been subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes stripped naked. The authorities have rejected calls for his release on a reasonable bail his family could possibly afford. All of this has happened because he wrote something online that concerned or offended or enraged the state.
[...]
The nineteen-year-old is Justin Carter. Carter, like many Americans his age (or mine, for that matter) plays online games and indulges in the exaggerated trash-talk common to that culture. In the course of an argument involving the game League of Legends, he got into a dispute with another player, who called him crazy or “messed up in the head.” That is a rather mild epithet coming from an online gamer; it’s nothing like Carter might have gotten if, for instance, he’d had the bad taste to Game While Female.
-
The singer refuses to perform in the state until its Stand Your Ground law is “abolished.”
-
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
The internet is a wonderful tool for openness, freedom and innovation. No wonder it is so important to so many citizens. And no wonder the debate over “net neutrality” can seem so charged.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
In the war against inequality, we’ve become so used to bad news that we’re almost taken aback when something positive happens. And with the Supreme Court having affirmed that wealthy people and corporations have a constitutional right to buy American elections, who would have expected it to bring good news? But a decision in the term that just ended gave ordinary Americans something that is more precious than money alone — the right to live.
At first glance, the case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, might seem like scientific arcana: the court ruled, unanimously, that human genes cannot be patented, though synthetic DNA, created in the laboratory, can be. But the real stakes were much higher, and the issues much more fundamental, than is commonly understood. The case was a battle between those who would privatize good health, making it a privilege to be enjoyed in proportion to wealth, and those who see it as a right for all — and a central component of a fair society and well-functioning economy. Even more deeply, it was about the way inequality is shaping our politics, legal institutions and the health of our population.
-
Copyrights
-
Copyright troll Prenda Law has become best known for the major setbacks it has faced in a Los Angeles case in the court of US District Judge Otis Wright. But the tough sanction order penned by Wright has been accompanied by setbacks in other jurisdictions as well.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.17.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Although the PC market is in turmoil, it has never been easier to replace its out-of-date, often unsupported, bloated & infected preinstalled OS with a Linux alternative.
In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to turn your PC into a Web kiosk. What’s a Web kiosk? It’s a PC that directs the public to a certain intended Web application. Imagine public computers found at a library or a cafe, these would be considered Web kiosks.
-
Desktop
-
Chromebook shipments could spike in the second half of the year. That’s not good news for Microsoft, which is seeing falling laptop deliveries.
-
Server
-
Last December I wrote about an idea I call “One Server Per Person”, the basic idea being that if every household included their own server, the Internet could make a return to being the decentralized, distributed, and open platform it was meant to be. Recent events have brought to light some pitfalls of cloud computing, and a call for privacy online make the concept of the One Server worth a revisit. I have three projects that I would like to talk about, and how they relate to bringing the datacenter home.
[...]
Transporter – If you took the Raspberry Pi setup above, put it in a nice plastic case, added a nice web interface and restricted its use to filesharing only, you might wind up with the Transporter from Connected Data. The Transporter is a tiny device that plugs into your home network and allows you to share your files with all of your computers and mobile devices, no matter where they are. It is like Dropbox, but hosted on your own personal server. The only drawback that I can see is that it is not open source (although I’d bet on it running Linux or FreeBSD under the hood), and it does require some form of cloud interaction with a central server to allow the connection back into your Transporter. However, as a proof of concept, it works well.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
-
-
-
Linus Torvalds is well known for his use of colorful language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and he’s not the only one that uses questionable language that some might considering threatening.
For the last 20 years, I can’t remember anyone actually standing up to Linus (or the other colorful devs) saying that’s just not right — until today.
Sarah Sharp, Linux kernel developer at Intel, is making a stand against the verbal abuse.
-
-
Profanity and insults have long been management tactics of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. He once memorably gave the middle finger to Nvidia; separately, he announced that he would not change Linux “to deep-throat Microsoft.” Torvalds has also shown no qualms about being rude to those who disagree with him.
-
There’s an interesting public spat going on in the world of Linux, where a Linux programmer from Intel, Sarah Sharp, has picked a fight with the Linux creator himself: Linus Torvalds.
-
Linus Torvalds is a man of many emotions. At times, he’s got a great sense of humor – he did just name the 3.11 Linux kernel ‘Linux for Workgroups’, after all. Other times, and especially if you’re a developer making his life harder, he can be less-than-pleasant, as has been evidenced time and time again. As much as I respect Linus, I’ve long believed that it wouldn’t hurt to tone down his aggressiveness just a wee bit, and now, it’s become clear that I’m not alone.
-
Sarah is completely right, and entitled to demand an abuse-free working environment. Thank you for making this explicit, and standing up against those that think it’s not necessary. You’re speaking for a silent crowd, that is now not so silent anymore.
[...]
Food for thought: If we want Asian hardware manufacturers to work with us on, e.g. drivers for their hardware, and do it upstream, it simply won’t happen in a rude atmosphere that is entirely incompatible with Asian culture (where critique has to be much more subtile). Of course it’s a general problem with cultural diversity.
-
The “Linus being Linus” issue comes up occasionally, and often with a hue and cry about how mean, nasty and ugly he can be. I’ve called him on things in the past — not that he cares (he doesn’t), but at the time I thought it merited discussion. But back to the latest edition of the blow up, which can be found here, here and here, and you’ll see wherein lies the rub.
-
A female kernel developer has told Linux creator Linus Torvalds that he should stop abusing and cursing developers on the main kernel mailing list, advising him to “keep it professional on the mailing lists”.
-
Graphics Stack
-
In late February this year, I published a proof of concept demonstrating the XBMC Media Center on the Weston system compositor. It was basically a hack which used SDL’s existing wayland compositor support with a few additions required to make XBMC work. XBMC plans to drop SDL usage and use window systems directly, which makes a lot of sense, but it meant that this proof of concept would have to be largely rewritten.
-
XBMC developer smspillaz, the man responsible for the XBMC Weston hack a few months ago, is now rounding the final turns towards XBMC being fully compatible with Wayland. smspillaz reports that he will be doing a GSoC this year to move XBMC completely to Wayland–without the use of SDL.
-
With the release of Mesa 9.2 being a few weeks out, here’s a current look at the OpenGL 3.x/4.x support levels within Mesa.
The current overview of the modern OpenGL functionality offered by Mesa can be found in the latest GL3.txt Git.
-
Chris Wilson has put out another speedy X.Org Intel graphics driver release, this time bumping it to version 2.21.12.
-
Benchmarks
-
There’s finally a new and visually exciting OpenGL benchmark to try out for Linux, OS X, and Windows users alike. The benchmark also supports OpenGL 3.x contexts for making testing more exciting with regard to the Linux graphics driver stack.
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
After 10 days of vacations, I’m now back at work for the rest of the GSoC period. Before my departure, I presented a syntax-highlighted query builder widget. It was based on a QTextEdit made to look like a QLineEdit, and a QSyntaxHighlighter subclass was responsible for the highlighting.
-
Games
-
[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
-
If you love the MMORPG WAKFU, then get excited players, because now it is on Ubuntu! In WAKFU, gamers can climb mountains and adventure across unknown lands were they can become a warrior, merchant or whatever they choose!
-
It’s been a while since Citrix updated their Receiver for Linux. The ‘Receiver for Linux 13.0 Tech Preview’ is intended for customers and partners to evaluate it in their environment. This Tech Preview provides the opportunity for partners to integrate the optimizations in their firmware in order to get the additional benefit of new enhancements with Citrix Receiver for Linux.
-
-
-
-
As we do every summer, we’ve pulled together our list of 101 of the “funnest” open source apps ever created. Of course, most of these are games, but there are also a few fun non-games at the end of the list.
This year, we’ve updated the list with quite a few new entries, as well as eliminating some of the older titles that are no longer being maintained.
Many commentators have noticed that open source and Linux are starting to attract more game developers. Hopefully, the trend will continue and we’ll have even more open source games to consider for next year’s list.
-
-
Shadow Warrior Classic Redux, classic first person action will be heading to Linux in a future version!
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Christmas morning 2012, one of my Gmail accounts was hacked. The good news was that it wasn’t my main account. The bad news was that it was one I used for a fair amount of work-related communication. I was lucky that I caught it quickly and was able to button it up within an hour or so, but it was a surprisingly intense experience, leaving me feeling violated, humbled, vulnerable, and silly.
-
Since my last post quite some progress has been made in getting KWin working on top of a Wayland compositor. My main focus of work has been on the input stack. This is something I am not really familiar with as so far we did not have to care about it.
As some might know input handling in X11 is very insecure. Every application is able to listen to every key event. And in the KDE workspaces we obviously make use of these “features”. For example the global shortcut handling is implemented as a kded module listening to all key events and notifying the application via D-Bus that the shortcut got triggered. In a post-X11 world this will not work any more: applications are no longer able to listen to all key events.
-
At the Kubuntu Developer Summit we discussed various topics. The guys on the left are from a 15,000 seat Kubuntu rollout in Munich, we worked out a plan to supply LTS backport packages they need.
-
-
Open Source communities are amazingly innovative. Linux Defenders encourages them to document their ideas in the form of defensive publications, so that this body of knowledge becomes relevant prior art for later patent applications and patent invalidations.
-
-
Language data for Artikulate is growing. We currently have 19 units in basic course skeleton form which 18 are translated into Polish,
-
-
A quiet day for me at Akademy catching up on e-mail and learning how to make an apt archive so here’s some more photos from the rocking party last night.
-
-
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
GNOME 2 is the Linux desktop environment that refuses to die. Three years after its last release, GNOME 2—or, to be precise, its successors—are collectively as popular as uncustomized GNOME 3. The GNOME 2 successors scored 18 percent to GNOME 3′s 13 percent in the 2012 LinuxQuestion’s Member’s Choice poll, and 15 percent to GNOME 3′s 21 percent in the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice poll. Despite the half dozen desktops available today, GNOME 2′s successors remain leading choices.
This persistent popularity is both a measure of the initial user dissatisfaction with the GNOME 3 release series and a triumph of branding. Initially, dissatisfaction with GNOME 3.0 caused many users to turn to Xfce. A long-time distant third to GNOME and KDE, Xfce closely resembles GNOME 2 but is generally lighter and faster.
-
-
-
The new 2013.07.11 Bluestar Full edition has been released and is available for download from the Bluestar Linux downloads area. This release introduces a number of new and useful features, including new icons for shutdown/reboot/logout/screenlock, and extended language installation options.
-
New Releases
-
-
This version includes some misc features like:
Eltrans: This release includes a complete rewrite of the translator tool for Elive. With features like a grammar corrector and a proofreader mode, where the translator can modify the original sentences of the application itself, making it more userfriendly and intuitive.
Backported Randr code from Enlightenment 18 to E17 which makes it easier to configure dual-screen and external monitors, special thanks to PrinceAMD and devilhorns.
-
Screenshots
-
Red Hat Family
-
Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) platform with a new beta release.
RHEL 5.10 provides users with a variety of updated capabilities, including a new version of MySQL, improved management tools and enhanced security.
-
We’re excited to share that Red Hat has just been named by Business Insider as one of “The 25 Best Tech Companies to Work for in 2013.” The list was compiled using information gathered from Glassdoor.com, a free jobs and career community where employees and job seekers can provide anonymous information about different companies.
-
Fedora
-
Fedora is one of those distributions I try from time to time but that ultimately fail to stay around, usually when it comes to the upgrade process. I last used Fedora 14, after brushes with 12 and 10, the KDE spin of which got slower with every point update to the desktop but whose LXDE spin actually got used for quite a few months. So let’s see how Fedora 19 pans out, featuring GNOME Shell 3.8.2, and how/if that has improved since I last tried the Shell when it was freshly released on the unsuspecting public.
-
Beginning with Fedora 20, the Linux distribution is considering no longer installing rsyslog by default but would replace it with use of the systemd journal as the Fedora logging solution.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
My son James (12) has presented me with two gifts he’s made at school recently. Both are terrific and he designed and made them himself.
-
MTN has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), a body which lets mobile operators shape Ubuntu’s mobile strategy.
Canonical announced the formation of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) on 18 June 2013.
-
Support for the alternative open source mobile OS developed by Linux shop Ubuntu increased this week as pan-African carrier MTN Group signed up to the cause.
Canonical announced that MTN has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, bringing another 21 countries across the African region into the fold.
-
-
-
Raspberry Pi embedded development firm Geekroo has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal for a Mini-ITX board and case that extends the RPi into a full-fledged computer (SBC). The Fairywren is equipped with a 24-pin ATX power supply connector, a four-port USB hub, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, a serial port, an IR remote module, GPIO breakout, and sockets for a built-in XBee radio and Arduino Uno boards.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
HTC One is a stunning device and the Taiwanese smartphone maker should be real proud of it, but being critically acclaimed doesn’t guarantee commercial success, and that exact same thing has been happening with HTC. The company’s popular flagship smartphone even though has had a positive impact on the finances, has not been enough to pull the company out of the crisis. Now analysts are suggesting that HTC should merge with the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei.
-
-
-
The new family-friendly XO Tablet debuts July 16 on Walmart.com and will be in Walmart stores on August 1, and will provide kids with a fun and exciting new way to build, learn and dream at their own pace via a powerful Android tablet packed with free educational games, apps, videos, e-books and more. The flexible tablet also grows with the family offering up to three separate user accounts plus full-fledged Android tablet functionality with parental-controlled access to conventional Android apps and the Google Play store.
-
Successful Kickstarter project and highly publicized Android gaming console OUYA has ignited a feeding frenzy as competitors rise to fill the market.
-
BoxTone’s enterprise mobility management platform is designed to bring Android security up to levels better-suited to the rigors of the business workforce, but in making Android enterprise-hardened, the company left Android’s open source trappings intact.
As part of that EMM platform, BoxTone delivers its service in three categories of functionality, according to Brian Reed, the company’s chief marketing officer and chief product officer. Mobile device management is generally the most well-known functional area; the second one is an emerging market called Web services management. The third category, mobile services management, focuses on reliability, service quality and cost efficiency.
-
-
-
To be presented and released at Black Hat, CrowdStrike’s Tortilla delivers to researchers much-needed anonymity on Windows machines
-
A start-up named Broala has been formed to expand the open-source intrusion detection system known simply as Bro that has been used in high-speed research networks for about two decades.
-
A lot of computer software now comes for free. It is called open-source software. Most open-source software has online communities of software developers around them who collaboratively write code. I always wondered who pays these people to work so hard and create such beautiful software and then give it away for free. Where do these people earn money? I was not surprised to find out that these were not conventional people bored with their desk jobs during the day who went home at night to write beautiful, intelligent computer software.
-
Avineon, Inc., a successful provider of information technology, geospatial, engineering support services, and Outage Restoration Management Software (ORMS) today announced the release of the Implementation Guide for the Outage Restoration Maturity Model (ORMM).
-
Boffin software reviewer revealed today its list of free label maker software for 2013. The Boffin reviewers have put to the test various label maker programs to identify the most efficient and reliable ones. The reviewers assessed the software based on efficiency, quality, speed and overall performance.
-
Trusted software review website announced today its top choices regarding free label maker software. CDROM2Go and MAgix Xtreme Print Studio made it to the Boffin hall of fame.
-
Last week Mark and I attended the Oxford University ICT Forum where we gave this workshop talk on “Getting the Maximum Benefit from Free and Open Source Software”.
-
Getting started in an unfamiliar open source project seems intimidating because it is intimidating; plunging into the unknown usually is. Navigating new territory is a lot easier with a guide—which is why I recently taught a seminar at Hacker School on “getting started contributing to open source” that mostly amounted to “first, find a mentor.” The basic steps are:
-
Events
-
Linaro has just published videos and slides from keynotes, technical presentations, and panel discussions at last week’s Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event held in Dublin, Ireland. The sessions spanned a wide range of topics, including Android, Builds and Baselines, Enterprise, Graphics and Multimedia, Linux Kernel, Network, Project Management Tools, Training, and more.
-
If you are going to be in Portland, Oregon in the next few weeks, I wanted to share some of the things I will be doing. If you want a meeting while I am at the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON, please get in touch and we can coordinate.
-
The SoCraMOB Open Space – hashtag #MOBenSpace – takes place roughly every second month and aims at people from the area around Münster, Osnabrück and Bielefeld. It has usually around 20-40 people and focuses on discussing modern and agile software development in these days, independent of the programming language. The background organization behind it is the German Softwerkskammer, an initiative to bring together software developers.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
I’ve been putting Google’s new version 28 of the Chrome browser through the paces, and so far I’ve come away impressed. In case you haven’t followed the latest on this release, Google is at a major fork in the road with Chrome (so to speak), and has built in a brand new, in-house created rendering engine called Blink. We covered it in this post, and the Opera browser is also transitioning from the WebKit rendering engine to Blink.
-
Mozilla
-
-
The Spanish company is expanding from the developer market to the broader consumer market with the Peak+, a higher-end phone than other Firefox OS models on sale.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
Cloud computing has become an integral part of IT for many organizations, and the competing open-source platforms are pushing for a role in advanced cloud management. The overarching goal of both CloudStack and OpenStack is to achieve logical cloud-layer management that presents numerous ways to control various workloads.
-
CMS
-
Funding
-
BSD
-
This is the first release candidate for FreeNAS 9.1.0. We have passed a great alpha and rolling beta cycle with many bug fixes and regressions fixed. At this point, only bug fixes and regressions will be addressed.
-
The FreeBSD Foundation has published their latest quarterly status report to make known the current state of the popular BSD operating system project.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Awk’s features have advanced considerably in the last decade — such as the addition of a debugger and a profiler — all without removing any of the elegance or terseness of the fabled little language.
-
Support for aarch64 was just committed to lightning.
-
Project Releases
-
The open-source Eucalyptus cloud project has just released a new version that’s improved its Amazon Web Service cloud interoperability.
-
Public Services/Government
-
Next.Data.gov is a sleeker site for government records, but will Americans use it?
-
The U.S. government’s portal for the data it creates, Next.Data.gov, is getting a revamp that should make it easier to view and reuse government data.
-
-
GovHack projects will be used to build upon and add new functionality to the data.gov.au website
-
The twelve Dutch provinces estimate that since 2009 they have saved 4.5 million euro by working together and by using open source software solutions for their Geographic Information Systems. The twelve are now looking to build communities around their open source tools.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
I never thought how a simple photograph at a family birthday could capture the essence of an open education until my niece recently turned one year old.
-
Open Access/Content
-
A few years back, one of my classmates from a graduate course had a complaint. She told me that her school bought an expensive technology system, which included tablets and interactive whiteboards, to help improve the school’s technological environment. In her opinion the purchase of this high-priced equipment was not really necessary. She believed that instead of buying such expensive technology, her school should have investigated alternatives that are inexpensive or free, and require only minimal training.
-
Programming
-
GitHub has become one of the most important places for open source software developers to publish code and collaborate on projects. But, ironically, most projects hosted publicly on GitHub aren’t open source, at least according to the letter of open source law.
Aaron Williamson, a lawyer specializing in open source issues, analyzed over 1.7 million public GitHub code repositories earlier this year, and of these, only 14.9 percent had clearly specified an open source license, as reported by The Register.
-
GitHub has launched a new site – choosealicense.com – as a way to simplify selecting an open source licence for projects and has added new licence setting options when creating new repositories for those projects. The company has been criticised in the past for not reminding users that putting code up in public doesn’t place it in the public domain, but leaves it as copyrighted and unlicensed code.
-
-
Security
-
As I write these words in mid-February 2013, many Ruby on Rails developers are worried. The framework that so many of us have used and enjoyed for so many years, turned out to have some serious security flaws. It’s not just the sort of flaw that can allow someone to modify your Web site either;these holes meant that a properly armed attacker could execute arbitrary code on your server. And nowadays, “properly armed” is not a very high threshold because of such tools as Metasploit, which make it laughably easy to launch an attack against an arbitrary computer on the Internet.
-
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
Lawyers for a man who alleges he was held in a secret CIA jail in Lithuania have accused the Baltic state of failing to give proper answers to judges considering the case at the European Court of Human Rights.
-
When the NSA can’t break into your computer, these guys break into your house.
-
Business is booming at HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, and whistleblower system admin Edward Snowden, who revealed the National Security Agency’s web-spying PRISM project, is doing his inadvertent part to pump it up even further.
[...]
HyTrust has been saying that IT shops should adopt a second approval rule for a lot of things that go on inside the data center for the past year, and the Snowden episode just makes this necessity all that more clear (at least, from the point of view of companies and governments).
-
But Krasheninnikova thinks that “talking about soft power, we need to understand who developed it and for what purpose. If the concept of soft power still belongs to the U.S., we must learn the true meaning of this concept and understand how these mechanisms work. The main instrument of the cultural front of the Cold War was the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” with offices in 35 countries and dozens of publications and programs. The majority of these programs were conducted through foundations and non-profit organizations. Some funds were very real, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Asia Foundation, they exist today, and other funds were fakes, created specifically to transfer money and to clean the CIA as a source of funds for the organization. Non-profit organizations and U.S. funds are a mere extension of the U.S. state apparatus. If someone thinks that they are truly independent, then that person is deeply mistaken. As the author says, at one point in time there was a joke: “If any American philanthropic or cultural organization includes the words “independent” or “private” in their documents, most likely it is a cover for the CIA.”
[...]
“We have no right to have illusions and have no right to make errors,” Krasheninnikova believes. “The U.S. may make mistakes because they have enormous economic, political and military weight, and their margin for error is wide. We have almost no margin for error. For example, the situation with Libya. We have made a decision, and Libya as a state does not exist. Our mistakes cost us too much. Therefore, we must, as experts, people who are involved in the processes of government, be responsible for the decisions, be responsible for the fate of the country. And so we must have the possibility of a deeper understanding of the current processes, understanding of history, as they provide a much more accurate prediction of the future, of the steps of the United States. America’s not going anywhere, we have to deal with America for a long time, as long as we exist. Therefore, we need to know this actor exceptionally well.”
-
What’s wrong with human resources officials of the CIA and U.S. Army intelligence? Their ineptitude is damaging the image of Western democracy by hiring people that let the truth out.
-
Yes, America, we tortured. And there is a step that Oregonians can take now to help ensure that U.S.-sponsored torture never happens again.
The torture in which our government engaged was illegal, abhorrent and cruel. Detainees died as a result of American torture, and former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew about it and were involved in authorizing it.
-
AT least nine suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region in a US drone strike and a separate Pakistan military operation, security officials have said.
-
At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.
Read more: U.S. drones, Pakistan military attacks kill 19 militants – The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_23658987/u-s-drones-pakistan-military-attacks-kill-19#ixzz2ZL0sPsmq
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse
Follow us: @Denverpost on Twitter | Denverpost on Facebook
-
Despite needed cuts to big ticket US defense programs, an investigation into Northrop Grumman’s lobbying efforts reveals the military contractor kept its costly Global Hawk drone flying despite the Pentagon’s own attempt to kill the project.
-
-
The strategy employed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to discourage a CIA hit job has been likened to a tactic employed by the U.S. and Russian governments during the Cold War.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
Earlier this week we got our first look at actor Benedict Cumberbatch playing Julian Assange in the forthcoming WikiLeaks film The Fifth Estate — but Assange himself has some particularly harsh words for the production. In a speech before the Oxford Union, Assange revealed that a draft of the script for the Dreamworks project had in fact been shared with WikiLeaks, and he called it “a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks the organization, and the character of my staff and our activities, and so on.”
-
Barrett Brown is a journalist imprisoned without bail, facing over 100 years of potential jail time, much of it for posting an http link to a public forum. He had been writing about several private intelligence companies and set up a Wikipedia-like site, ProjectPM, for crowdsourced analysis of the documents released by Anonymous after several hacking attacks. Some people are petitioning for Brown’s freedom from what they view as a politically targeted prosecution, but this article will concentrate on what the information Brown has uncovered can do to explain how PRISM and related spying programs may be used against Americans. The official government line has been that PRISM is targeted at foreign terrorists, but it’s just as likely that the program will be used to frustrate expressions of political opinion at home.
-
Finance
-
As long as workers could wrest gains from capitalism, the system was safe. But with production offshored, that bargain blew up
-
TPP talks held in British Columbia in June were kept secret, but Canadian activists learned about them the day before from an article in the Peruvian media. Opponents hustled to hold an emergency teach-in and to project messages about the TPP on downtown Vancouver buildings. More talks will take place July 15-25 in Malaysia. Photo: Citizens Trade Campaign. – See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/07/secret-tpp-deal-would-void-democracy#sthash.yPy3NTN9.dpuf
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Despite widespread public opposition to the education privatization agenda, at least 139 bills or state budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) education bills have been introduced in 43 states and the District of Columbia in just the first six months of 2013, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. Thirty-one have become law.
-
New York Times reporter Peter Baker has a piece today (7/16/13) about Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower that presents a somewhat confusing picture of both.
The article is about how Obama wields power–or, in the eyes of some critics, fails to take advantage of the “bully pulpit.”
-
Privacy
-
-
This is not exactly a huge vote of confidence in the National Security Agency’s institutional safeguards against wrongly invading Americans’ privacy. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D.-Mich, told reporters Tuesday that he wouldn’t want someone like notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to have the NSA’s powers to spy on U.S. citizens.
“If this technology were in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, would I feel comfortable? No,” Levin declared at a breakfast with reporters organized by the Christian Science Monitor. “But on the other hand, I wasn’t comfortable with J. Edgar Hoover with his technology.”
Levin, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had been “adequately informed” about the NSA’s program of collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans. That program and a parallel program to intercept online communications, known as PRISM, were the focus of revelations by Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor.
-
-
-
-
A lawsuit disputes a new interpretation of the Patriot Act allowing routine, bulk collection of phone data by the NSA
-
A group of 19 consumer and privacy groups has sued the National Security Agency (NSA), arguing that the agency’s data collection processes violates the law and the Constitution.
Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2013/07/17/long-time-enemy-eff-sues-unconstitutional-nsa-to-stop-dragnet-spying/#ixzz2ZI9iDaxE
-
-
A group of 19 consumer and privacy groups today sued the National Security Agency (NSA), arguing that the agency’s data collection processes violates the law and the Constitution.
-
-
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today joined eighteen other activist and advocacy organizations in challenging the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of telecommunications in the United States with a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The recently revealed surveillance program intercepts and catalogs the time, place, and participants of all calls on Verizon’s phone network over a defined period. This includes calls made between advocacy organizations and their supporters.
-
-
The cycle of leaks and discussion around the NSA and its post-9/11 role in American society has had an impact on the degree to which companies can talk about their efforts to resist corporate intrusion. One result of these leaks has been additional information on Yahoo’s efforts to protect its US users. For years, Yahoo fought the government’s attempts to compel it to turn over private data, even though gag rules prevented it from ever discussing the case. The EFF just acknowledged the company’s silent battle with a sparkling gold star of “special distinction,” despite the fact that the company’s challenges ultimately failed.
-
The Federal Migration Service confirmed he had completed the relevant paperwork at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where he has been for the past three weeks.
-
Edward Snowden has applied for temporary asylum in Russia, according to a pro-Kremlin lawyer. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier said Snowden would leave Russia “as soon as he can” but also accused the US of “trapping” the intelligence leaker in Russia. Snowden is spending his fourth week in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. In a closed-door meeting, Snowden said he plans on finding a way to travel legally to Latin America after filling for asylum in Russia.
-
The Russian President claims the former CIA computer technician turned down an offer of asylum contingent on him leaking no further classified information
-
A parliamentary oversight committee in Berlin would like to know how much the German government really knows about NSA spying activities in Germany. Their leverage, however, is limited.
-
A parliamentary panel has questioned Germany’s interior minister about what Berlin knew about a US spy program known as Prism, before it became public knowledge. He now faces a second day before the committee.
-
“If we’re lucky, we might even be able to see a real NSA spy,” event page says.
-
There are many people around the globe who want to stay strictly anonymous when using the web and electronic messaging systems, and there are also lots of people who simply want to follow best practices for protecting their online privacy to the extent that they can. In some parts of the world, opressive government regulations threaten free speech, and that has produced an extensive list of technologies that people use to avoid online detection.
-
Vásquez made his apology after handing over the note in the ministry, although he also reiterated that his government never denied Morales’ plane permission to fly over Spanish airspace as it returned from Russia.
-
Merkel’s center-left opponents have seized on disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance programs by leaker Edward Snowden to assert that she hasn’t been doing enough to confront Washington and protect Germans’ personal data — and to cast doubt on officials’ assertions that they didn’t know of the programs.
The opposition apparently hopes that the issue will breathe life into a so-far stumbling and gaffe-prone campaign for Sept. 22 parliamentary elections. A healthy economy, low unemployment and perceptions that Merkel has managed Europe’s debt crisis well have bolstered the chancellor.
-
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has issued a report into the legality of the intelligence gathering and information sharing by using the NSA’s PRISM program.
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/17/parliamentary-committee-rules-gchq-spying-program-nsas-prism-was-legal#ikmYhTcpO1Q0Thcm.99
-
Facebook continues to be an intelligence operative’s best friend. Many of its users subvert any sort of expectation of privacy simply by leaving their accounts on the default settings. (This also works out well for Mark Zuckerberg.) Anything set to the public default can and, apparently, will be seen.
-
Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation have sued the Obama administration and are demanding the White House stop the dragnet surveillance programs operated by the National Security Agency.
-
Several House members call on the NSA to end its program collecting the phone records of US residents
-
It makes some interesting points, about the role of government in open source projects, and the whole Snowden affair has thrown a spotlight on the way major software companies have (inevitably?) co-operated with government…
-
-
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
-
Unlikely coalition takes NSA – and the telecoms firms who own much of the web’s infrastructure – to court over bulk surveillance
-
-
If you’re using Google’s “back up my data” feature for Android, the passwords to the Wi-Fi networks you access from your smartphone or tablet are available in plaintext to anyone with access to the data. And as a bug report submitted by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on July 12 suggests, that leaves them wide open to harvesting by agencies like the NSA or the FBI.
-
Civil Rights
-
And now, living in a world of instant everything, I worry about huge number of people who blindly read and believe almost anything posted, pinned, linked or Tweeted. It scares me.
-
As the mainstream American press goes after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, the leakers’ revelations are becoming an afterthought.
-
The recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act is bound to bring voter ID laws back into the media discussion. And, unfortunately, that means some of these discussions will suffer from a familiar problem: The unwillingness to point out that the problem such laws are allegedly fighting–voter fraud–doesn’t exist.
-
That platform is more likely belongs to someone like Cohen–who, in 1986, wrote a column defending store owners in Washington, D.C. who refused to allow young black men to enter their stores because of a fear of crime. The Post apologized to readers. This time around they probably won’t.
-
But what the NDAA has done is essentially codified the elimination of one of the most important restrictions on state power. These restraints — that the burden of proof is on the state, that nobody can be locked in a cage without due process, that only the civilian police force is allowed to make arrests — are some of the most revolutionary legacies of Western liberalism and represent one of the starting points of anything resembling a free society.
But thanks to the president’s stroke of a pen and a Congress that resembles the rubber-stamping body of the Roman Empire, these constitutional restrictions, written by men who combed through history for the devices that were intended to keep state power in a box, have been legislated away.
-
The Obama Administration and the U.S. military are asking a federal judge to put a hold on his order blocking groin searches of Guantanamo Bay prisoners in connection with attorney visits.
-
For centuries, the act of refusing food has turned human bodies into effective political bargaining chips. And so it’s no surprise that the prisoners desperate to leave Guantanamo after, in some cases, nearly a dozen years there, have turned to hunger strikes on and off since 2005 to try to win their release.
For years, the Pentagon officials who run the detention camp have responded by prisoners. Currently, some 45 of the 104 hunger-striking captives are receiving the procedure, as many people learned this week when a graphic video featuring Yasiin Bey, the rapper and actor formerly known as Mos Def, went viral. While Bey’s performance may be part publicity stunt, doctors say it does help expose the unethical treatment and some of the pain of the Gitmo detainees subjected to force-feeding.
-
Antonio Petalcorin, President of the Network of Transport Organisation (NETO) has been shot dead on his way to a union meeting. Antonio is one of twenty trade union leaders to have been murdered over the course of the last decade, and one of up to 1,000 politically motivated killings in the Philippines.
-
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has dealt a terrible blow to Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and the other activists and journalists suing to prevent the indefinite military detention of American citizens.
-
A federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit targeting a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that opponents argue could be used to indefinitely detain American citizens on mere suspicions of terrorism.
The journalists and activists who brought the case argued that the NDAA unconstitutionally gives the president the authority to detain anyone he suspects of teaming up with al Qaeda or the Taliban, anywhere. They argued that even those who merely spoke with terrorists — like former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges — might be in danger.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
On Tuesday of last week I announced a package of measures to be presented in September – for a telecommunications single market, bringing down barriers to support a sector critical for our future growth.
The focus of some of the immediate reactions to this speech has been on mobile roaming. Operators have long resisted attempts to stop them charging well over the odds on roaming rates. And it appears that they are continuing to do so.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
“It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but their targeting of open source software is something new. In an attempt to remove pirated copies of Game of Thrones from the Internet, HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one. … Usually these notices ask Google to get rid of links to pirate sites, but for some reason the cable network also wants Google to remove a link to the highly popular open source video player VLC. … The same DMCA notice also lists various other links that don’t appear to link to HBO content, including a lot of porn related material, Ben Harper’s album Give Till It’s Gone, Naruto, free Java applets and Prince of Persia 5.”
-
-
The VLC 2.1 media player update is due out in the coming weeks and with it will come several new features for the open-source program.
After the excitement this morning about the VLC port to Qt 5 nearly working, I decided to check in on the state of VLC 2.1 — the next major release for the project — and what features it shall possess.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess
-
WASHINGTON: German inventors have developed a new pen that gently vibrates every time it senses a spelling mistake or sloppy handwriting.
Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink but inside it, is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a Wi-Fi chip.
-
Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink, but inside it is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a Wi-Fi chip.
-
This is a contributed posting for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Peter Linnell, Linux Engineer at SUSE.
As the hype and competition for big data analysis continues to grow, today’s data scientist has a vast array of tools and technologies at their disposal.
-
Desktop
-
So far this year, market research news has been beyond dreary for PCs and PC equipment makers. But, as sales of PCs slip, sales of new-generation devices, including tablets, are on the rise. And, among PC alternatives, it turns out that Chromebooks running Google’s Chrome OS platform, are bucking the downward trend.
-
Kernel Space
-
Server virtualization advancements made with ARM server support, performance improvements, and tech preview for Open vSwitch
-
-
-
Late Sunday afternoon, Linus Torvalds released the first release candidate for the new Linux 3.11 kernel.
-
Substantially improved support for the power management features of modern Radeon graphics cores is among the major new additions of the now available first release candidate of Linux 3.11. For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from “Unicycling Gorilla” to “Linux for Workgroups” and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993. After the Tuz interlude in Linux 2.6.29, this is the second time that Torvalds has changed the logo since the introduction of Git.
-
New kernel version pays homage to Windows past
-
-
New feature will wake the system from sleep mode in six seconds.
-
-
Immediately after the release of Linux kernel 3.9.10, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on July 13 that the first maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.10 kernel series is now available for download.
-
Linus Torvalds is well known for his use of colorful language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and he’s not the only one that uses questionable language that some might considering threatening.
For the last 20 years, I can’t remember anyone actually standing up to Linus (or the other colorful devs) saying that’s just not right — until today.
-
Graphics Stack
-
A stable programming interface for display servers and colour management support are two of the major new features in the now available versions 1.2 of Wayland and Weston. The developers say that the stable server API allows a Wayland 1.2 compositor such as Weston to work with more recent versions of Wayland; in their release email, they mention that having a stable API became necessary because external Wayland compositors are beginning to appear. The protocol for Wayland clients was declared stable in version 1.0.
-
-
The latest release of the Wayland protocol and support library along with the Weston compositor is now out. For the GNOME community this release is particularly interesting:
-
Applications
-
A project is aiming to build a Wine-like compatibility layer for Linux operating systems that would allow them to run OS X applications.
-
There are some good news for people who are using Geary Mail Client. Yorba has included a search functionality in the upcoming version 0.4 (unknown date release) that comes to solve the strongest weakness of Geary since day one.
-
Conky Manager, a graphical font-end for managing Conky configuration files, has been updated to version 1.2 yesterday, getting 4 new Conky configurations / themes, as well as some new options.
-
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I managed to drop the ball yesterday and didn’t have time to write up another text-based system monitor.
-
Wine or Emulation
-
Almost every regular desktop Linux user I know keeps a virtual machine with an old version of Windows around. I’m included in this group, I still run Windows XP in a VM, and will until it no longer works or the need for it is gone. I expect that the need will be the first to go, as the Windows only applications that I use are migrating off to web apps, like the latest release of VMware’s Vcenter server. This personal, anecdotal evidence is what I see as the final failure of the Wine project. Wine promised us the ability to run Windows applications on Linux, but in my experience very few actually do.
-
Today in Open Source: Windows RT is a waste of time for developers. Plus: Check out Linux 3.11 features, and a new Linux Mint 15 KDE user is born.
-
Games
-
Get tons of awesome PC/Mac games for dirt cheap during the Steam Summer Sale; Here are recommendations
-
Leadwerks, a kickstarter project aims to introduce advanced games development in 3D to the Linux platform which has been witnessing greater acceptance among 3D game developers. However, this comes as a surprise development considering Leadwerks did not start off as ideally suited for developing games for Linux. Rather, it will be ported over to Linux which will ensure the the development of any type of 3D game. Also, it will perhaps be pretty much safe to assume the games will also be easily ported to Windows and OS X since a Linux only compatibility will mean too much of a Linux focused approach and hence a narrow user base.
-
Looking for a job in the game development field? If so, and if you happen to be well versed in Linux with a minimum of 2 years of professional software development experience, Crytek would very much like to make your acquaintance. That’s because the German video game company is hoping to port its CryEngine 3D engine over to Linux, further underscoring the growing importance game makers are putting on open source platforms.
-
-
Valve’s epic ‘Summer’ sale has boosted sales of some games as much as 600%, with the sale still only in its beginning days.
-
NOWHERE looks like one trippy game that the developers class as a “a procedural single player, open world, sandbox game”.
-
I play video games on a PC. I know this may come as a surprise to some of you – after all I typically don’t blog about gaming that much at all. I mean it’s not like I have a dedicated category for PC game reviews or anything like that. It would be silly, don’t you think. But yes, I am a PC gamer, a firm believer in the One True Gaben (may he deliver HL3 unto us as it was foretold at the dawn of time) and I actually never really felt the need to own a console.
-
Last month we shared slides from a presentation about Linux as a gaming platform. After that generated much interest, the developer of this presentation has revised his slides.
-
Some days ago Left 4 Dead 2 has been released on Linux on Steam Gaming Platform.
The game was released on 2009 for many gaming platforms such as Xbox and Windows, but if like me you like to play games on your Linux box, this is a good opportunity to play one of the most famous FPS cooperative survival Zombie games.
-
-
Universe Sandbox where you can spawn massive stars, launch asteroids, and manipulate gravity with just a few clicks, currently Windows only but the developers have said something interesting for the next version.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
In part 1, I had a look at the GTK based options out there, In part 2, the Qt based Desktop Environments.
I do have an addition for the Qt environments, even though I haven’t had a look yet, it is certainly intriguing. The team behind LXDE is currently in development of a Qt version of their Environment. I haven’t seen anything other than some screen shots, but it may be worth looking at, it is currently in a “Beta” state, and likely not ready for everyday use, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
-
Timothée Giet has received the 2013 Jury’s Akademy Award for “Shaping the future and community of Krita”. The other Akademy award recipients were Eike Hein for Best Application with Konversatiion, Vishesh Handa for Nepomuk and Kenny Duffus for all his work on Akademy.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
In the previous posts of this series, we looked at the history of our community and the reasons which pushed us toward answering “What is a KDE Project?”. We also discussed which process we followed which ultimately gave birth to more than a definition in the form of the KDE Manifesto.
-
-
On the eve of the event inauguration, KDE e.V Annual General Meeting was held followed by a party at Hika Ateno in Caco Viejo which gave the attendees opportunity to meet fellow contributors face to face who they know since a long time only through IRC or email.
-
While other Free software projects drift apart, splitting up in multiple forks that stop talking to each other, differentiate based on the wrong reasons, what we see here during Akademy is projects growing closer to each other. This is a good development, so let’s look at it a bit more detailed.
-
On the eve of the event inauguration, KDE e.V Annual General Meeting was held followed by a party at Hika Ateno in Caco Viejo which gave the attendees opportunity to meet fellow contributors face to face who they know since a long time only through IRC or email.
-
-
Last time i showed off the ownCloud-News client i’d written for Blackberry 10 using QML/cascades. After i did that, the API for the news client changed in the development version, meaning that if I released it, it wouldnt work once people upgrade to the latest version.
-
-
-
After trying to connect to Mohammed Nafees, our GCi student winner from India, I finally was able to talk with him this afternoon. I was asking about his experience with KDE, and if he had gotten the help and support he needed. The enthusiasm of his reply was a bit surprising. He said he had chosen KDE because it is more than a community. When he couldn’t think of the word he wanted to use to finish his sentence, I said that to me, KDE is family. He said, “YES! KDE is family.”
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
First, it was Ubuntu which innovated in the scrollbars creating a nice overlay, but making them unusable for those like me using a track pointer or a mouse without wheel.
Now, with GTK-3.0, the scrollbars have also changed their default behavior and when clicking above or below, the scrollbar moves immediately to that position.
-
For whoever doesn’t know it yet, this is a service that let you installing GNOME Themes (GTK, Shell, Icons, Cursors, Fonts, Wallpapers?) directly from your web-browser with a single click, similar to extensions.gnome.org page.
I wasn’t going to post on this and I uploaded it just to test it ourselves. But I did because this thing is surprising fast and it is worth to see it! First time I tried it my self (in a production server) few minutes ago, and it takes less than 2sec [1] to install a Theme!
-
A File Manager is just a File Manager and nothing more. File Manager duties and responsibilities are well defined and almost unchanged (with the exception of Online Storage) through the last 30 years. Therefore when you are trying a File Manager, you don’t really examine what it does, but how good does it.
-
The Clutter 1.15.2 development release is now available for download and testing, as announced by the GNOME developers on July 10, 2013.
-
Wayland 1.2 adds a stable server API among other major and minor updates, and is still poising itself as the successor to the xserver.
-
-
SuperX is a Linux-based distribution that does not like to advertise its Linux roots. Hence, the official website, which only speaks about the ultimate computer operating system and superior alternative solutions. Moreover, it boasts an enterprise like approach, with heavy emphasis on support. Somewhat slightly intrigued, and bolstered by a warm recommendation by a friend, I gave it a chance.
-
New Releases
-
PCLinuxOS Mate ISO updates are now available in both 32 and 64bit flavors. These ISOs are small enough to fit on a standard 700 mb CD or a small usb key.
-
I’m happy to announce our 2nd preview build of Manjaro 0.8.7 which we will release in late July. This first build is fully installable and stable. You will find only a minimalistic XFCE 4.10 Desktop on it. One of the biggest changes you might see is the use of Whisker Menu which replaces the standard XFCE menu.
-
Screenshots
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
The PCLinuxOS project earlier released maintenance updates for several of their popular varieties of Linux operating systems. Version 2013.07 of MATE, LXDE, and KDE MiniMe editions commonly feature Linux 3.4.52, Xorg 1.10.4, and GCC 4.7.2. Maintenance releases fix minor and security bugs while providing for new installs, but loyal users are encouraged to update through the update manager.
-
Arch Family
-
i pulled the slow magnetic hdd running gentoo from my thinkpad r61i; swapped it with a 2009-era 32GB ssd running archbang, a variant of arch linux.
it’s been several years since i last tried arch, and i wanted a desktop environment installed & preconfigured. archbang offers a minimal openbox desktop with a few basic programs: web browser, terminal, text editor, file manager, etc.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Conn. & RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Cigna(NYSE: CI), a global health service company that offers health, life, accident, dental, and disability insurance, and related health services, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cigna has been named the 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Cigna was recognized during a ceremony at Red Hat Summit for its innovative use of Red Hat technologies to revitalize the company’s IT infrastructure and solidify the company’s position as a leader in the health care industry. Cigna also won an Innovation Award in the “Outstanding Open Source Architecture” category.
-
Last week, Red Hat, unveiled the costs for its bundle of products and services aimed at giving it a strong foothold in the cloud computing market. The bundle includes Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which combine the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS (RHEL) and the KVM hypervisor plus Red Hat’s own distribution of OpenStack. If you look closely at the pricing, it’s clear that Red Hat wants to attract users of its existing Linux platform and support services to its cloud platform and associated support. Now, there are questions arising about the strategy.
-
Fedora
-
The latest offering from the Fedora Project, Fedora 19, was released on July 2nd. The new version carried the code name “Schrödinger’s Cat” which seems appropriate. Fedora, being a cutting-edge distribution, is an unpredictable beast and one never knows, prior to installing it, if the release is going to bring joy or heartache. Looking through the release notes for Fedora 19 I got the impression this version was to be a fairly small evolution from Fedora 18, which was released earlier this year. The release notes highlight such desktop features as the inclusion of GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, LibreOffice 4.0 and packages for the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. Less obvious changes include improved boot times and enhancements to the systemd init software. The release notes also mention that users who run logical volume management (LVM) file systems will be able to take advantage of file system snapshots. These snapshots will be taken by the yum software manager during updates to allow administrators the ability to rollback to previous package versions. We’re also told yum now has delta-update capability built in directly and enabled by default. This means the package manager only downloads changes to software packages rather than downloading the entire package again.
-
For the release of Fedora 18 the installation tool was completely overhauled, which also resulted in a different layout to the former Anaconda installer. As with every subsequent release more bugs are squashed it may eventually mature, in the meantime unintuitive and inconsistent layout prevails, coupled with the odd crash. Here I walk you through the installation of Fedora 19 from Live image. You may also want to look at the official installation guide but it’s missing the section on encrypting drives.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
-
That box you see above? It’s a quad-core ARM-based PC running Ubuntu called Utilite. The desktop system, made by Compulab, will be available next month starting at $99. While there are plenty of Android dongles built on ARM SoCs out there, few (if any) can truly offer a PC-like experience. The company — best known for its Trim Slice, Fit-PC and MintBox products — wants to change this.
-
-
Forget your Raspberry Pi and all of those Android dongles: this quad-core, ARM-based box claims to offer up a PC-like experience for just $100.
-
CompuLab announced a tiny mini-PC based on a 1.2GHz, single-, dual-, or quad-core Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip. Supported with Ubuntu and Android, the 5.3 x 3.9 x 0.8-inch Utilite offers up to 4GB RAM and up to a 512GB internal SSD, as well as dual gigabit Ethernet ports, dual serial ports, five USB 2.0 ports, and dual-head HDMI and DVD-D, all starting at $99.
-
The base model will feature a Freescale i.M6 single-core processor, but dual and quad-core versions will also be available. The system will also support up to 4GB of RAM, up to 512GB of built-in storage thanks to an mSATA solid state drive slot, and up to 128GB of removable storage via the SDXC card slot.
-
In the Utilite mini-PC, if you’re all about working with open-source software, small form factor, and more ports than you know what to do with, the team at Compulab may have created just the monster you’re looking for. This week the creators of the Utilite have announced not only that the machine itself exists, but that they’ll be selling it in different configurations starting at under $100 USD. The smallest of these works with a Freescale i.M6 single-core processor and will be aiming to be just about as basic as possible.
-
Mir is Canonical’s new display server. It fulfils a broadly similar role to Wayland and Android’s Surfaceflinger, in that it takes final responsibility for getting pixels onto the screen. XMir is an X server that runs on top of Mir. It permits applications that know how to speak the X protocol but don’t know how to speak to Mir (ie, approximately all of them at present) to run in a Mir-based environment.
For Ubuntu 13.10, Canonical are proposing to use Mir by default. This doesn’t mean that most applications will be using Mir, though – instead, the default session will run XMir as a full-screen client and a normal X environment will be run on that. This lets Canonical deploy Mir without forcing anyone to update their applications, allowing them to take a gradual approach. By 14.10, Canonical expect the default Unity session to be a Mir client rather than an X client. In theory it will then be possible to run an Ubuntu system without any X applications at all, leaving XMir to do nothing other than run legacy applications.
-
Long before Ubuntu ever existed, Debian was a major player in the Linux space. To put a finer point on that statement, Debian is a distribution of Linux that has made countless other distributions, from Knoppix to Simply Mepis, a reality. This is similar to how Ubuntu relates to Linux Mint by providing Mint a base from which to develop.
-
Canonical’s Christopher Halse Rogers wrote a blog post over the weekend to try to clear up the XMir performance situation and say that Canonical engineers are working on improving the performance, as users begin to discover there’s a performance hit in using XMir.
-
-
-
-
Download here (MP3) (ogg) (FLAC) (Speex), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net.
-
Some say Canonical has lost its way. Are they right?
-
Since the last update my 550 paracord (both orange and purple) and vinyl wrap has been put to use, mostly on the mac mini, i still have plenty of both left though. Unfortunately, i broke my psu after i got the +4 pin done so sleeving will have to wait until i’m less poor. As a result, i made some other stuff with the paracord.
-
This box packs quite a punch, and is ready to plug-and-play. Starting at $99, the computer connects through WiFi or Bluetooth, HDMI, USB, microUSB, microSD, ethernet, and DVI-D ports. The customer will be able to configure from single to quad-core processing, and the price will vary respectively. The box measures a little over 5 x 4in, and is just under 1in tall. It uses very little power, and is becoming very attractive to prospective users, both of Linux and those new to the OS. The box supports Android use as well as Linux for users who are more comfortable in that environment.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
If I think of any distro which just works without any issue month after month, year after year, it is got to be Linux Mint. I am using Linux Mint 13 XFCE (with LTS support) on my netbook and it’s been a trouble free 1.5 years – with absolutely no issue. Everything just working as it should work and I keep it on most of days at night to download Linux distros or movies – no heating problem till date. Linux Mint 13 XFCE was and still is so amazingly efficient!
-
Linux Mint 15 Codename ‘Olivia’ Xfce Edition is released with the exciting features stated below. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment aiming to be fast instead of low system resources. In this edition, Xfce 4.10 desktop, all the improvement with latest packages are included. In this post we’ll see step by step installation and Update of packages post installation.
-
As I’ve said that many times before, Linux is all about choice: first, and most obviously, choice in operating systems for your computer. If you don’t like the desktop or user interface of Windows 8 (I personally don’t know even one sane person that does), or if you just don’t like paying Microsoft over and over and over again, Linux gives you another choice. But even within the Linux world, choice is an important advantage — choice of distributions, and within many distributions, choice of desktops.
-
The Linux Mint team has released the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 15, code-named “Olivia”. The release includes the Whisker Menu as a replacement for Xfce’s native application launcher. Whisker is inspired by KDE’s Kickoff menu, but also takes design cues from the Mint menu application included in the Cinnamon edition of the distribution.
-
-
-
Ever since the announcement of the Raspberry Pi, sites all across the Internet have offered lots of interesting and challenging uses for this exciting device. Although all of those ideas are great, the most obvious and perhaps least glamorous use for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is creating your perfect home server.
-
Blue Chip Technology announced a Ubuntu-ready “digital signage player” based on a 1GHz AMD G-Series processor with AMD Radeon HD graphics. The Vario-A2 is packaged in a polished stainless steel enclosure, runs from 0 to 40° C, accommodates internal SATA HDDs and SSDs, and has a mini-PCI Express card socket for functions such as WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPS, and 2G/3G modems.
-
Phones
-
Is a bunch of cash to spur app development all that’s needed to propel Tizen to success with its fledgling Linux-based mobile operating system? “I’ve always wanted to be excited for Tizen, but it’s never really given me enough to be excited about,” offered blogger Mike Stone. “I’ve never seen anything where I just had to stop and say, ‘Now that is cool.’”
-
Ballnux
-
Samsung’s Galaxy Note family has been one of the most successful tablet devices in the market as a result they’ve had to face competition from notable companies such as LG and Sony. Now a new competitor is rumored to appear which as the title gives away is the HTC One Max. According to Mobile Geeks reports, it’s a 6 inch device expected to have a 2.3GHz quad core snapdragon 800 chip, along with 2GB of RAM and up to 64GB of storage powered by a 3200mAh battery.
-
-
Android
-
Tinder has been the hot new social dating service on the iOS since its release in October last year. They claim to have generated 75 million matches and 50 engagements over the period of time. Despite all those statistics, we haven’t seen the application on the most popular platform of the mobile OS market yet. But that isn’t to say they aren’t working on it, they actually have it ready but they want to make sure that at-least one million people explicitly request for the application to be available. That is quite entertaining for the developers maybe considering they haven’t yet monetized the app.
-
Following Samsung and HTC, Sony is set to make a smaller version of its flagship Smartphone available to the customers. Even before any confirmation about existence of ‘Honami’ flagship device from Sony, we already have rumours around a ‘mini’ version of the device coming in.
-
It’s not raining, but pouring, rumours around Moto X phone just don’t want to take a break. If you believe that Google is spending $500 million on marketing, you should wonder if they really need it with all the hype it has already created. Yesterday we saw the allege Moto X phone in Eric Schmidt’s hand, and now we have a hands on video of the device in use.
-
-
It’s a given that NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 can handle 3D — unless you’ve been crafting a fully open source project around the chip, at which point you’ve been stuck in a flat world. Fresh contributions from Avionic Design’s Thierry Reding have brought that extra dimension back, albeit in limited form. His early patches for the Linux kernel enable support for 3D when using the Tegra Direct Rendering Manager driver. There’s also a matching Gallium3D driver for us regular users, although it’s still young: it can run reference 3D code as of a recent check, but can’t produce visible imagery. While it may take some months before everything falls into place, the officially-backed work should make the (slightly aging) chip that much more useful beyond the realms of Android and Windows RT.
-
-
-
Elon Musk has been dropping hints about a revolutionary form of transport called Hyperloop for over a year, and on Monday he said that the full details will be released on August 12, and that the system’s key technologies will be open sourced.
-
It’s time to take a look back at June and see how open source is changing the world. We’ll take a look at what articles where hot, a few that you may have missed, and what the chatter was all about last month.
-
-
A decade ago, as CTO of a large service provider, I was lucky to be able to drive an open-source everywhere strategy. In addition to the ubiquitous LAMP stack, we managed to use open-source software in almost every part of the business, not just in the data center but also in departments like accounts and HR. However, there were two holdouts against the power of open source: storage and networking.
-
Quite often on Phoronix we cover various experimental open-source projects that catch our interest as they’re interesting from a technical perspective, but often these projects don’t end up stabilizing due to limited manpower or prove to be too technically ambitious. Here’s a look at some of the less heard of open-source projects that have previously been covered on Phoronix to look at where they are today.
-
For those involved in data analysis, numerical computation and taks of that nature, Matlab is an industry standard software to use, though it is not necessarily the best available. The problem is that (Matlab) is commercial and can be expensive.
Recently I took a class on Machine Learning and was surprised to find that the professor was not going to use Matlab, but a Free Software alternative called GNU Octave, which was good news because it meant not having to spend money on a proprietary software.
-
For more than a decade, Evan Prodromou has worked to build open source tools that help people share things online. In 2003, he co-founded Wikitravel, a website that lets world travelers collaborate on the ultimate travel guide. Then, in 2008, Prodromou launched StatusNet, a decentralized, federated networking tool whose public face, identi.ca, became the microblogging service of choice for many free software advocates and open enthusiasts.
-
In 2007, the Korean government first held the OSS World Challenge in an effort to promote open source software and bring awareness to developers within the country.
-
The Tax Office has moved to encourage more big business to adopt a government-devised scheme to automate lodgement of financial reports, by replacing a proprietary interface with its systems with open-source software.
-
Events
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
-
Building a storage startup is no easy task — just ask Markus Rex, the co-founder and CEO of ownCloud.
OwnCloud Inc got its start in December of 2011 as a commercial enterprise. The promise of the commercial enterprise is to build out the enterprise supported version of the open source ownCloud storage system. Today, ownCloud officially released its Enterprise Edition 5.0 release, providing enhanced file sync and share capabilities. Among the improved features is better Active Directory (AD) integration as well as native AES encryption for data at rest.
-
Tracing the career path of Dr. Kongkiat Kespechara is like reading a treasure map: there are twists and turns and surprises all along the way, but promises an unfolding bounty at the end. Here are some of his current activities: Dr. Kespechara is a still-practicing MD, a software entrepreneur, an open source pioneer, a force in economic development, a big data processor, a nutritionist, an agriculturist and a retailer. Let me explain.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
So that were extremely busy weeks for all people active in LibreOffice localization and QA. Today the last translations – many up to 100% – have been pulled and the last triple reviewed code commits were done. And somewhere next week already we expect the release of LibreOffice 4.1.
-
What started as a simple text editor and later became am office suite is actually becoming a very comprehensive set of tools for the daily office work.
-
Scrubbing millions of lines of code? Yeah, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day
-
Oracle has decided to stop development on its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Sun Ray Software and Hardware, and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines. Some Oracle partners, which received the news over the weekend, are not happy with this change.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Licensing
-
Last November, I wrote about the huge contradiction embodied in GitHub. Though the site is self-described as the “world’s largest open source community,” a significant number of GitHub projects come with no rights whatsoever for you to use their code in an open source project. That’s because so many don’t include an OSI-approved open source license.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and chairman of SolarCity, has been teasing us for a while what he calls the ‘Hyperloop’, a “fifth mode of transportation” that would provide a very high-speed, high-efficiency, and safe alternative to boats, planes, automobiles and trains.
-
Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing technology areas today, with a projected 50 billion connected devices deployed by 2020.1 And yet M2M technology is still not evolving as quickly as it could because too many basic development functions remain closed and proprietary.
-
Programming
-
Eclipse users and developers have just under a month left to submit a talk proposal to the organisers of EclipseCon Europe 2013. The organisers from the Eclipse Foundation are looking for proposals for 35 minute talks and three hour tutorials that cover one of a number of subjects, including Eclipse itself, OSGi, Java and web technologies. Additional themes of this year’s conference are machine to machine (M2M) embedded systems and using Eclipse to build industry-specific applications in areas such as banking, aerospace automotive. In the latter area, the EclipseCon team is looking for speakers who can present case studies involving the use of Eclipse software.
-
Technology website The Register called it. With the search called off, we must presume that Evi Nemeth is no longer with us. Their obit, “Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea”, gives an excellent overview of her life and influence.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Security
-
With the recent release of Apache web server version 2.0.65, the Apache project has discontinued the maintenance of the 2.0 version branch. The developers have urged users to migrate to current version series 2.2 or 2.4 editions as soon as possible; version 2.4 was released in February 2012.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
Lee Harvey Oswald had closer ties to Cuba’s intelligence agency in the months before his fatal shooting of John F. Kennedy than previously known, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.
-
So– the NSA engaged in an act of war using cyber attack on IRan. That suggests that the NSA, without congressional oversight, since the NSA people lie to congress, can start a war without congressional authorization. And then, on top of that, you’ve suggested that Obama may claim that HE didn’t know.
-
-
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2014 (H.R. 1960), which passed June 14, would impose reporting requirements on the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments’ integrated electronic health record project, as well as stand up an advisory panel to provide additional oversight.
-
There has been significant movement in both the House and Senate on the pending legislation to create a national historical park for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge as well as Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford, Wash.
-
-
In times of economic uncertainty and mounting national security issues, it is critical that each branch of government is allowed to play its constitutional role. We must protect the uniquely American system of checks and balances set forth by our forefathers, which helps prevent abuse or overreach of power. Stepping outside of the roles intended and defined only leads to unfortunate, harmful decisions that affect the entire country.
-
At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.
-
At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.
-
At least 16 people were killed and five others wounded when an American drone strike hit a suspected Haqqani militant compound in a remote tribal region of northwestern Pakistan late Tuesday, according to Pakistani government and intelligence officials.
-
Two missiles were fired as the suspected militants rode a motorbike in the village of Mosaki, the sources said.
-
US President Barack Obama has promised to scale them back, resorting to them only when a threat was “continuing and imminent”.
-
When Bilal Berjawi spoke to his wife for the last time, he had no way of being certain that he was about to die. But he should have had his suspicions.
-
On June 8, a US drone attack in North Wazirstan killed seven people. It was the first drone attack since Nawaz Sharif took office as Pakistan’s prime minister for the third time. He condemned the attack as a violation of the country’s sovereignty.
Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), are being used by the US to kill people seen as militants by the US media and government. As well as Pakistan, drones are also being used in Yemen and Syria to kill people. However, the resentment against drone strikes is present all around the world, including the US itself.
-
The report by the Abbottabad Commission about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s house, leaked at Al-Jazeera News website was the new media play-card. Much is being said and written about it. The report quotes General (retd) Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who headed Pakistan’s premier Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency at the time of bin Laden’s killing in 2011, telling investigators that drone strikes had their uses. Though there were no written agreements, there was a political understanding, between America and Pakistan, it said.
Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat and US envoy to the Pakistan and Afghanistan region, coined the term, “AfPak,” understanding that the theatre of war extended to both ends of the Durand Line. He understood that it was the eastern side, which served as the backyard for militants’ sanctuaries. Geography played a huge part in this arrangement. Battle fought by the US and its allies was focused on taking over the heartlands of Taliban in Afghanistan. The provinces in southeast of Afghanistan are unsuitable for guerrilla warfare, mostly comprising of plains. Adjoining the Hindu Kush with passes to Pakistan’s tribal belt offered the perfect sanctuary to retreat and regroup. A strategy was developed to destroy the supply lines of the militants and then wipe out their sanctuaries through drone strikes in the tribal areas. Unfortunately, the drones killed more civilians than it killed militants.
-
In stark contrast to traditional means of fighting wars, drones are both inexpensive and safe for the military to operate, even on a large scale. The risk of friendly casualties alienating domestic support for the war is almost nil, and the relative unobtrusiveness (at home) of operating these aircraft means that the military can fight wars in multiple countries with the public barely noticing the impact. After all, by the traditional standard of what one would define as a “war,” the United States is indeed at war in Yemen, Somalia and parts of Pakistan; yet few Americans recognize it as being the case and, indeed, neither officially does the United States. That violence can be carried out on such a massive scale with so little scrutiny is one of the most important aspects of the drone war and perhaps its most insidious. In the past governments have often found their ability to wage wars abroad constrained by the citizenry who have borne the brunt of the social pressures these wars inevitably create. As such, the prospect of perpetual war fought on an expanding scale would have been impossible until very recently. Casualties would occur, enormous sums of money would be spent, and upon reaching a breaking point in stress the people would come out into the streets to demand an end to such policies.
-
At least two health workers have been killed and several others injured after an attack by heavily-armed gunmen against anti-polio workers in the troubled northwestern Pakistan.
-
Obama’s drone calculus ignores the CIA’s warning about the continuing “possibilities of blowback.” Officials in Washington ignore the high-cost ways in which the U.S. “war on terror” and the use of tactics such as drone strikes fuel the fires of home-grown radicalization in Western societies. This is a rising phenomenon that has not been seriously debated, despite a string of high-profile attacks. While trials have yet to take place, the Woolwich attack in London and the Boston Marathon bombings are suspected to be the latest cases in point.
-
-
On Monday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying, “These unilateral strikes are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” adding that “such strikes also set dangerous precedents in inter-state relations. Pakistan has repeatedly emphasized the importance of bringing an immediate end to drone strikes,” press tv reported.
-
Finance
-
Privacy
-
Fugitive appeals for the help of human rights groups in Russia, as his latest revelations suggest Microsoft lets US government access its customers’ data
-
Not long before headlines exposed National Security Agency programs that secretly collect records of Americans’ phone calls, another surveillance system got far less attention: Nordstrom, the department-store chain, acknowledged it was tracking customers without their knowledge in 17 stores.
-
Newly released documents reveal the depth of collaboration between Microsoft and the National Security Agency in collecting data from the company’s users, including communications and documents sent or accessed over Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. They also show that Microsoft worked with the NSA to break the company’s own encryption, ensuring the fullest possible access for the agency.
-
As talks on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership began this week in Washington, a second topic loomed large: US intelligence programs. Germany wanted to make sure the issue didn’t fade into the background.
-
Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that the former NSA systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”
-
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, fled the United States saying he did not want to live in a surveillance state.
-
Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.
-
When I received an email late on Thursday from “Edward Snowden”, I was naturally sceptical. The invitation, supposedly from one of the world’s most sought-after people, had a whiff of Cold War spy thriller to it. The note instructed me to go to the arrivals hall of Sheremetyevo Airport, and “someone from airport staff will be waiting there to receive you with a sign labelled G9”. What would you think?
When I finally got through the media scrum to Terminal F, there was a man with a sign, “G9”, just like they said. So, along with eight other people – including the Russian ombudsman, an MP and representatives of other rights groups – I was put on a bus and driven to another entrance. We walked in and there he was: Mr Snowden, waiting for us along with someone from WikiLeaks and a translator. The first thing I thought was how young he looks – like a school kid.
-
Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that the former NSA systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”
-
A RUSSIAN state service in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications is looking to purchase an array of old-fashioned typewriters to prevent leaks from computer hardware, sources say.
-
-
-
The revelations about the activities of the U.S. National Security Agency have strengthened the hand of those in the European Union calling for stronger data protection, a European tech conference was told Monday.
-
General Keith Alexander, the Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Commander of the United States Cyber Command, is to be a keynote speaker at this year’s Black Hat conference. This announcement has caused a stir after the organisers of the DEF CON hacker conference, which is being held in parallel, requested only a few days ago that government officials stay away from the conference: the latest revelations concerning the US government’s extensive surveillance programmes have made communicating with federal law enforcement officers uncomfortable for many hackers, they argue.
-
For those of you who haven’t kept up, the National Security Agency (NSA’s) Prism program has been in the news. Prism provides the NSA with access to data on the servers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, etc.
-
Prism is just a part of the NSA’s larger mass electronic surveillance program that covers every possible path someone might use to communicate; tapping raw data as it flows through fiber optic cables and Internet peering points, copying the addressees on all letters you physically mail, all credit card purchases, your phone calls and your location (courtesy your smart phone.)http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/15/your-pc-may-already-be-compromised-by-the-nsa/
-
Of course readers realize by now that this patriot or, in some minds, “overzealous” man, is General Keith B. Alexander, whose title reads, Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) and Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS).
-
-
The actual story that matters is not hard to see: the NSA is attempting to collect, monitor and store all forms of human communication
-
The time to join the battle for privacy is now, because whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange can’t fight against Big Brother on their own, software freedom activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, told RT.
Stallman says that the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who exposed secret US and British surveillance programs to the public, are a confirmation of his worst concerns – which he voiced over a decade ago.
-
-
Data centers are notorious for using a lot of power and other resources, but residents of Bluffdale, Utah are a little annoyed by the volume of water that will soon begin flowing to a new NSA facility. When it is completed in September, cooling the massive collection of servers will require as much as 1.7 million gallons of water each day. That’s no drop in the bucket when you’re in the middle of a desert like Bluffdale happens to be.
-
-
-
-
People worry that Google is accepting code from the NSA and pushing it into Android, but really, don’t we want some of those code breakers showing us how to do it right?
-
-
As Edward Snowden continues to expose the connection between Internet companies and NSA surveillance programs like PRISM, the popularity of alternative Internet services continues to boom. IBTimes previously reported on DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has saw traffic spike to more than 3 million daily searches in the days following the original PRISM leaks.
-
Recent alarming revelations have raised some incredibly important questions about the use of surveillance techniques and Big Brother Watch, alongside seven other foremost campaign croups, have called on MPs to begin an enquiry into exactly how ministers and the security agencies have been interpreting the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), as reported in today’s Guardian.
-
-
-
Dotcom has put a strong emphasis on privacy since he began preparing the Mega storage website. Mega places content and the responsibility for it in the hands of the end-user, and limits Mega’s exposure to litigation and takedowns.
He has talked up the privacy benefits of Mega before and spoken of secure private messaging, and now he wants to go further.
-
Civil Rights
-
“Sweeping” subpoena violates rights of those who spoke out against oil giant’s devastating actions in Ecuador
-
The acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing unarmed high-schooler Trayvon Martin serves as a reminder of the continuing inequities in America’s criminal justice system — and might be the impetus to repeal a law like “Stand Your Ground,” which was adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and subsequently spread across the country. Stand Your Ground was part of the jury instructions in Zimmerman’s criminal trial, and it could again come into play if Trayvon’s family brings a civil suit.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
While countries have their own laws, many individuals worldwide choose to be guided by their faith in matters of morality. When it comes to movie piracy, for example, some Christians may be believe “thou shalt not steal.” So it’s perhaps interesting that in the Middle East where a similar law exists, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan piracy actually increases by 30%.
-
Earlier this week a movie and TV show subtitling site was raided by police following an investigation carried out by a Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group. With the site’s equipment seized but data safe, the youth division of the Swedish Pirate Party is now overseeing Undertexter’s crowd-funded return to glory. Meanwhile, as the prosecutor stands behind his decision to take down the site, a law professor thinks that things may not be so cut and dried.
-
-
-
A handful of tech giants have teamed up with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the White House to reduce the flow of ad revenue to operators of sites engaged in significant infringement and counterfeiting.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA