02.19.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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HP has become the latest “legacy” IT vendor to announce it would ship commodity switches for web-scale data centers that support network management software other than its own.
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Hewlett-Packard said on Thursday that it would sell a new line of networking switches that are manufactured by a Taiwanese company and depend on Linux-based, open-source software from another company.
HP, once at the center of high-tech manufacturing, will not make the new networking equipment but will act as a reseller, providing both online ordering and worldwide support for the product.
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Kernel Space
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The demand for Linux developers has jumped seven per cent in comparison to last year, a study has shown.
The 2014 Linux Jobs Report shows that hiring managers at tech-powered companies are focusing more attention on Linux talent, and that’s reverberating in the market, with stronger than average salary increases to those working with the OS.
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Linux is now 24 years old, and its community of developers, contributors and users shows no signs of shrinking. The annual “Who Writes Linux” report from the Linux Foundation was released today, and it includes many interesting nuggets about the people and companies who build Linux. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that the 3.15 kernel release cycle was said by the report to have been the busiest such cycle in the history of Linux.
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The platform-drivers-x86 pull request has been filed for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some prominent additions.
First up, the Toshiba ACPI driver (toshiba_acpi) is closer to feature-parity with its Windows counterpart. The Linux Toshiba ACPI driver now supports USB Sleep & Charge functions, USB Sleep functions under battery, USB Rapid Charge, USB Sleep & Music, support for keyboard functions mode, support for Panel Power On, support to enable/disable USB 3, etc. There’s also driver clean-ups and other improvements for this ACPI laptop driver specifically for Toshiba hardware.
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The Linux kernel sits at the core of all Linux-based operating systems and is produced in an open-source, multi-stakeholder process. It’s a process that has evolved over the last two decades, with a steady flow of new developers pouring into the community and contributing code. In a new report released by The Linux Foundation Feb. 18, the pace of Linux code contribution is detailed with data looking at eight Linux kernel releases in 15 months—beginning with the Linux 3.11 kernel, released in September 2013, and ending with Linux 3.18, which debuted Dec. 8, 2014. The Linux development report finds that more than 80 percent of code contributed to the Linux kernel comes from developers who are paid for their work. The overall number of developers is also growing, with 1,458 contributing code for the Linux 3.18 release. Looking at the companies that contribute to Linux, Intel continues to lead the way, with 10.5 percent of code contributions during the development period covered in the report. In this slide show, eWEEK examines key data points on the state of Linux development.
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The number of unpaid contributions to the Linux kernel has fallen again since the last major update, as work on the open source operating system (OS) is increasingly borne by corporations.
The annual report from the Linux Foundation, which runs the project, showed that unaffiliated developers accounted for 12.4% of all patches during the fifteen months leading to December 2014, more than any single company.
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Graphics Stack
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While Intel’s implemented ETC2 support in their driver and is supported by their latest hardware, Gallium3D is finally getting some ETC2 support.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Enpass is a multi-platform password manager which received a massive update recently and with it, the application is now available for Linux (64bit only for now).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night is a new title based on 1987 Games Workshop classic board game with the same name. A Linux port of this title has been made available.
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A puzzle platformer with surreal imagery, Tulpa, was released late last month and almost flew completely under our radar. The game mixes highly contrasting colours, strange environments and moody music to an interesting effect which you can appreciate in the trailer below:
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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So all plasmoids are gathered in Blue Systems office in beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain for Plasma Sprint 2015. One of the points I wanted to discuss was future of Plasma Media Center. Plasma Media Center got ported to KDE frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 library during last GSoC and with the help of our great Visual Design Group we also revamped the user interface fro Plasma media center. We also have integrated it as Plasma Shell package so plasmashell can load it as shell package and also can switch to mediacenter shell pacage.
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One of the things I’ve been sorely missing when doing UI design and development was a good way to preview icons. The icon picker which is shipped with KDE Frameworks is quite nice, but for development purposes it lacks a couple of handy features that allow previewing and picking icons based on how they’re rendered.
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Qt 5.5 is expected to ship in about two months and with this release will come a number of new and exciting features.
Qt 5.5 is in the process of being branched and an alpha release issued, prior to a beta in March, and the release candidate in April followed by the official Qt 5.5.0 release.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers announced that Nautilus (now known as Files) is now at version 3.16 Beta 1 and is ready for download and testing.
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David King, the developer of the default webcam viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, Cheese, has announced the immediate availability for testing of the first beta version of the upcoming Cheese 3.16 update, which will be distributed as part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop, due for release on March 25, 2015.
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As we’ve reported earlier today, the GNOME development team is hard at work to bring you the latest GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. GNOME Boxes, the default virtualization software of GNOME based on QEMU, will also be part of the forthcoming release of the graphical environment, bringing a number of enhancements and new features. The first Beta version of GNOME Boxes 3.16 is now available for testing.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has updated its infrastructure-as-a-service offering for enterprise businesses with a new iteration of the Linux OpenStack platform intended to help clients deploy cloud services.
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Fedora
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for February 18th, 2015…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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The time has come to introduce you guys to a new Linux kernel-based operating system, designed for creative people who were searching for a good-looking, reliable, and modern distribution for all of their multimedia creation needs. Future Studio OS is based on a mix between Debian GNU/Linux Jessie and Sid, using a low-latency Linux kernel and the KDE4 desktop environment.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Meizu, the second Ubuntu phone manufacturer, has kept the details of their Ubuntu Touch phone hidden, the rumors saying that Meizu is holding the details to reveal them at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.
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Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu operating system, has been aggressively pitching itself as the enabler for a world of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This enablement has occurred via its “Snappy” Ubuntu core, the most recent rendition of Ubuntu which is a cut down operating system. Snappy shares the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu but via a simpler mechanism. Canonical points to Snappy’s upgradeability and core security as differentiators that will help it succeed in this space.
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The entry-level dual-SIM Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition is available for sale if you’re in the European Union. The first of its kind Ubuntu powered smartphone features a 1.3.GHz Quad Core Cortex A7 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 2150 mAh battery. Basic specs to be sure, but what is interesting is that Ubuntu seems to run on hardware designed for Android phones. which means that it shouldn’t be too hard to see this OS running on other devices.
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It seems, as well as the variety of different smartphone manufacturers in the android world, there is also an increasing number of operating systems becoming available. While all, fork off of android in one capacity or another, there was one particular OS which has (for a long time) been gaining attention, that is Ubuntu OS. However, in spite of the increased attention and seemingly fervor for an Ubuntu OS running device, the actuality of bringing one of these devices to the market has proved difficult.
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Ninja Blocks, a new kind of smart home controller that got funded through Kickstarter already, has announced that it will provide support for Ubuntu Snappy Core and it will make it feel right at home in the “Internet of Things.”
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Ubuntu developers are working on the 15.04 version of their operating system and they have made some interesting changes so far, but they also entertained the possibility of adopting GTK+ 3.16. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be.
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We have to admit that today’s flash sale of Ubuntu phones was a successful one, especially because we managed to get one too and because we saw a lot of happy people posting tweets about purchasing the first-ever Ubuntu-powered smartphone. The Ubuntu Phone flash sale is now over, as announced by BQ on their Twitter account, and confirmed by Canonical.
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Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been updated in order to couple X.Org X server vulnerabilities that have been found by devs.
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Besides Canonical developers having released a new version of Mir, they’ve also continued concurrently advancing the Unity 8 UI.
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The arrival last week of Linaro’s open source 96Boards specification — ARM’s first pseudo-official SBC form factor standard — shows that ARM is serious about bringing order to the chaotic ARM hacker board scene. 96Boards is a preemptive attempt to consolidate Linux and Android development before a new wave of ARMv8 hacker boards hits the scene later this year.
Linaro’s 96Boards.org developer community and standards organization has defined a 96Boards Consumer Edition (CE) spec for ARM single board computers running Debian, Android, and other Linux-based distros. The spec defines either an 85 x 54mm or 85 x 100mm footprint, as well as standardized 40- and 60-pin expansion connectors for stackable boards. A higher-end Enterprise Edition (EE) spec will follow in the second quarter.
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It’s only been two weeks since the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was released but the foundation that designs them says it’s already shipped 500,000 units.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation confirmed to ZDNet that it has already sold half a million units of its latest computer, the fifth model it has released since its modest launch in 2012. As well as the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, the foundation has also released the 2.1 revision last year, as well as the model B+, model A+, and the compute module.
The 500,000 milestone for the Raspberry Pi 2 means the latest version now accounts for roughly 10 percent of the five million Raspberry Pi units shipped overall. The Pi hit its five million sales high-water mark this week, massively dwarfing the 10,000 units that Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton expected the foundation would sell in total, but which instead it reached within hours on the first day of sales in February 2012.
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Adlink is prepping a rugged, compact “MXE-200i” box-PC preloaded with Wind River’s Linux-based IDP XT IoT gateway stack running on quad- or dual-core Atoms.
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Phones
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Android
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BlackBerry rolled out a major software update Thursday, allowing users of its entire suite of BlackBerry 10 devices such as the Z10, Q10 and Z30 to access Android applications and a host of other features, including Blend.
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Owners of several Android Wear watches (Sony Smartwatch 3, LG G Watch, and Moto 360 so far) have reported seeing an update hit their devices to bring it up to Android 5.0.2. The corresponding build number is LWX49K for the G Watch and Smartwatch 3, LWX49L for the Moto 360.
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The email application of Samsung Galaxy 4 Minis can be made to repeatedly crash with a simple email that need not even be opened, according to researcher Hector Marco.
A crafted email gobbled up by the native email client running on Android 4.2.2.0400, a superseded operating system that was the latest stock offering for the S4 Mini.
Marco did not specify if the bug also bites earlier Android versions, but if that is the case this flaw will impact a great many more users. Google estimates 52.4 percent of users operate Android version 4.2 and earlier, while 19.8 percent run 4.2.x.
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Even though Apple is baked into my past, I can’t help but think that writing an Android guide is a little like writing a guide to the future. Every operating system aspires to create a universal experience, yet Android may do the best job of actualizing and implementing it for a consumer market. The Google OS offers unprecedented compatibility thanks to its line of next-gen wearable technology, including the experiment-gone-mainstream, Google Glass, and a slew of recently-announced smartwatches. Everything seems to be going Android’s way.
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Android Wear feels like it’s nowhere near its full potential and that the only thing holding it back is Google. You could say there’s a kind of courage in doggedly sticking with simplicity, in refusing to rush out functionality that would give it feature parity with the as-yet unreleased Apple Watch. I’d love to know if the developers inside Google are standing on that principle or just waiting to see how people react to what Apple has made.
In the meantime, we have unassuming watches like Sony’s SmartWatch 3. Even if you’re part of the tiny sliver of users to whom it’s designed to appeal, you have to admit that there’s nothing really special about it.
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BlackBerry rolled out a major software update on Thursday, allowing users of its entire suite of BlackBerry 10 devices such as the Z10, Q10 and Z30 to access Android applications, and a host of other features, including Blend.
The company said the BlackBerry 10 OS 10.3.1 gives users the ability to access both the BlackBerry World appstore and the Amazon Appstore that provides access to a host of Android applications previously unavailable on the BlackBerry platform.
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Want to contribute to an open source project, but don’t know where to start? Finding the first problem to fix in an unfamiliar codebase can seem pretty difficult—and even more so if it counts millions of lines of code—but it’s usually much easier than it looks. This article should give you a few tips and ideas on how to get started.
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Splunk, the log analysis system that’s evolved into a full-blown, machine-generated data processing platform (also described as “Google for visual analytics”), faces competition from a rising wave of open source competitors. One of the most prominent, Graylog, has unveiled its formal 1.0 release. Graylog’s success won’t be in meeting or exceeding Splunk’s feature set or performance, though; it’ll be in capturing or re-creating Splunk’s existing ecosystem of users and applications.
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Events
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As midnight Wednesday becomes Thursday morning, SCALE Team members continue to put in hours, doing everything from wiring the rooms to stuffing swag bags, getting ready for 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when registration opens. Once that happens, the show is on the clock and all the work that those on the SCALE Team have put in so far — the long hours of work prior to, and leading up to, the show — and the work that the team puts in during the course of the show becomes the cornucopia enjoyed by the attendees.
Reunions are quick — those who keep in touch through emails or social media over the course of the year meet face-to-face for the first time since last February. Security is called at times (just kidding, right Phillip Ballew?) and quick hellos give way to pitching in with what’s left to be done before the show opens in around eight hours.
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A panel of Platform as a Service and container experts at Collaboration Summit Monday didn’t agree on many things – including the relative importance of PaaS and containers, which is more useful for developers, and how the ecosystem will evolve. But they all agreed that the PaaS ecosystem relies on open source to remain relevant and useful.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Pivotal has taken a giant leap by open sourcing its big data platform. So what’s to stop companies from downloading the software and managing it in-house? Is Pivotal drying up its own revenue stream? Not really. Large enterprises will need the company’s support, as well as commercial licensing for some features. “We don’t feel that we are at risk in any way,” said Pivotal’s Michael Cucchi.
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RightScale is out with its 2015 State of the Cloud report, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing. The findings show that private clouds may be waning in momentum, hybrid clouds are the favorite solution for most enterprises, and Docker and container adoption are absolutely on fire.
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Centrify, in conjunction with big data companies MapR, Hortonworks and Cloudera, hopes to bring major changes to the way enterprises handle Hadoop security, data privacy and user authentication. This week, it introduced what it is billing as the channel’s first comprehensive identity management solution for Hadoop.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The administration of the Italian region Emilia-Romagna will complete its switch to Apache OpenOffice next month, says Giovanni Grazia, an IT project manager for the region. Emilia-Romagna is making the Open Document Format ODF the default on all 4200 workstations, across 10 departments and 5 agencies.
Emilia-Romagna is adding several tools to the OpenOffice suite, “improving the user experience”, says Grazia. Three of these are publicly available OpenOffice extensions, but others are being developed especially for the region. The latter will be made available as open source within the next few weeks, Grazia says.
The first of the official OpenOffice extensions used in the region is Alba, which makes it easy to insert in a document one or more pages with a different orientation. The second is Pagination, which improves the insertion of page numbers. Third is PDFImport, which allows the import of PDFs into OpenOffice.
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CMS
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WordPress 4.1.1 is now available. This maintenance release fixes 21 bugs in version 4.1.
Some of you may have been waiting to update to the latest version until now, but there just wasn’t much to address. WordPress 4.1 was a smooth-sailing release and has seen more than 14 million downloads in the last two months.
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BSD
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The next version of the Lumina desktop environment has just been released! Version 0.8.2 is mainly a “spit-and-polish” release: focusing on bugfixes, overall appearances, and interface layout/design. The FreeBSD port has already been updated to the new version, and the PC-BSD “Edge” repository will be making the new version available within the next day or two (packages building now). If you are creating/distributing your own packages, you can find the source code for this release in the “qt5/0.8.2″ branch in the Lumina repository on GitHub.
The major difference that people will notice is that the themes/colors distributed with the desktop have been greatly improved, and I have included a few examples below. The full details about the changes in this release are listed at the bottom of the announcement.
Reminder: The Lumina desktop environment is still considered to be “beta-quality”, so if you find things that either don’t work or don’t work well, please report them on the PC-BSD bug tracker so that they can get fixed as soon as possible.
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The PC-BSD developers behind the original Lumina Desktop Environment have put out a new “spit and polish” release of Lumina.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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The last part is in place, you can still smell the solder in the room. Your open hardware project is complete. So, what comes next? The hard part: do you need a license?
The first step is to determine if you have anything to license. For those of us coming from the software world, this step may seem odd.
Michael Weinberg, Vice President at Public Knowledge and a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association, tells us, “Software is protected by copyright (and protected automatically), so you can safely assume that you have something to license when you write software.”
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Standards/Consortia
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The web is about to get faster thanks to a new version of HTTP – the biggest change since 1999 to the protocol that underpins the world wide web as we know it today.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol is familiar to most as the http:// at the beginning of a web address. It governs the connections between a user’s browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
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Ad blockers have always been controversial among publishers. Many web publishers resent the use of ad blockers and feel that they are being cheated out of their rightful ad revenue. Some have even started to block access to their content when they detect an ad blocker in a reader’s browser.
[...]
Readers don’t use ad blockers because they want to cheat publishers out of revenue or act in an otherwise aggressive or nasty way. They use them because some web advertising has become incredibly obnoxious or intrusive.
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Hardware
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Qualcomm announced yesterday the introduction of four new Snapdragon processors that the company says will “take 4G LTE and multimedia to new heights”. These new processors are the Snapdragon 620, 618, 425, and 415.
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Health/Nutrition
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Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi – the great Persian physician often described as the grandfather of pediatric medicine – was a meticulous man. Before the age of 30, he discovered ethanol, thanks to the careful application of the then new art of distillation.
When overseeing the building of a new hospital in Baghdad, al-Razi hung raw meat around the city and broke ground where the meat putrefied most slowly. And, in one of the 200 or so books that he wrote, he created the first and most extraordinarily detailed account of one of the most infectious diseases ever known.
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Security
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Privacy
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Together with FFDN, a federation of community-driven non-profit ISPs, La Quadrature du Net is bringing a legal action before the French Council of State against a decree on administrative access to online communications metadata. Through this decree, it is a whole pillar of the legal basis for Internet surveillance that is being challenged. This appeal, which builds on the European Union Court of Justice’s recent decision on data retention, comes as the French government is instrumentalizing last month’s tragic events to further its securitarian agenda, with an upcoming bill on intelligence services.
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We reported earlier today on Lenovo bundling adware with some of its newer computers, but over the last few hours it’s emerged that the situation is worse than originally thought.
The software, named Superfish, was pre-installed by Lenovo on some consumer computers. The software injects unwanted advertising into users’ browsers in search results and on third-party websites.
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News broke last night that Lenovo has been shipping laptops with a horrifically dangerous piece of software called Superfish, which tampers with Windows’ cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user’s browsing. This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don’t want implemented in the most insecure possible way.1
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Imagine that you are a major global seller of laptop computers and that you were just caught preloading those machines with ultra-invasive adware that hijacks even fully encrypted Web sessions by using a self-signed root HTTPS certificate from a company called Superfish. How do you explain why you did it?
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Lenovo deserve criticism. The level of incompetence involved here is so staggering that it wouldn’t be a gross injustice for the company to go under as a result[1]. But let’s not pretend that this is some sort of isolated incident. As an industry, we don’t care about user security. We will gladly ship products with known security failings and no plans to update them. We will produce devices that are locked down such that it’s impossible for anybody else to fix our failures. We will hide behind vague denials, we will obfuscate the impact of flaws and we will deflect criticisms with announcements of new and shinier products that will make everything better.
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AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
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With reference to writing to the Commission (dated 9/9/2013) on alleged hacks into the Dutch based SWIFT-server and Written Questions on the alleged infiltration of the Belgium based Belgacom servers and the Commission systems with the use of REGIN-malware (E-010269-14 of 5/12/2014);
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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If you try to boot FreeBSD with its zfsloader you will likely need to apply a workaround patch, because the BIOS seems to do something odd. Linux works as expected.
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Kernel Space
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Here are 10 highlights:
1. 3.15 was the biggest kernel release ever with 13,722 patches merged. “I imagine we will surpass that again,” Corbet said. “The amount of changes to the kernel is just going up over time.”
2. The number of developers participating is going up over time while the amount of time it takes us to create a kernel is actually dropping over time. It started at 80 days between kernel releases some time ago, and it’s now down to about 63 days. “I don’t know how much shorter we can get,” het said.
3. Developers added seven new system calls to the kernel over the past year, along with new features such as deadline scheduling, control group reworking, multiqueue block layer, and lots of networking improvmenets. That’s in addition to hundreds of new hardware drivers and thousands of bug fixes.
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Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it’s especially nice to compare the results for older stable kernel builds with current ones and notice how much happier everything is.
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The Linux kernel is the biggest collaborative software project on the planet, but sometimes it might be difficult for people to understand that. The Linux Foundation has released its annual development report and we can get a glimpse of just how much work is being done.
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Applications
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A new development release of Evince, the document viewer application of the modern GNOME desktop environment, was made available to testers worldwide on February 17, 2015, version 3.16.0 Beta 1, which brings a number of new features, improvements, bug fixes, better documentation, as well as updated translations.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Solo: Gaze into Madness is a good looking first person horror that looks really quite good. The developer emailed it in directly, so Linux support is a go.
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Crytek announced a while ago that it was working on the CryEngine for the Linux platform, but little information has been made available since then. Now, it looks like they are finally ready to share some news about the engine during the upcoming GDC 2015 event.
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Act of Aggression, a new RTS developed by the famous Eugen Systems studio, will be out in May, 2015, and it’s likely that we’ll also get a Linux version.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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There is no shortage of desktop environments for Linux, which means you can customize your PC the way you want it.
I have used almost all major desktop environments — not just to test the waters but to actually find the one that works for me — because, you know, the best DE is the one that fits your needs.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME development team is working hard on the next major version of their controversial and modern GNOME desktop environment, release 3.16, which will bring a number of improvements in performance, stability, and updated components, each one having its own major features. This is the case of GNOME Control Center, which is now available to testers worldwide in a beta form.
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Red Hat Family
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Networking improvements, better Ceph distributed storage support and enhanced I/O virtualization are the headline features in the latest version of Red Hat (RHT) Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, the enterprise cloud computing product that the company released this week.
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Red Hat started putting its weight behind 64-bit ARM architecture in data-center last year by launching ARM Partner Early Access Program for Partner Ecosystem.
The idea behind the program was to develop an operating system which was capable of supporting multiple partner-initiated system designs based on the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture.
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RED HAT has announced the arrival of Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack Platform 6 (RHOP6).
The infrastructure-as-a-service offering has been modelled in part on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, aiming to push forward the firm’s commitment to Ceph storage along with a host of other enhancements.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new flash sale for BQ’s Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition will take place in less than an hour, at 9 AM CET (Central European Time), so get your wallets ready.
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Even if Mir and Unity 8 still have some time until they reach the desktop in a default capacity, it doesn’t mean that the developers don’t make important updates to them. A new progress report has been made available, showing off the improvements for both Mir and Unity 8.
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Phones
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Android
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Facebook said today that it’s giving away a tool it built to spot errors in Android application code.
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According to Google’s own Android version distribution data, Android 5.0 Lollipop is only on 1.6% of Android devices that are currently in use. The actual figure is undoubtedly much smaller, as it doesn’t take into account the millions upon millions of off-brand Android devices that don’t ship with Google’s apps and services installed.
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Using Android Wear isn’t always easy, but it’s beginning to catch on. Google has been busy packing new functionality into Android Wear, and though smartwatches (like any new tech) have a steep learning curve, they’re quickly becoming more practical. Here are some essential tips to get the most out of your Android Wear smartwatch.
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A couple of readers just got in touch with us to inform us that the long-awaited Android 5.0 Lollipop update has landed for the T-Mobile Galaxy S5. And by the looks of things, it’s a fairly hefty update weighing in at almost 1GB in size. It’s available to download over the air, so if you haven’t received a notification yet, check your settings and update manually. If that fails, give Samsung Kies a try.
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Google released Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’ last November, a major milestone in the life of today’s most popular mobile operating system. Like with most Android revisions, the update was pushed over-the-air to Nexus devices and all was well in the vanilla Android camp. Google took the opportunity to launch new devices, too, the Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet, complete with Android 5.0 support out of the box.
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Let’s face it: most projectors aren’t very useful outside of home theaters or boardrooms, even if they’re packing some smarts. Beam may get you to change your mind, though. Its namesake Android-powered projector runs apps, streams media from your mobile gear (through AirPlay or Miracast) and starts tasks based on the time or what you’re doing. You can play a video message when someone gets home, for instance, or load Netflix as soon as you turn on Bluetooth speakers. However, the design is the real party trick. While the 854 x 480 resolution and 100 lumen brightness are no great shakes, you can screw Beam into any standard light socket — you don’t have to hunt for a free wall outlet (or even a wall) if you’re just looking to show off some vacation photos.
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A core tenet of the free software movement is to enable every computer user to cooperate and contribute as equals. Improving the accessibility standards at which open source software is developed not only progresses the fundamental concepts behind this philosophy, it further legitimizes open source developers’ place in the software development community.
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Thanks to some applied discipline, Facebook is reaping greater benefits from its efforts around open source software.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Next month, Johnathan Nightingale will step down as a full time Mozillian after 8 years of distinguished service. We’d like to thank him for his countless contributions to the Mozilla project and leading Firefox through periods of intense competition and change.
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SaaS/Big Data
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It’s been said that sometimes the only thing worse than no choices is too many choices. If that is the case, the enterprise could be in a jam when it comes to cloud architectures.
The number of OpenStack distributions is getting larger every day, and they are starting to incorporate wildly divergent ancillary feature that will make it difficult to identify the right solution for the task at hand.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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SiteSupra Open Source Edition is a PHP-based free, GPL-licensed CMS that is available to download from www.sitesupra.org via GitHub. The product contributes to a hosted version of the product available under the same name at www.sitesupra.com. You can find out more about the original platform via our SiteSupra Review.
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Openness/Sharing
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We’ve written a few times about Elon Musk and Tesla’s decision to open up all of Tesla’s patents, with a promise not to sue anyone for using them. We also found it funny when some reacted to it by complaining that it wasn’t done for “altruistic” reasons, but to help Tesla, because of course: that’s the whole point. Musk recognized that patents frequently hold back and limit innovation, especially around core infrastructure. Since then, Musk has said that, in fact, rivals are making use of his patents, even as GM insists it’s not.
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Programming
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The world’s largest annual human migration is now well underway as 2.8 billion trips are made across China in what is known as chun yun, when students, migrant workers and office employees living away from home will make the journey back to celebrate with their families.
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Security
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Transparency Reporting
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This is the age of the whistleblower. From Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden to the latest cloak-and-dagger lifter of files, ex-HSBC employee Hervé Falciani, whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties — pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes.
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When information becomes a weapon – whether in geopolitics or domestic politics – the democratic principle of an informed electorate is sacrificed, as is now the case in modern America, where some leaders pander to parts of the electorate that are disdainful of science, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar observes.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Fox News’ Special Report used a story about a train derailment and oil spill in West Virginia to push for the passing of the Keystone XL pipeline, a common pattern for Fox, which has a long history of exploiting tragedies to push for the pipeline’s construction.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Conservatives have spent much of Obama’s presidency laying out ludicrous theories for how Obama is secretly Muslim.
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Privacy
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As of today, the Real ID Act—which will require all US IDs to meet minimum federal security standards—enter the first stage of its multi-year enforcement. That has a lot of people pretty nervous; whether legislators use the term or not, it smells an awful lot like a national ID card. But what is Real ID, exactly?
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Samsung does not encrypt voice recordings that are collected and transmitted by its smart TVs to a third party service, even though the company has claimed that it uses encryption to secure consumers’ personal information.
A week ago, the revelation that Samsung collects words spoken by consumers when they use the voice recognition feature in their smart TVs enraged privacy advocates, since according to Samsung’s own privacy policy those words can in some cases include personal or sensitive information. The incident even drew comparisons to Big Brother behavior from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
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A new report released by Tru Optik shows that there are hundreds of millions of active BitTorrent users who together shared 18 billion files last year. The data is being used to show media companies the scale of the “unmonetized” demand for their products while offering a tool to target pirates with the right offerings.
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Google says increasing the FBI’s powers set out in search warrants would raise ‘monumental’ legal concerns that should be decided by Congress
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BEIJING is an enormous city, sprawling over an area 10 times larger than Greater London. To get around China’s capital, many residents rely on the metro, swiping a smartcard each time they jump on or off. Could their swiping patterns reveal their class?
At the Beijing Institute of City Planning, researchers led by urban planner Ying Long have been poring over the smartcard records of millions of riders to see what their travel patterns reveal.
They explored two separate, week-long snapshots of public transportation activity taken two years apart, each including the movements of more than 8 million riders along the city’s bus and subway lines.
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As companies expand the amount of data hoovered up via their subscribers, a common refrain to try and ease public worry is that consumers shouldn’t worry because this data is “anonymized.” However, time and time again studies have highlighted how it’s not particularly difficult to tie these data sets to consumer identities — usually with only the use of a few additional contextual clues. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about cellular location data, GPS data, taxi data or NSA metadata, the basic fact is these anonymous data sets aren’t really anonymous.
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China has been trying for some time to clamp down on the Internet, in an attempt to prevent it from being used in ways that threaten the authorities’ control. Since the appointment of China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, the situation has deteriorated — China Digital Times speaks of the “new normal” of sharpened control.
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The question of whether law enforcement’s warrantless (and subpoena-less) access to hotel records falls outside the confines of the Constitution will be answered by the Supreme Court. An en banc hearing by the Ninth Circuit Court found that Los Angeles’ ordinance granting local law enforcement this power was unconstitutional. Not content with this finding, the city of Los Angeles has managed to bump it up to the highest judicial level.
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Civil Rights
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We’ve discussed for years how broken the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) is. The law, which was written many years ago, is problematically vague in certain areas, allowing prosecutors to claim that merely breaking a terms of service you didn’t read is a form of felony hacking — as they define it as “unauthorized access.” While there have been many egregious CFAA cases, one of the most high-profile, of course, was that of activist Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for downloading too many research papers from JSTOR from the computer network on the MIT campus. The MIT campus network gave anyone — even guests — full access to the JSTOR archives if you were on the university network. Swartz took advantage of that to download many files — leading to his arrest, and a whole bunch of charges against him. After the arrest, the DOJ proudly talked about how Swartz faced 35 years in prison. Of course, if you bring that up now, the DOJ and its defenders get angry, saying he never really would have faced that much time in prison — even though the number comes from the DOJ’s (since removed) press release.
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Police in Michigan have determined that a mishap involving a bra holster led to the death of a local politician and pageant champion.
Christina Bond, a 55-year-old mother of two, fatally shot herself in the eye while attempting to secure her handgun.
“She was having trouble adjusting her bra holster, couldn’t get it to fit the way she wanted it to,” said St. Joseph Public Safety Director Mark Clapp. “She was looking down at it and accidentally discharged the weapon.”
Bond was rushed from her home on Lake Michigan after the incident, but succumbed to her injuries at a local hospital.
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Send this to a friend
02.18.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Sony is developing self-driving car technologies with ZMP, which sells autonomous RoboCar development platforms with Linux-based control and sensor systems.
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Desktop
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Until Christmas or shortly before, GNU/Linux was kind of flat with just a small daily variation and little real growth. At Christmas there was obviously a huge influx of consumers’ PCs with GNU/Linux.
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Russia responded to the first sanctions over Ukraine by announcing a move to GNU/Linux, FLOSS and Postgresql in the Ministry of Health back in 2014, just when “Unknown” took off… Who needs salesmen when you have tyrants? It’s a small world and one action over here gives another reaction over there. It’s all good, I hope.
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Server
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Sarah Novotny is a technology evangelist and community leader for NGINX. I first met her at OSCON, where she’s one of the program chairs. She makes it look easy on stage, but it’s a tough job to help organize one of the largest open source events held each year.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 3.19 was released, to be followed by either a version 3.20 or 4.0. Also, the 2015 Linux Kernel Report reveals a growing rate of kernel contributions.
Linux kernel 3.19 was released on Feb. 8 (see farther below). Meanwhile, the next release has a good chance of being renamed from Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0. As reported by LinuxPlanet, Linus Torvalds posted an entry on Google+ saying he is opening up the question of naming to the community before he makes a decision.
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For those unfamiliar with the VirtIO 1.0 implementation see the OASIS specification, “This document describes the specifications of the ‘virtio’ family of devices. These devices are found in virtual environments, yet by design they are not all that different from physical devices, and this document treats them as such. This allows the guest to use standard drivers and discovery mechanisms. The purpose of virtio and this specification is that virtual environments and guests should have a straightforward, efficient, standard and extensible mechanism for virtual devices, rather than boutique per-environment or per-OS mechanisms.”
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The Linux kernel is growing and changing faster than ever, but its development is increasingly being supported by a select group of companies, rather than by volunteer developers.
That’s according to the latest survey of Linux kernel of development by the Linux Foundation, which it published to coincide with the kickoff of this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on Wednesday.
The survey found that coders who claimed no company affiliation, or for whom an affiliation could not be determined, accounted for just 16.4 per cent of the total number of contributions to the kernel. Independent consultants made up another 2.5 per cent.
The rest all came from coders working on behalf of companies large and small. And while individual contributors seldom made a huge impact on the kernel – most made ten or few changes to the kernel over the last three years – their combined efforts made a huge difference.
The latest version of the Linux kernel to be released before the report was compiled, version 3.18, comprised some 18,997,848 lines of code.
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Linux recently saw “busiest development cycle” in its history.
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If there’s anyone left on the planet who thinks Linux is written by undateable guys in their parents basement, the latest Linux Foundation report, Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It, should put an end to that delusion.
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Working with Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman to produce the ‘Who Writes Linux’ report is one of the most important research projects we do, as it surfaces important data and trends that offer some insight into how the Linux kernel development process is going and informs collaborative development practices across the industry. As the world’s largest collaborative development project, Linux can teach us much.
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Linux, without any doubts, is the most used technology in the world which is powering the modern IT infrastructure. From drones to space stations; from massive super computers to tiny smart-watches, from mission critical stock exchanges to your printers and routers everything is powered by Linux.
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Drone technology has also reached a maturity level that the embedded Linux, ROS (Robot Operating System) and drone communities are converging, Anderson said. Dronecode, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is designed to bring these various communities together to work on a common open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology.
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Bloomberg, the global business and financial information company, has joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold member.
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The newest addition to systemd just a day after landing its new EFI boot manager is systemd-fsckd. This new addition was done by Ubuntu developers.
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With the next kernel — regardless of whether it be known as Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0 — it will contain support for new ARM platforms.
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Intel, one of the world’s largest computer hardware companies, is now also among the biggest contributors to open-source software.
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The Linux Foundation has released their annual Linux kernel development report from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit taking place in Santa Rosa, California.
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A few weeks ago I wrote how systemd developers were planning to add Gummiboot as a UEFI boot manager to systemd. Now, following the just-released systemd 219, they’ve gone ahead and added their initial code for providing systemd with a EFI boot manager.
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Now more than ever, the development of the Linux kernel is a matter for the professionals, as unpaid volunteer contributions to the project reached their lowest recorded levels in the latest “Who Writes Linux” report, which was released today.
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Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin thinks the information security world needs fewer surgeons and more personal trainers, and he’s putting his organization’s money where his mouth is.
Speaking at this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, an invite-only event taking place this week in Santa Rosa, California, Zemlin took a break from his customary Linux and open source cheerleading to stress that the open source community needs to do more to address security.
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Graphics Stack
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Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side.
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The candidates running for the open seats for the X.Org Foundation Board if Directors has been released.
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A few weeks back at FOSDEM was a presentation by Luc Verhaegen on the Tamil Driver, which is focused on bringing open-source graphics driver support to ARM’s Mali T-Series and is the successor to his former Lima driver for older Mali graphics hardware.
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The latest OpenGL extension being implemented within Mesa Git for Mesa 10.6 is the ARB_pipeline_statistics_query extension.
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In getting Wayland’s input support ready for prime-time usage and with Fedora 22 switching its X.Org input stack to libinput, Red Hat developers have been very busy getting libinput to reach feature parity with the conventional X.Org input code.
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Benchmarks
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For those looking for a very economically priced SSD that’s still reliable and from a well known vendor, the OCZ ARC 100 series might be the most tempting drive line-up yet. With the OCZ ARC 100 series, a 256GB SSD costs only $90 USD or a 480GB SSD for $197. Though in this article the OCZ ARC 100 120GB SSD is being tested and it retails for less than $70 USD.
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Applications
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For some time now I’ve been using Atom as a replacement for Kate, KWrite and GEdit, depending on the desktop environment I’m using.
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The first beta of version 14.2 “Helix” of the software formerly known as XBMC is now available.
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Kodi is a powerful media player and entertainment hub that you might know better under the name of the XBMC. The name change occurred a few months ago and this is the first major upgrade for the 14.x branch.
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Proprietary
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Having a modern graphical interface, Vivaldi tries to bring the quality of Opera 12.
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Adobe’s Flash has gotten a bad rap for quite a long time now. One redditor asked how people deal with Flash on their Linux computers, and his fellow redditors pulled no punches in their responses.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this article we are going to have look into the installation and basic usage of node.js application. Node is a set of libraries for JavaScript which allows it to be used outside of the browser. It is primarily focused on creating simple, easy to build network clients and servers.
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Games
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The 2D adventure game Shipwreck is now available on Steam. It’s been covered previously before when it was only available for Linux gamers via Desura and the Humble Store.
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OpenMW, an open source implementation of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind game engine and functionality that is still under development, has just been upgraded to version 0.35.0 and is now ready for download.
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Hey Linux gamers, we are happy to inform you that a Trinity Bundle game sale is taking place these days, which includes no more than 10 awesome games for GNU/Linux operating systems. Of course, all games will also work on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X computer operating systems.
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Even if Valentine’s Day has already passed, gamers can still get the Humble Weekly Bundle: For Lovers (of games), which contains quite a few Linux titles and even a couple of pillowcases.
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Crytek announced a while ago that it was working on the CryEngine for the Linux platform, but little information has been made available since then. Now, it looks like they are finally ready to share some news about the engine during the upcoming GDC 2015 event.
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FlightGear 3.4 brings improved frame-rates, reduced memory occupancy for scenery titles, AI model improvements, SVG-based panel support, improving rendering of the runway and other lights under ALS, landing and spotlight support for ALS, and various other improvements to this open-source cross-platform flight simulator.
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The FlightGear devs had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, February 17, the immediate availability for download of the FlightGear 3.4 open-source and cross-platform cooperative flight simulator. The new release introduces a number of improvements and new features in various areas, such as aircraft, graphics, scenery, and JSBSim.
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FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.
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Gallium Nine is a Direct3D 9 implementation for the Open Source Mesa drivers that use Gallium. Used with Wine, it enables you to play Direct3D 9 games with solid performance on Linux.
Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The porting of KDE software from Qt4 to Qt5 is in full progress. The KDE core libraries were splitted to multiple manageable frameworks, ready to be used with any Qt5 application.
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One of the important design cornerstones of Plasma is that we want to reduce the amount of “hidden features” as much as possible. We do not want to have to rely on the user knowing where to right-click in case she wants to find a certain, desktop-related option, say adding widgets, opening the desktop settings dialog, the activity switcher, etc.. For this, Plasma 4.0 introduced the toolbox, a small icon that when clicked opens a small dialog with actions related to the desktop. To many users, this is an important lifeline when they’re looking for a specific option.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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For those wishing to experiment with the latest Wayland technologies, short of running the Weston compositor, the bleeding-edge development GNOME stack continues to serve as an excellent alternative with quickly adopting support for new functionality.
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It looks like that Google’s Material Design guidelines are making quite an impression, and developers have started to pay closer attention to them. Now we have a new theme that tries to respect the new guidelines and it’s probably just the first of many.
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Ozon OS “Hydrogen” is a new Linux distribution based on Fedora 21 developed by a team from Nitrux and Numix. It’s been in the works for quite some time and it looks like a new Beta release is almost here.
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Reviews
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Nvidia followed that device up this past summer with what it calls the “Shield Tablet,” an 8-inch device built to be a solid tablet, but with a clear focus on gaming. I’ve had one here for the last week, kicking the tires. And, let me tell you, it makes both an incredible tablet and an astoundingly good game console.
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Arch Family
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Arch is one of my favorite GNU/Linux distributions, along with openSUSE and Kubuntu. However, unlike openSUSE or Kubuntu it’s not easy to install Arch Linux. I have created a little guide of my own which I follow whenever I install Arch on any system – and I have done it dozens of times since 2011. I would suggest that you should also open the official wiki of Arch Linux, while you follow this tutorial so you can better understand the wiki.
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Slackware Family
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The KDE 5_15.02 increment contains the KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, Plasma 5.2.0 and Applications 14.12.2. Also present is a bunch of the “good old” KDE 4: most of kdebase, kdebindings and all those “extragear” packages like k3b and kdevelop which were missing in my 5_15.01 release.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is making lots of noise. The firm is bullishly ebullient about containers; the firm has this year partnered with 3scale for its API management platform; and the firm has just announced its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 offering. In less product branded terms then, this is software to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for businesses that we can label as “advanced cloud users” today.
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Last year, Red Hat decided that the 64-bit ARM architecture was ready for the data center and cloud. This year, Red Hat announced that its Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has expanded to include more than 35 companies. It also expects them to contribute open-source system-specific software and drivers to the upstream Linux ARM community.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has expanded to include more than 35 member companies, ranging from silicon vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to independent software vendors (ISVs).
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ARM is not yet a primary target for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux server, but it will be at some point in the near future. Red Hat has grown its ARM Partner Early Access program to 35 members, including both software and silicon vendors.
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Fedora
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The GNOME desktop is well integrated into the Korora distro. Korora 21 also is available with the Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce desktops. Korora developers did an awesome job tweaking the integration of each desktop into the distro’s performance. You must download each ISO file separately. Like most full-service Linux distros, Korora no longer includes all of the desktop options in one humongous ISO.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I recorded and posted a video with a detailed review of the bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu phone, complete with wider commentary on the scopes and convergence strategy and the likelihood of success.
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People tend to think about Ubuntu for Phones like a separate platform, but the truth is that it’s a lot closer to the PC than most users think. The fact that an app like GCompris can be made to run on phones is good proof of that.
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On the 11th of February, over 12.000 BQ Aquaris E4.5 have been sold in two flash sales. The next flash sale will take place tomorrow, at 9 AM CET (Central European Time). The Ubuntu phone from BQ will be available for ordering via the bq website, for €169.90.
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For those of you who didn’t have the chance to buy the Ubuntu Phone last week, BQ announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that a new flash sale for its Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone device, which uses the Ubuntu Phone (Ubuntu Touch) operating system, would take place tomorrow morning starting at 9 AM CET (Central European Time).
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Mark Shuttleworth clearly feels that what consumers and developers need, they will in time learn to want.
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A new arrival into an extremely competitive market, the first Ubuntu-powered phone has finally gone on sale in Europe – two years after a failed attempt to generate crowdfunding nevertheless raised US$12m. A sleek, polished rectangle, it appears much like other smartphones, but promises a different experience.
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In case you didn’t know, BQ, the Spanish phone manufacturer that produces the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone, has a YouTube channel, called Canal bq. There, you will find all sorts of instructive videos, some of which are about the brand-new Ubuntu Phone device.
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Meet the $89 Remanufactured Ubuntu Linux web workstation. Encased in 12.5×12.5×6.25 of 1/8th inch black recycled ABS plastic and shipped in 100% non-virgin fiber packaging, this little marvel is the culmination of years of hard work, dedication and focus. Averaging only 50% of the shipping weight of a standard desktop tower, and offering at least 2GB of RAM, 2.8Ghz of desktop-class processing power and at least a 80GB SATA hard drive, the Symple PC gives classroom labs, non-profits and call centers a planet-friendly, privacy-conscious choice for computing at an outstanding value. Complete with an available 1 Year Advanced Replacement Warranty, provided you ship the unit back to be planet-conscious, Symple PCs arrive at your organization with Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS pre-installed. They handle local document processing, web work, and are completely private and stand-alone, not requiring any 3rd party accounts to login and be productive.
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Flavours and Variants
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Jeff Hoogland today announced Bodhi Linux 3.0.0. This is the first release after the scare of losing founder and lead developer; a release many thought may never come just a short while ago. Over at Linux.com Swapnil Bhartiya penned an article describing the best Linux contenders in a variety of categories for the coming year. Elsewhere, five developers say Linux should be used for making music.
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Version 3.0 of Bodhi Linux is now available, the distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that features a customized Enlightenment E19 desktop.
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Enea (STO:ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor within the communication domain announces Enea Linux support for the 64-bit AMD embedded R-Series system-on-chip (SoC) processor, codenamed “Hierofalcon”.
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It is hard to believe that the Raspberry Pi has been around for three years already. Launched back in 2012, the credit card-sized PC attracted quite a bit of attention due to its $35 price and potential ability to encourage programming with children. Today, it was revealed that over 5 million units of Raspberry Pi have been sold to date.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Terminology version 0.8 has been released and is available for immediate download. Terminology is a terminal emulator program that is written with Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), and has some extra features when compared to standard Terminal apps.
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Android
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When it comes to Android, there is never a dearth of messaging apps. From WhatsApp to Line, you can switch to pretty much any messaging service, whenever you want. However, if you are running a company, there are many factors involved before you add a messaging app in the mix. The same solutions that teenagers use to keep up with their buddies won’t work amongst your employees. Can be quite frustrating, don’t you think?
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The Android 5.0 Lollipop is now being seeded to various Samsung smartphones like the Galaxy S5, Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Note 2. The update is being rolled out in phases which mean that all the others will not receive the Lollipop update simultaneously. This report talks about the status update of the latest Android build for the aforementioned smartphones.
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We’ll explain 15 reasons why Android is better than the iPhone with a new for 2015 Android vs iPhone comparison. In the last six months Apple’s iOS 8, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus changed the playing field and removed some of the advantages Android offered, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop release and excellent phones still set Android apart in several important areas.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Android 5.0 Lollipop has been out and about for almost four months now and during this time it has slowly been making its way to phones and tablets. More phones than tablets, to be precise.
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The information jobs for the remainder of the 21st century will not be managed by operating systems. Today, we perceive Twitter as one of a very few examples of services that run at “Internet scale” — at a scale so large that the size of its domain is meaningless. Yet Twitter is actually an example of what one day, within most of our lifetimes, will be considered an everyday job, the sort of thing you expect networks of clustered servers numbering in the tens of thousands to do.
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At least that’s how Dmitry Pushkarev sees it. His new company, ClusterK, is releasing its genomics pipeline to illustrate how complex workflows like the Broad Institute’s GATK can be run efficiently—and much faster—on the cloud. The pipeline breaks the GATK pipeline into thousands of different tasks, each taking 10-20 minutes, which can be run in parallel. “It allows the entire workflow to be distributed across dozens of compute nodes,” Pushkarev says, and results are returned much faster.
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HP has released a product that checks off many of the boxes on the hot-technology list for 2015: big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics, and open source.
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HFOSS organizers need to make is easier to help people get involved. One recommendation that I have is a simple navigator that asks people what they want to do or what they want to give. The aggregator would then help match them to tasks and communities. Think of it as a global Match.com for giving. We would give love to open source organizations, corporations, nonprofits, community-based organizations, and citizens. Truly, this is all hands on deck to make it possible for anyone and any organization to connect. We could tailor it with the code to help people choose their own adventure based on topic, time, location, and their learning/doing/giving path. Really, we need to dream big more and build it.
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Zack Urlocker was just named COO of Duo Security, a Benchmark and Google Ventures-backed security company that aims to make two-factor authentication omnipresent and painless. Is this Urlocker’s next unicorn? After all, as SVP of products and marketing at MySQL, he helped to drive a $1 billion sale by Sun. Later, he went on to run operations at pre-IPO Zendesk (now worth $2 billion).
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From the corporate world I frequently hear how hard it is to predict and track what upstream developers do. On the other side, developers that work part or full time upstream frequently underestimate the need for communicating what they do in a way that enable others (or themselves) to provide deadlines and effort estimations. Upstream and product “time lines” and cultures often differ too much to be compatible under the same environment.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation describes its annual Collaboration Summit as a gathering of its corporate members along with invited participants including core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors, and representatives of community organizations. This year’s Summit takes place Feb. 18-20 in Santa Rosa, Calif., and is expected to draw more than 450 participants.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Every so often, a bug shows up in an open-source application that just make me go ..huH? That’s the case with Mozilla firefox bug 949446 which has the ominous title of: “Source Code Disclosure of every possible project”
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SaaS/Big Data
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IBM, GE, Teradata, Infosys, VMware, Pivotal, SAS and others will develop on and test out Apache Hadoop open source tools
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MapR has a new release today that provides some perspectives on the influences that are shaping new data-centric architectures. In particular, it shows the importance of Yarn, Mesos and the continued value that Docker plays as the need increases for developing new patterns that reflect the forces of data gravity and container density.
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All the way back in 2013, the folks at Cloudscaling were adamant that the future of OpenStack depended on embracing Amazon Web Services (AWS), and there has continued to be much debate on the topic. Eucalyptus Systems, among other open cloud players, proved that by integrating Amazon’s command interfaces exactly, many users would react positively.
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This week, there are a lot of interesting big data announcements coming out of Strata + Hadoop World. MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced at Strata + Hadoop World the latest release of the MapR Distribution including Hadoop, which, the company notes, “has new features that accelerate the data-centric enterprise by supporting applications on globally-distributed, big data.” The company’s new MapR Distribution including Hadoop, version 4.1, features interesting table replication features and more.
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Bowing to customer pressure, enterprise software and services vendor Pivotal will release as open source the remainder of its software suite for analyzing data.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is the flagship office suite for Linux. It’s also quite popular with Windows users. As a free, open-source and cross-platform solution, LibreOffice allows people to enjoy the world of writing, spreadsheets, presentations and alike without having to spend hefty sums of money. The only problem till now was that it didn’t quite work as advertised. Microsoft Office support was, for the lack of a better word, lacking.
Version 4.4 is out, and it promises a great deal. A simplified interface, new looks, much improved proprietary file format support. Sounds exciting, and as someone who has lambasted LibreOffice for this very reason in the past, I felt compelled to give this new edition its due rightful try. On top of Plasma 5 no less. So let’s see.
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Funding
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I wrote a column a while back called “Distro developers need dollars” where I included links to distro donation pages. My thought then was that it was a good idea for distro developers to get financial support from users whenever possible. I still feel that way, however, there’s a flip side to that idea too.
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BSD
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Anyhow, some comments in my recent posts (“Has modern Linux lost its way?” and Reactions to that, and the value of simplicity), plus a latent desire to see how ZFS fares in FreeBSD, caused me to try it out. I installed it both in VirtualBox under Debian, and in an old 64-bit Thinkpad sitting in my basement that previously ran Debian.
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If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgrade your kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys.
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It was fixed and subsequently reported yesterday that the FreeBSD kernel has been subject to a faulty random number generator for the past four months.
[...]
Update: To clarify, this issue is/was only in the FreeBSD -CURRENT kernel and not the 10.x releases.
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Coming soon is the HHVM 3.6 release for making PHP even faster and Facebook’s Hack derivative even better, but further out into 2015 are even more exciting improvements.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has announced the launch of a new open source software community and code repository at OpenSourceSDN.org. The foundation said the new site is designed to be a resource for those looking to commercially deploy open SDN (Software-Defined Networking) solutions, free from vendor lock-in.
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Open Data
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OpenStreetMap has been for almost 11 years and at long last routing has arrived on the main website. The functionality is actually provided by 3rd parties including OSRM, MapQuest and GraphHopper. One shortcoming of the new map implementation is that you cannot add multiple destinations to your journey. Nonetheless the new update is a huge one for the open source map software.
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The OpenGov platform has been gaining traction as a tool for governments to demonstrate their transparency by providing better access to government spending data in a user-friendly, digital format.
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Open Access/Content
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Subha Panigrahi is an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is currently works at the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program where he builds partnership with universities, language researchers, and GLAM organizations. Their goal is to bring more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses. During his work at the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program, Subha was involved in designing community sustaining and new contributor cultivation models.
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Open Hardware
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VR ecosystem is now supported by 38 members; Academia Support Program announced to support developers worldwide
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Standards/Consortia
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On February 11 at the State Council Executive Meeting in Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang confirmed the final framework agenda for China’s standardization reform. According to a report on the State Council website, the key target of reform is improving China’s economic performance and enhancing the overall competitiveness of China’s products and services.
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The HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications have been formally approved by the IESG.
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The ‘90s rapper known as Vanilla Ice has been arrested and charged with burglary and grand theft for allegedly stealing an array of items from a vacant Florida home.
Lantana police told TMZ that furniture, a pool heater, bicycles and other items were stolen from the property in the 100 block of N. Atlantic Drive.
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Health/Nutrition
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The numbers are startling. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.8 million more children in the US were diagnosed with developmental disabilities between 2006 and 2008 than a decade earlier. During this time, the prevalence of autism climbed nearly 300%, while that of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder increased 33%. CDC figures also show that 10 to 15% of all babies born in the US have some type of neurobehavorial development disorder. Still more are affected by neurological disorders that don’t rise to the level of clinical diagnosis.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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There was a great power that was worried about its longtime rival’s efforts to undermine it. Its leaders thought the rival power was stronger and trying to throw its weight around all over the world. In fact, this longtime rival was now interfering in places the declining state had long regarded as its own backyard. To protect this traditional sphere of influence, the worried great power had long maintained one-sided relationships with its neighbors, many of them led by corrupt and brutal oligarchs who stayed in power because they were subservient to the powerful neighbor’s whims.
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Further, Bush misrepresented the strength of ISIS, saying they have some 200,000 men, which is far greater than U.S. intelligence community’s estimates. Last week National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen pegged the fighting strength of ISIS at between 20,000 and 31,500.
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Transparency Reporting
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Last month, WikiLeaks wrote an open letter to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admonishing the tech giant for waiting over two and a half years to reveal that it gave the Department of Justice the emails and other data of three Wikileaks staffers. Google was finally successful in overturning the gag order in December, which was when the staffers in question – Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell – were made aware of the investigation into their activities.
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Adrian Humphreys of the National Post, who last year wrote an award-winning 5 part investigative piece on Matt DeHart’s case, reports: “The decision by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) offered him a moral victory — finding no ‘credible or trustworthy evidence’ he committed the child pornography offences alleged by the government — but extended him no protection, denying him refugee status, which would have allowed him to remain in Canada.” — See full story here.
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The sea is rising and our remaining hills are few and far between. This is not a discussion of climate change despite its perils. This a discussion of the anonymous archipelago in the global sea of surveillance and our loss of collective privacy. While our individual privacy is in grave danger today, there are still countermeasures to protect our thoughts and words from hostile eyes and ears. It cannot listen to yet the voice in our heads nor can they follow everyone at all times. It cannot yet steal the ideas from our minds nor can they accurately predict our intentions short of our overt behavior. They do not yet have this power, but they will try. They will try because we have ceded to them our right to collective privacy.
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When Private Chelsea Manning – the former soldier currently serving a 35-year prison term for leaking thousands of classified documents – came out as transgender in August 2013, major media outlets proved just how ill-prepared they were to cover transgender stories. Both Fox News and CNN repeatedly misgendered Manning, disregarding GLAAD’s Media Reference Guide, which calls on news organizations to refer to transgender people by their preferred gender pronouns.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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You don’t have to look 85 years into the future to see what a sinking world looks like—you only need to look as far as Miami.
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Finance
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Or maybe people think inequality hasn’t stopped rising because it hasn’t. The problem with Leonardt’s argument is that it’s cherry-picking: If you start from 2007, which was the height of a financial and real-estate bubble that mostly benefited the wealthy, then of course the income of the wealthy won’t return to where it was; a bubble is by definition unsustainable. (If the recovery amounts to reinflating the bubble, as some observers fear, that would be bad news for the elite as well as for the rest of us.)
[...]
Leonhardt can sometimes be an effective debunker of conservative spin, but the trick of starting your measurement of inequality from an unrepresentative peak is reminiscent of the chicanery of Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Barkley, who wrote an entire book, The Seven Fat Years, based on manipulating the timeframe of economic comparisons.
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Of course, income inequality is still at historically troubling rates, and could potential even worsen, as the Times repeatedly noted.
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Geneva’s public prosecutor searched the premises of HSBC Holdings PLC in Geneva on Wednesday and said it had opened a criminal inquiry into allegations of aggravated money laundering.
“A search is currently underway in the premises of the bank, led by Attorney General Olivier Jornot and the prosecutor Yves Bertossa,” Geneva’s prosecutor said in a statement.
HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, apologised to customers and investors on Sunday for past practices at its Swiss private bank following allegations that it helped hundreds of clients dodge taxes.
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Investigation into suspected ‘aggravated money laundering’ comes after Belgium and France begin scrutinising tax affairs of Europe’s biggest bank
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The Swiss subsidiary of HSBC was searched on Wednesday by officials after prosecutors in Geneva said they are opening a money laundering investigation into the bank’s alleged illegal tax activity.
The premises of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) were searched by authorities, AP reported, and the investigation could possibly extend beyond the bank to any clients participating in money laundering.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Conservative media figures criticized the Obama administration for suggesting terrorism is tied to poverty, ignoring the fact that former President George W. Bush also explicitly cited alleviating poverty as a fundamental tool to fighting terrorism.
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The Wall Street Journal is celebrating a ruling from a lower-court judge who has temporarily blocked President Obama’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion over undocumented immigrants by repeating a litany of right wing-media myths, some of which were repeated in the legal decision itself.
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You can see propaganda being manufactured before your eyes: “According to one new poll” becomes “Poll Shows”; “more support it than object” becomes “Americans Want.” Any subtleties are ironed out to create an assertion that the American people are calling for Netanyahu to speak.
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Censorship
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The First 100 Days featured actress Priyanga Burford as the party’s only Asian woman MP, who is elected for Romford in an imagined landslide making Mr Farage Prime Minister.
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Former Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne has said that “poor editorial judgement” has been exercised at the newspaper he stepped down from.
Following his announcement that he had resigned from his position as The Telegraph’s chief political commentator, Oborne appeared in a strongly-worded interview on BBC Radio 4, where he repeated his comments that the paper had “failed” its readers in its alleged underreporting of the HSBC scandal.
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The Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, has called for an independent inquiry into the paper’s editorial guidelines over its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax story, which he described as a “fraud on its readers”.
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In September 2013, Peter Oborne wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph in praise of Ed Miliband, calling him a brave and adroit leader. I remarked at the time that he was a columnist renowned for going against the grain of the newspaper for which he writes.
It is to his credit that he did so and was to the Telegraph’s credit that it hired him and published him for five years. He never subscribed to the paper’s large-C Conservative line on many subjects.
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THE report released on Thursday by Reporters Sans Frontières reminds us that politics around the world today has inevitably taken a heavy toll on media freedoms, squeezing both the public’s right to know and journalists’ duty to inform.
“Press freedom … is in retreat in all five continents,” said the RSF 2015 World Press Freedom Index.
The head of the RSF told the media that the deterioration is linked to a range of factors, “with information wars and actions by non-state groups acting as news despots”.
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Privacy
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New research done by Russian cyber-security firm, Kaspersky, suggests that the NSA (although not confirmed by Kaspersky) has spyware deeply embedded into hard drives from manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and others, covering much of what’s on the market. The software embedded in the hard drives is part of a group of spyware which Kaspersky found out about.
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The UK already has a pretty awful reputation when it comes to surveillance, what with millions of CCTV cameras, DRIPA and two recent attempts to shove the Snooper’s Charter through Parliament without scrutiny. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to discover that UK police forces have created a giant facial recognition database that includes hundreds of thousands of innocent people….
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Police forces in England and Wales have uploaded up to 18 million “mugshots” to a facial recognition database – despite a court ruling it could be unlawful.
They include photos of people never charged, or others cleared of an offence, and were uploaded without Home Office approval, Newsnight has learned.
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Security researchers have uncovered highly sophisticated malware that is linked to a secret National Security Agency hacking operation exposed by The Intercept last year.
Russian security firm Kaspersky published a report Monday documenting the malware, which it said had been used to infect thousands of computer systems and steal data in 30 countries around the world. Among the targets were a series of unnamed governments; telecom, energy and aerospace companies; as well as Islamic scholars and media organizations.
Kaspersky did not name the NSA as the author of the malware. However, Reuters reported later on Monday that the agency had created the technology, citing anonymous former U.S. intelligence officials.
Kaspersky’s researchers noted that the newly found malware is similar to Stuxnet, a covert tool reportedly created by the U.S. government to sabotage Iranian nuclear systems. The researchers also identified a series of code names that they found contained within the samples of malware, including STRAIGHTACID, STRAITSHOOTER and GROK.
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On Monday, London-based human rights group Privacy International launched an initiative enabling anyone across the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the National Security Agency’s British counterpart.
The campaign was made possible following a historic court ruling earlier this month that deemed intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the NSA to have been unlawful because of the extreme secrecy shrouding it.
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As the Snowden leaks continue to dribble out, it has become increasingly obvious that most nations planning for “cyber-war” have been merely sharpening knives for what looks like an almighty gunfight.
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Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower on the run, spoke at ACLU Hawaii’s First Amendment Conference live Saturday, via a video link from Moscow, Russia.
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Google is warning that the government’s quiet plan to expand the FBI’s authority to remotely access computer files amounts to a “monumental” constitutional concern.
The search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how they can approve search warrants for electronic data.
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The UK Government has today conceded that its policies governing the ability of intelligence agencies to spy on lawyer-client communications were unlawful, in response to a case brought by two victims of an MI6-orchestrated ‘rendition’ operation.
Abdul-hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar were tortured and rendered to Libya in 2004 in a joint MI6-CIA operation. They filed a case in 2013 with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) concerning alleged eavesdropping by UK intelligence services on their confidential communications with their lawyers.
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The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.
The admission that the activities of the security services have failed to comply fully with human rights laws in a second major area – this time highly sensitive legally privileged communications – is a severe embarrassment for the government.
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Civil Rights
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No country on the planet is untouched by the United States government. In fact, the US has the most powerful military on Earth and arguably the most powerful military in the history of the world. There is no more important “affair of the state” during the life of a nation than its participation in war. Yet instead of defending the country, the United States government often uses the military, the CIA, and a variety of international organizations to intervene in foreign affairs on behalf of powerful US based multinational corporations often to the detriment of the great majority of the people in the United States and billions of people around the world.
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This is the third article (see PART 1 & PART 2) in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward a justice system which operates for profit not public good has created a breeding ground for corruption.
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French police have opened an investigation after Ffans of Chelsea football club were filmed repeatedly pushing a black man off a Paris Metro train, before chanting “We’re racist and that’s the way we like it”.
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The University of Massachusetts Amherst today announced that it will accept Iranian students into science and engineering programs, developing individualized study plans to meet the requirements of federal sanctions law and address the impact on students. The decision to revise the university’s approach follows consultation with the State Department and outside counsel.
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In August 2010, Stephen Kim, a highly-regarded intelligence analyst in the State Department, was indicted under the Espionage Act for divulging classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen. If convicted at trial, he faced 10 to 15 years in prison.
Kim allowed me to film his life in intimate detail from the period after his guilty plea early last year — he accepted a sentence of 13 months — until his surrender at a federal prison this past July. I watched him simultaneously disassemble the physical components of his life while he retraced the journey that brought him from speaking zero English as a young Korean immigrant, to the nation’s top universities, to the State Department and ultimately to the courtroom where he faced federal prosecution.
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Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This Is His Story.
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New York Times reporter James Risen slammed Attorney General Eric Holder in a series of tweets Tuesday evening, calling the Obama administration “The greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”
“Eric Holder has been the nation’s top censorship officer, not the top law enforcement officer,” Risen tweeted. “Eric Holder has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States.”
Risen was tweeting in response to a speech Holder gave earlier on Tuesday at the National Press Club, where he defended the administration’s record on prosecuting leakers, saying they could have prosecuted far more than they actually did.
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At almost the same time, lawyers for Jeffrey Sterling moved for acquittal on all charges. As part of that, they made an argument very similar to the one I made: Jeffrey Sterling was convicted on three charges relating to the possession of a copy of a letter that appeared in Risen’s State of War that not only did the FBI admit they never found, but which Sterling had no possible way of possessing.
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Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper issued guidance this month on polygraph testing for screening of intelligence community personnel. His instructions give particular emphasis to the use of the polygraph for combating unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
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Speaking at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Holder, noting that he was speaking in a personal capacity and not as a member of the administration, said the “inevitable” possibility of executing an innocent individual is what makes him oppose capital punishment.
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The human rights abuses revealed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released in December sparked global outrage, leaving some begging for senior officials from the George W. Bush administration to be held accountable. But CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou is certain the U.S. government will do nothing of the sort.
Just two weeks after Kiriakou was released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal in which he admitted to violating one count of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he spoke with HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski on Tuesday about where the accountability should lie.
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Members of the Zambrano family began arriving here three decades ago, picking apples in nearby orchards. Over time they have become part of the fabric of this harvesting town, growing to more than 50 and settling in tiny candy-colored homes, some ringed by white picket fences.
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For the record, I believe our country needs some kind of program to divert wayward young men — of whatever race, religion, and ideology — rather than ensnaring them in stings that will result in a wasted life.
Mind you, the government is going about it with the Muslim community badly. In part, that’s because the US doesn’t have much positive ideology to offer anymore, especially to those who identify in whatever way with those we’ve spent millions villainizing. In part, that’s because we’d have to revamp FBI before we started this CVE stuff, starting with the emphasis on terrorist conviction numbers as the prime measure of success. You’ll never succeed with a program if people’s primary job measure is the opposite.
Finally, and most obviously, you have to start by building trust, which will necessarily require a transition time between when you primarily rely on dragnets and informants to that time when you can rely on community partners (it will also require an acceptance that you won’t stop all attacks, regardless of which method you use).
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This is for the courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou. He was the first U.S. government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding was used to interrogate Al Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture. On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow CIA officer that connected the covert operative to a specific operation. He was the first person to pass classified information to a reporter, although the reporter did not publish the name of the operative.[6] He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013, and served his term from February 28, 2013 until 3 February 2015 at the low-security Federal correctional facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania.[7]
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In countries where Internet access is widespread there’s active conversations going on regarding net neutrality as more and more users tax ISP’s infrastructures thanks to heavy data usage. The fear surrounding a tiered Internet is that people will lose access to some sites and therefore lose out on information. Facebook’s attempt to provide some sites for free in India also raises net neutrality issues, rather than included sites being democratically chosen by it’s users, they’ve been pre-selected by Facebook.
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More antitrust woe for Google on the international front. Search giant Yandex, often described as the “Google of Russia”, has filed a request with Russia’s antimonopoly regulator to investigate Google over possible violations of Russia’s antitrust laws.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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London’s Conway Hall was the venue for a Guardian Membership event held this week to debate the pros and cons of TTIP. The discussion was chaired by Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott and the panel comprised Claude Moraes, Labour MEP; Owen Tudor, head of European Union and International Relations, TUC; John Hilary, executive director of charity War on Want; and Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser at the Centre for Economics and Business Research. There was also a room full of impassioned Guardian members. So what did we learn?
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Copyrights
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The Pirate Bay has been back online for more than two weeks but thus far it’s been rough sailing. The notorious torrent site has had to jump from hosting service to hosting service just to stay online and is still looking for a safe haven. At the same time, scammers keep hounding the site with fake files and malicious links.
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Send this to a friend
02.17.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Vivaldi, a new web browser based on Chromium, built by an Opera founder and his team, has just received an upgrade and 32-bit versions for the application, among other things.
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Its not a secret that I’ve been working on sandboxed desktop applications recently. In fact, I recently gave a talk at devconf.cz about it. However, up until now I’ve mainly been focusing on the bundling and deployment aspects of the problem. I’ve been running applications in their own environment, but having pretty open access to the system.
Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure. We also need to use kdbus to allow desktop integration that is properly filtered at the kernel level.
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Clearly, GNU/Linux is growing as rapidly at work as at home. Thanks to Dell, Canonical, the government of India and others who laid the groundwork for this growth. May it continue for years to come and accelerate.
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Kernel Space
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Of course, the other option, if Linus wanted to be truly trendy, is to just call the next version Linux 10—and then perhaps thereafter give each new version the name of a large animal or an interesting location from Torvalds’ home country of Finland.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It’s clear the current KRecipes gardening effort is not having much traction, but before moving on to different applications, let’s try a different format, the Gardening Day.
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Last spring, Pivotal unveiled its Pivotal Big Data Suite, a subscription-based software, support and maintenance package that bundled its big data components into a single, simple licensing structure. The Big Data Suite was responsible for $40 million of the $100 million in total business Pivotal did in 2014. Today, the company took the unprecedented step of open sourcing all those components.
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Linux has a reputation for being geeky, esoteric, hard to get into and limited in terms of available software. But does the increasingly popular free OS and its ecosystem deserve such criticism, or are musicians missing out by not considering making the switch from Windows or OS X?
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Linux is omnipresent, even if you don’t realize it. I have been using Linux as my only OS since 2005 and with every passing year I come to realize that it has much more to offer than I initially, back in 2005, understood. There is something for everyone. In this article, I have picked some of the best Linux distros to help you get the job done.
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New Releases
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The first update pack has been released for Manjaro 0.8.12, the latest version of the distribution released only a couple of weeks ago. Numerous components have been upgraded, including some of the core ones.
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Bodhi Linux, a fast, minimalistic Linux distribution which uses Enlightenment (E19) by default, has reached version 3.0.0.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Open source vendor SUSE jumped into the distributed storage market this week with the launch of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Based on Ceph, the new offering positions the company to compete more strongly in the software-defined, scale-out storage market.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Feb. 17 announced the general availability of release 6.0 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP), providing an enterprise-grade cloud platform based on the OpenStack Juno milestone release. Red Hat is also going a step beyond what was in the OpenStack Juno release by providing its users with a technology preview of the TripleO OpenStack-on-OpenStack project. Red Hat is one of the leading code contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform, and has both a community distribution called RDO and an enterprise-supported release with OSP that it makes available to users. RDO, much like Red Hat’s community Fedora project, closely tracks and follows the upstream open-source community, while OSP is a more stable release that benefits from additional enterprise hardening. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.0 release follows the upstream OpenStack Juno release, which debuted on Oct. 16, 2014.
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Red Hat remains very focused on advancing its OpenStack-focused cloud business initiatives. The company has now released an update of its OpenStack distribution, marrying its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) platform with the latest OpenStack release: Juno. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform sets a new standard for OpenStack deployments, with customers in production in every region, spanning industry verticals and enterprises of various sizes in education, financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications,” claims the company’s announcement.
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I’ve had my lovely new Raspberry Pi 2 for a few days now – it was shipped from the Swiss Pi-Shop less than a week after the announcement, so thanks once again to them for their prompt and courteous service. I’ve been trying it out since then, mostly comparing it to my original Models B and B+. The results have been interesting, generally what I expected, but with one or two surprises.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung unveiled their new 2015 Smart TV Lineup at CES 2015, which are Smart TVs that run Tizen, as well as offering Sony’s PlayStation Now service combined with Samsung’s latest screen technologies. The SUHD Re-Mastering Engine uses a colour grading tool to offer a high dynamic range and wider colour gamut, which is 64 times the colour expression thanks to quantum technology and 2.5 times the brightness when compared to conventional TVs.
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Android
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Contrary to initial reports last week that it would be Motorola devices which shall be first receiving the Android 5.1 Lollipop, the major update to the problematic Android 5.0 Lollipop, it seems that Google Nexus devices will beat everyone else to the draw.
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Are you a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact owner? If you are, you have reason to rejoice: the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update is now available for your smartphone, according to reports.
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Sometimes companies do the stupidest things, and Sony is one of the latest examples. The company has decided to take on Google Glass with its own version of ugly glasses that no one will want to wear.
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Google has extended its Android One push to the Philippines, offering low-cost devices running the latest version of Android out of the box.
Google has partnered with local operators Cherry Mobile and MyPhone for Android One’s launch into the Philippines, following the scheme’s debut in India last year. Both operators will release one Android One handset each.
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If you’re getting bored with your phone’s lock screen, maybe it’s time to try another. This is Android after all, so you’re not locked in to what came with your device—there are a ton of options to put impressive images, better notification controls, and a steady stream of news and updates right in front of you.
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One of the slick, new features touted by Google about Android Lollipop before its release in November is Project Volta, a collection of optimization settings that promise to offer better battery consumption for devices upgrading to Android Lollipop. Aside from a power-saving mode native to the platform, Project Volta allows developers to specify when their apps need to connect to data or Wi-Fi in order to save up on juice.
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It’s been splashing around in beta for a little while, but now your Pebble can respond to notifications directly from that monochrome screen — kind of like Android Wear, sans touchscreen. You’ll need to update your Pebble smartwatch firmware as well as download the very latest edition of of the companion Android app to get rolling. But given Pebble’s popularity and price, it should mean far more people are making wrist-based responses to messages. Aside from the ability to set multiple custom notification responses (available to you whenever a compatible app offers a reply option), you can toss money around with Square Cash. The update also adds support for Android 4.0 and over devices, as well as automatic app and watch face updates, even when your Kickstarted smartwatch is idle. Oh and you can reply with emoji. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep the Pebble on your wrist on until that fancy new interface arrives in the near future.
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Within the past six months, the mobile phone operating system battle seems to have come to a head with the release of Apple’s iOS 8 and Android’s 5.0 Lollipop. A report on Mashable on how both operating systems fare when compared with each other says that “iOS 8 has as many features as Android” while on the design side, which was historically Apple’s edge, the Android 5.0 Lollipop “has an almost iOS-level of fit polish and finish.”
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Facebook is among the most recognizable and advanced social media enterprises today. A major part of its success story is its professed love for open source software, which the company uses as means of augmenting innovation across multiple projects. In fact, open source is a key resource among Facebook’s web developers due to its flexibility in providing immediate security patches and collaboration across platforms.
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A growing number of educational institutions are adding classes or programs that focus on open source. There are some channel executives, however, who worry these initiatives are inadequate to meet business needs and are concerned their companies will continue to carry most of the technology’s training burden.
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Events
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Politik has announced their third Subculture event to be held the evening before their flagship Interzone conference on March 10, 2015.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Pivotal—the rather ambitious business software outfit spun off from big-name tech companies EMC and VMware—is open sourcing three of its key products, sharing the underlying software code with the world at large.
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Pivotal, the big data and software division of storage and IT giant EMC, will today announce plans to release open source versions of its big data and analytics software.
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Pivotal will make the majority of its big data suite open source, drawing inspiration from the Linux concept.
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Cloudera’s total ISV application and tools partners, companies that build applications that run on the platform, increased more than 60 percent to 267. System Integrators (SI) and solutions partners jumped 50 percent to 851. Cloudera says that it is working with SI partners on 18 industry solutions built on Cloudera, with more than 20 others in development. OEM application partners grew during the past year to 29–delivering full product solutions in verticals such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and technology.
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Only three years ago, Oracle wanted to do the cloud it own way, and ignore open-source cloud efforts in general and OpenStack in particular. After reflection, Larry Ellison thought better of that idea. By May 2014, Oracle announced OpenStack support for its Linux and the Xen hypervisor. On February 18, Oracle partner and DataBase as a Service (DBaaS) company Tesora is bringing the Oracle database management service (DBMS) and OpenStack together.
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BSD
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A couple of weeks ago I described the host key rotation support forthcoming in OpenSSH 6.8. Almost immediately after smugly declaring “mission accomplished”, the bug reports started rolling in. First Mike Larkin noticed an interaction with ssh’s CheckHostIP option that would cause host key warnings, then Theo de Raadt complained about the new code unnecessarily rewriting known_hosts when no changes needed to be made, finally Philipp Kern and Jann Horn pointed out a way for a hostile server to abuse the extension.
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Public Services/Government
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If you have the right to use, examine, modify and distribute the software, your costs go down, just as they go down for everyone who uses FLOSS. It’s about sharing. If everyone shares in the cost of producing and distributing software, everyone pays less because folks like M$ are not siphoning off $billions and imposing software slavery to keep you coming back for more abuse.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Good news for OpenStreetMap: the main website now has A-to-B routing (directions) built in to the homepage! This will be huge for the OSM project. Kudos to Richard Fairhurst and everyone who helped get this up and running.
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Open Hardware
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At $5,995, the printer isn’t exactly a steal. Autodesk more so built it to be the perfect exhibitor for its open-source Spark 3D printing software, which is currently in beta.
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Programming
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HP says that while R is an open-source language used by millions of data scientists, it has been, up to this point, inherently limited. It’s that increased scale that HP stresses as providing a new level of predictive analytics capabilities.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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I told them that I thought we could, because if a cloud in the stratosphere were created (the most commonly proposed method of control) that was thick enough, large enough, and long-lasting enough to change the amount of energy reaching Earth, we could certainly see it with the same ground-based and satellite instruments we use to measure stratospheric clouds from volcanic eruptions. If, on the other hand, low clouds were being brightened over the ocean (another suggested means of cooling the climate), we could see telltale patterns in the tops of the clouds with satellite photos. And it would also be easy to observe aeroplanes or ships injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere.
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A leading climate-change scientist has warned that the US secret service’s interest in geoengineering technology may not be benign. But it’s not the first time a government has tried to control weather patterns
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Weaponising the weather is nothing new. U.K. government documents showed that, 99 years ago, one of six trials at the experimental military station of Orford Ness in Suffolk sought to produce artificial clouds, which, it was hoped would bamboozle German flying machines during the first world war. Like so many military experiments, these trials failed but cloud seeding became a reality in 1967/8 when the U.S.’s Operation Popeye increased rainfall by an estimated 30 per cent over parts of Vietnam in an attempt to reduce the movement of soldiers and resources into South Vietnam.
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Decades-old weapons long past their expiration date, most of the chemical arms recovered in Iraq were not close to usable in the traditional sense. Officials did say they were surprised, however, at the potency of some of the chemicals despite many years in storage.
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Mohammed Saleh Tauiman was just 13 years old in 2014 when the Guardian newspaper gave him a camera so he could record life under the drones that flew over Marib province, Yemen.
His father and teenage brother had been killed in a US drone attack in 2011 while they were herding the family’s camels. Afterward, he lived in constant fear of what he called the “death machines” that circled above him in the sky.
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The Obama administration will permit the widespread export of armed drones for the first time, a step toward providing allied nations with weapons that have become a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy but whose remotely controlled power to kill is intensely controversial.
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As drone warfare proliferates, the stings of the drone become more lethal and terrifying.
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The conference was informed that 364 of the 415 drone strikes (until early February 2015) on targets inside Pakistani territory had killed nearly 4,000, including over 1000 civilians, mostly women and children. A case study of 24 such strikes by the Centre for Research and Security Studies, too, had exposed the extremely disproportionate civilian harm caused by these attacks which increased seven-fold under the Obama Administration.
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An alliance of militant organizations has called for the expulsion of United States Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg in light of reports that the US government was heavily involved in the planning and implementation of the Jan. 25 covert police operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.
In a statement issued Monday, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) secretary general Renato Reyes Jr. accused the US government of “blatantly interven[ing]” in the Philippines’ domestic affairs in pursuit of high-profile terrorists Zulkifli bin Hir alias Marwan and Abdul Basit Usman.
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Eight Americans were monitoring from the Special Action Force (SAF) command post the operation against a Malaysian terrorist in the marshland 11.8 kilometers away that went wrong and left 44 police commandos dead on Jan. 25, the Inquirer has learned.
A US drone located trapped SAF commandos as they were battling their way out after killing their target, Zulkifli bin Hir, alias “Marwan,” according to three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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U.S. bombings and drone attacks have killed thousands of innocent people. This has resulted in hatred toward America. How about making a serious effort at diplomacy instead?
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The Islamic State group is expanding beyond its base in Syria and Iraq to establish militant affiliates in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, U.S. intelligence officials assert, raising the prospect of a new global war on terror.
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The collapse of the American-backed government in Yemen took the U.S. intelligence community by surprise, the Obama administration’s senior counterterrorism official admitted on Thursday as he testified before Congress, according to The Associated Press.
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The international airport in Donetsk was opened to facilitate the thousand of football fans flooding the country for the 2012 European Championships – a $1 billion dollar symbol of Ukraine’s modernity. It now sits as rubble, destroyed by the conflict in which Russian-backed separatists have waged a bloody civil war with forces loyal to Kiev.
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Finance
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The new governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, is a hedge fund manager whose salary last year was $60 million. He spent $65.9 million—including $27.6 million of his own money—buying his last election, and he’s about to introduce an austerity program that will make most folks in Illinois think they are living in austerity-wracked Greece, with less idyllic weather. While he’s generating national headlines by trash talking unions, he is quietly taking a scalpel to every important social program in the state, starting with an Illinois program that subsidizes high-quality childcare for 160,000 low-income kids. Instead of extending a small tax increase that passed the Illinois legislature in 2011, staving off a crisis, he’s letting the increases expire. Rauner is methodically manufacturing an economic crisis for his state, one that will let him do what he has long been set on doing: shrink the government and squeeze the 99 percent.
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The Supreme Court of Iceland today upheld prison sentences issued by Reykjavík District Court in December 2013 on four former key executives and majority owners of Kaupþing Bank in the so-called Al-Thani case in what is the heaviest sentence ever given in Iceland for economic fraud, ruv.is reports. The four were charged with market manipulation in relation to Sheik Mohammed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar’s acquisition of more than five percent of shares (worth ISK 25.7 billion) in Kaupþing Bank shortly before it collapsed in autumn 2008.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Daily Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.
[...]
No one has ever expressed quite as well as Utley the quiet decency and pragmatism of British conservatism. The Mail is raucous and populist, while the Times is proud to swing with the wind as the voice of the official class. The Telegraph stood in a different tradition. It is read by the nation as a whole, not just by the City and Westminster. It is confident of its own values. It has long been famous for the accuracy of its news reporting. I imagine its readers to be country solicitors, struggling small businessmen, harassed second secretaries in foreign embassies, schoolteachers, military folk, farmers—decent people with a stake in the country.
[...]
With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.
Late last year I set to work on a story about the international banking giant HSBC. Well-known British Muslims had received letters out of the blue from HSBC informing them that their accounts had been closed. No reason was given, and it was made plain that there was no possibility of appeal. “It’s like having your water cut off,” one victim told me.
When I submitted it for publication on the Telegraph website, I was at first told there would be no problem. When it was not published I made enquiries. I was fobbed off with excuses, then told there was a legal problem. When I asked the legal department, the lawyers were unaware of any difficulty. When I pushed the point, an executive took me aside and said that “there is a bit of an issue” with HSBC. Eventually I gave up in despair and offered the article to openDemocracy.
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Censorship
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Media outlets and Middle East analysts have expended considerable energy assessing whether and how Jordan’s war on ISIS in the aftermath of the Kassasbeh capture and death represents a game changer. It is difficult to find a sustained critique of this war on ISIS in the local Jordanian media, whether in the mainstream or the more critical online venues. This is not surprising. After all, Jordan is an authoritarian state. Both historically and in the contemporary moment, the regime has carefully drawn red lines around public speech and political opposition.
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Tumblr users say they are witnessing a tougher response to music piracy by the blogging platform. A wave of complaints suggest that increased anti-piracy activity by the music industry is resulting in Tumblr more readily banning users as part of a “three strikes” policy.
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Privacy
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has infected hard disk firmware with spyware in a campaign valued as highly as Stuxnet that dates back at least 14 years and possibly up to two decades, according to an analysis by Kaspersky Labs.
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In a new report, Kaspersky revealed the existence of a group dubbed The Equation Group capable of directly accessing the firmware of hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron, Samsung and other drive makers. As such, the group has been able to implant spyware on hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world.
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A few weeks back, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that GCHQ had been spying unlawfully on British citizens, using the NSA’s Prism and Upstream tools to gain access to private communications. Anyone may have fallen foul of GCHQ’s secret snooping. But it doesn’t have to remain secret. Here’s how to go about finding out if you’ve been spied on by the GCHQ and, hopefully, have the data acquired destroyed.
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Once the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal has determined whom was affected, it has to inform them. Though participants should find out whether their data were unlawfully obtained by GCHQ from the millions of private communications hoovered up by the NSA up until December 2014, it won’t be anytime soon. Privacy International warned in its FAQs: “Count on it being many months, and likely years before this action is completed.”
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Security researchers have uncovered a trove of highly-sophisticated hacking tools used over the last 15 to 20 years to break into thousands of targets’ computers. There’s little doubt the malware and exploits used belonged to the National Security Agency, according to security experts.
[...]
The GRAYFISH tool, which works with almost all versions of Windows, including 8, was another of the more impressive malware types. It sat in the Microsoft MSFT -1.13% Windows registry, which stores information on most activities and settings on a PC. GRAYFISH used a bootkit, a malware that resides at a low level of the operation system so it can execute every time a computer starts up. That was the most complex bootkit Kaspersky had ever seen. GRAYFISH also stole files and stored them in its own encrypted Virtual File System (VFS).
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Russian security experts say that an advanced persistent threat team has infected thousands of computers in more than 30 countries using tools and tactics not unlike what’s already been attributed to the National Security Agency.
Kaspersky Labs of Moscow declined to specifically implicate the United States and its spy office in a report published by the security firm on Monday this week. The researchers, however, say that it’s been monitoring a group of computer hackers that have waged attacks since 2001 and that share similarities with operations of the NSA.
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A cyberespionage group with a toolset similar to ones used by U.S. intelligence agencies has infiltrated key institutions in countries including Iran and Russia, utilizing a startlingly advanced form of malware that is impossible to remove once it’s infected your PC.
Kaspersky Lab released a report Monday that said the tools were created by the “Equation” group, which it stopped short of linking to the U.S. National Security Agency.
The tools, exploits and malware used by the group—named after its penchant for encryption—have strong similarities with NSA techniques described in top-secret documents leaked in 2013.
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President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that will attempt to protect America’s crucial computer networks by sharing knowhow between g-men and techies.
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License plate readers can record up to 1,800 license plates per minute. However, it seems these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. The Drug Enforcement Agency has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.
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Just as it did when launching its “GigaPower” service in Austin, Texas in late 2013, AT&T offers different prices based on how jealously users guard their privacy. AT&T’s $70 per-month pricing for gigabit service is the same price as Google Fiber, but AT&T charges an additional $29 a month to customers who opt out of AT&T’s “Internet Preferences” program.
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To counter the PR hit from Google Fiber, AT&T has recently been proclaiming that it too is now offering 1 Gbps services under the company’s “Gigapower” brand — but pretending that Google has nothing to do with it. On the surface, it looks like AT&T is taking on Google blow for blow, and that this is a wonderful example of how competition works. And while that’s true up to a point, as we’ve discussed previously, AT&T’s offering is highly theatrical in nature. AT&T’s actually been slashing its fixed-line CAPEX each quarter, but is offering 1 Gbps speeds to a few, scattered high-end developments where fiber is already in the ground.
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Civil Rights
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The European Court of Human Rights today confirmed that the Polish government was complicit in the CIA’s secretive programme of rendition, detention and interrogation.
The Court in Strasbourg today rejected a challenge from the Polish government to a landmark ruling from last July, a decision which now makes that original judgement final.
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The European Court of Human Rights refused on Tuesday to reconsider its ruling that Poland hosted a secret CIA jail, a decision that will now oblige Warsaw to swiftly hold to account Polish officials who allowed the jail to operate.
The court’s decision will add to pressure on other European countries to end years of secrecy about their involvement in the CIA’s global programme of secret detention after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
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John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent who helped reveal the agency’s use of waterboarding in a 2007 interview, was released from prison on February 3 after serving a two-year sentence.
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“Hypocritical” is how CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou describes his arrest and imprisonment for exposing the spy agency’s use of torture while those who actually committed the heinous acts go unpunished.
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North Korea’s mission to the United Nations has criticized the upcoming human rights conference to be held in Washington, pointing to torture crimes committed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“The United States and South Korea are going to convene so-called ‘Conference on North Korean Human Rights: the Road Ahead’ on 17 February in Washington…The Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK] to the United Nations condemns the convening of such human rights gathering as a political human rights plot against the DPRK,” the mission said in a statement on Sunday.
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That’s right, America. While the resolution makes some fair points about crowded U.S. prison systems and the questionable ethics of using drones to kill suspected enemies, lumping the U.S. – and Israel – in with nations that routinely violate fundamental rights, while failing to mention far more egregious violators, like much of the Arab world, is certainly a sophomoric stretch.
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Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign
[...]
Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 — bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe — as well as its own “navy,” including six submersible drones.
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All the pillars of the earth would shake if a Christian or a Jew is killed or if a Buddhist statue is destroyed or comes to any harm. International forces wherever they may be join together to condemn the killing of an individual so long as he or she is not of Arab or Muslim background. These same leaders do not hesitate to condemn any infliction that comes to a Buddhist statue in Afghanistan.
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Police and Canadian Justice Minister Peter MacKay said the plot was not related to terrorism.
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We have heard of no measures taken to protect the beleaguered Muslim communities—the “banlieues” that surround Paris, largely populated by impoverished African and Middle Eastern immigrants—where unemployment ranks highest in the nation and social services rank lowest. Unemployment among Muslim youth approaches 40 percent. Close to half of the residents of Muslim communities lack a high school diploma. As in the U.S., police harassment and profiling—stop and frisk, French style—are taken for granted. There has been little mention of the 50 recorded post-Charlie Hebdo fire bombings or of the racist graffiti-tagged and bullet-ridden mosques; such atrocities meant to terrorize the Muslim population are ongoing and proceed with impunity. France’s Central Council of Muslims reported 21 shootings that targeted Muslim buildings.
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The bill, titled “An Act to provide for the resumption of rail service operations,” will be presented by Labour Minister Kellie Leitch, who took part in the talks. In a statement issued Saturday night after negotiations broke down, Leitch made it clear that the government was prepared to act quickly.
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Virginia House Bill 2144 (HB2144) expands on the state’s current anti-indefinite detention law by setting the stage for ending some state-federal partnerships. (read about the bill here). It passed successfully through the state house on Feb. 10 by a 96-4 vote. The bill now must pass successfully through the Senate Committee for Courts of Justice before it can receive a full vote in the state senate. Follow the action steps below to support this important bill.
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As video cameras begin to sweep post-Ferguson policing — and policymakers grapple with whether to bar the public from watching the images — one such recording sits at the heart of a new lawsuit.
It shows St. Louis police making an arrest that would later be called abusive, and catches an apparently surprised officer yelling, in part, “Everybody hold up. We’re red right now!” before she abruptly shuts off the camera.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Attorney Matt Wood, the policy director for advocacy group Free Press, told the FCC last week that it faces “legal obstacles” in how it intends to regulate Internet service providers. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposes to reclassify Internet service providers as common carriers in two parts. ISPs will be common carriers in their relationships with home Internet consumers. They will also be common carriers in their business relationships with “edge providers,” companies that offer services, applications, and content over the Internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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City of London ‘police’ have not yet arrested a single #hsbc banker or tax evader; instead they go after poor people for petty things.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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So is Linux a labour of love? I think that there is money to be made but not in the traditional sense of just making a single product and selling it. If distributions are out to generate income then they have to be a bit creative about how they do that. Multiple revenue streams are definitely going to be important.
I think charging for a download may help to generate income in the short term but it will ultimately mean missing out on possible revenue streams later on.
The debate is much like the newspaper paywalls. Would you really pay to read a newspaper online when the BBC provide similar or sometimes better information for free? Therein lies the problem for Elementary.
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Soaring demand for professionals with expertise in Linux and open source is great for people with the requisite skills. But it makes finding the right employees more difficult for companies. That’s why the Linux Foundation recently outlined tips for attracting open source talent, which is about much more than the hiring process itself.
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Desktop
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The inquiry from Malawi was passed to our local expert, Esben Aaberg, who after a few hours of work got the dictionary to work. Unfortunately dictionaries can not be registered without the language been known by LibreOffice. Instead, Esben “cheated” by using a language code from another language. Of course we need the language Chichewa registered, but here and now, it works after all.
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Dear Lifehacker, I was recently in hospital and wanted to try out some streaming services in Australia. I have a Linux laptop. I tried out Stan on the free 30-day trial but then realised it uses Silverlight so I cancelled that straight away. Then I wanted to try Presto which has no free trial.
I signed up because it was only 10 bucks and on the supported devices it lists PCs and Macs, with no qualification, but much to my dismay the service doesn’t work on Linux machines. Foxtel refuses to give me a refund. Is this false advertising, and is there any way to submit a complaint about them? Thanks, No Light At The End Of The Tunnel
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Kernel Space
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Back in November of 2013, when the Linux 3.12 kernel was released, Linus Torvalds first began to talk about about Linux 4.0
Linux 4.0, much like Linux 3.0 isn’t about any major milestone or API compatibility feature in the Linux kernel, but rather is just an arbitrary number.
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Lennart Poettering announced the release of systemd 219 today and it comes with a very large number of new features and changes.
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Many many improvements, in particular in the area of containers, btrfs hookup, and networkd. Also, many bugfixes. Enjoy!
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Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has announced the immediate availability of systemd 219, a release that includes numerous improvements, specifically for Btrfs hookup, networkd, and containers. Many bugs have also been fixed in this release.
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Linus Torvalds is “running out of fingers and toes” and therefore wonders if it might be a good time to tip the Linux Kernel over into version 4.0.
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Linus Torvalds, freshly returned from speaking at Linux Conf AU (LCA) 2015, announced 3.19- rc5 saying “[a]nother week, another -rc”. His announcement mail included his usual opening about his desire for less churn late in the development cycle (Linux kernels typically have up to 8 RCs – or Release Candidates – in the two months of the average release). Overall, Linux 3.19 is shaping up to be a normal sized release – though there’s still well over 10,000 individual commits or patches, each with many lines, which isn’t bad when you consider how the development largely aligned with the end of year holiday period. The new kernel will add a few exciting features, including support for Intel’s MPX processor extensions, and the nios2 embedded system microprocessor architecture from Altera.
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Graphics Stack
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The 1.7 release of Wayland is now available for download. Thanks to all who have contributed, and especially to the desktop environments and client applications that now converse using Wayland.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Bundle Stars have unleashed their ‘Trinity Bundle’ and all games support Linux. You can save a massive amount of money buying this bundle!
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OpenMW has used the Ogre3D engine for rendering up to now, but they’ve decided to instead switch over to using OpenSceneGraph. The OpenMW developers feel OpenSceneGraph is more suitable than Ogre3D for their purposes, due to OpenGL requirements, Ogre’s resource system, and other support. OpenSceneGraph meanwhile is a “perfect fit” according to its developers.
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How could Linux get more game ports and users? An Ubuntu developer is suggesting that Canonical and Red Hat finance the ports.
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I gave the game a brief go and found myself having some fun despite it being rather limited in many ways. The premise and controls are simple enough – acquire resources to upgrade and customize your single ship which you control with a combination of the arrow keys and mouse. Trade is limited to buying and selling parts and there’s no real factions besides friendlies and hostiles from what I saw. Getting mercenaries to do my bidding was amusing as was exploring the different planets I encountered. However, in the end, most of the variety in the game was found in changing parts and loadout of my ship.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This project is primarily for school children.It helps them to get acquainted with different parts of computer both internal and external and also to know about their functionality.
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It has been more than 2 years when I was an intern in Red Hat and Lukáš Tinkl, my leader that time, told me that I should take a look what needs to be done around network management in KDE. I started with contribution to libnm-qt (networkmanager-qt now), because there was a plan to have a separated library for NetworkManager and port the applet to use it later. It took me a few months to get familiar with NetworkManager DBus API and implement all missing stuff and I was ready to start porting the applet. Problem was that the old NM applet was not ready at all, its architecture had been done with more network daemons in mind (like wicd) and the code base became really complicated. I still remember that discussion we had about starting from scratch, it was quite tough decision, because we had to drop such huge code base and years of work. Anyway, we decided to go for it and start from scratch and one of the best journeys of my life had begun. It went quite good, we were able to reuse some existing parts from the old applet and we had first release like half year later. Well, quality of first releases is questionable, not everyone liked them we did, but we have learned from mistakes and now I daresay that the version we have after 2 years currently in Plasma 5 is really great and we enjoyed doing it.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I recently spoke at GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, and I opened my presentation with a reminder that GNOME is competing for mind share with other systems that are fairly easy for most people to use: Mac, iPad, Windows and Chromebook. So for GNOME to continue to be successful, it needs to be easy for everyone to use—experts and newcomers alike. And, that’s where usability comes in.
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let’s say you are on a bleeding edge distribution, or have access to bleeding edge GTK+.
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With the upcoming GNOME 3.16 release and its GTK+ 3.16 tool-kit there is native OpenGL support and a new GTKGLArea widget.
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Every time a new boutique Linux distro rolls out into the limelight it seems the same two thoughts cross my mind. First, the distro’s developer must be excited to present their vision to potential uses and work hard to provide the best distro possible. Second, this also means that if something happens to the developer the project can instantly end in its tracks.
In this article, we’ll examine the risks of relying on a boutique Linux distro and what to do when you’re forced to switch due to a distro ending its development.
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Reviews
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So after spending the not-so-bad-after all-valentine watching “romantic” movies I decided to go on a cleanse and get back in my geek groove. What better way to do this than testing a Linux Distro Beta? So I remembered how one reader once requested a review of Apple lookalike Linux distros and decided to take the latest Beta of Elementary OS nicknamed Freya which is due for release “when it is ready!”
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I think it is easy to get excited about Makulu as the distribution offers a lot. Users are given a modern, feature rich desktop (Cinnamon), a lot of useful software, including VLC, the WPS suite, a rich settings panel and easy to use backup utility. Multimedia is well supported and the operating system (when run on a physical machine) performed well. Plus users have access to a huge supply of software in the Debian repositories. I was a little surprised at some of the choices offered. For example, offering us WPS over LibreOffice is an unusual choice for an open source operating system. It’s not a bad choice necessarily, just uncommon. Likewise, the focus on gaming (providing Steam and PlayOnLinux) is an interesting choice. The theme, with its focus on rich, 3-D icons, is also strange, but a welcome breath of fresh air when compared against the stark utility of GNOME or the flat, washed out look of recent KDE releases.
I suppose what really stands out about Makulu is it is an open source operating system that does not shy away from including proprietary applications when the developers feel those are the right tools for the job. It is a philosophy that may disappoint proponents of free software, but I have to admit it seems a practical path, one which is likely to attract people transitioning from Windows to Linux.
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New Releases
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The Frugalware Developer Team proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the Frugalware Linux 2.0 computer operating system, a general purpose and independent GNU/Linux distribution that has been created from the ground up for people who are not afraid of text mode.
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The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 2.0, our twentieth stable release.
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Version 2.0 of the Frugalware Linux distribution is now available, the operating system originally inspired by Slackware that since moved on to being an independent distribution using Pacman.
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While there’s no official announcement on the Bodhi Linux website about the 3.0.0 release at the moment of writing this article, we’ve spotted the final ISO images of the anticipated Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 release on SourceForge and decided to share them with you on this space.
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Softpedia was the first to announce today, ahead of the official announcement, that the final release of the highly anticipated Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 computer operating system is available for download. Exactly 12 hours after our blog post, Jeff Hoogland officially announced the immediate availability of Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 for PCs and Chromebooks.
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The last screenshot tour blog post in the Bridge Linux 2015.02 series is for the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) edition, which appears to be the most resource friendly of all Bridge Linux flavors.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (RHT) has beefed up its certification and training programs for open source software. Now, the company is offering new Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) concentrations focused on clouds, data centers and applications related to its Linux-based solutions.
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Fedora
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New version of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE is available for F21 and F22. The update fixes over 25 bugs, exposes more API and enhances plugin options. Read more in release notes of DNF and plugins.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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It seems, that the passion of the community of #! was too overwhelming…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Cut the Rope is one of the many popular games on iOS and Android. The game is now available for Ubuntu Phones. The first Ubuntu phone was made available only a few days ago.
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There’s so much you can do with an Ubuntu installation. But what if you could take that same Ubuntu installation and make it portable so you can have it with you wherever you are?
We’ve looked at several options where you can use Linux with your USB drive, but now we’re going to take a look specifically at keeping a portable Ubuntu installation with you so that you have access to all your apps, settings, and files wherever you go.
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The world’s first Ubuntu phone, the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, finally went on sale last week and promptly sold out within day. The Ubuntu OS offers an alternative to iOS and Android but it has a long way to go before it can take on the two market leaders.
Ubuntu’s phone itself is not that exciting; the most interesting thing about it is the software.
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Ubuntu for phones doesn’t have an official online store for the applications accessible from the PC, but that doesn’t mean someone didn’t manage to put one together. It’s not official, but it works very well.
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On Indiegogo, CoroWare launched a 4WD “CoroBot Spark,” open robot platform for STEM education, based on a Raspberry Pi SBC and a CoroWare controller board.
CoroWare Robotics Solutions’s CoroBot Spark is the latest of several open source robot kits that have used the Raspberry Pi single board computer. Recent examples include iRobot’s Create 2, a hackable version of its Roomba robot, as well as Frindo.org’s RPi-ready Frindo robot. Other Linux-based robot controller boards designed to integrate the Raspberry Pi include the Roboteq RIO, Mikronaut’s RoboPi, and the Calao Systems’s PinBall SBC.
The open source CoroBot Spark differs from the Create 2 or Frindo in that it’s a larger four-wheel drive (4WD) vehicle. Like the Create 2, the Spark is designed for middle school and high school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs, as well as university research and education.
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Axiomtek’s “CAPA881″ SBC taps Intel’s 4th Gen Core chips, supports extended temperatures, and has powered COM ports, plus SATA, CFast, and mini-PCIe.
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Phones
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Android
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Let’s start off the week with some fun! In our weekly round up of the best new Android and iPhone games we introduce you to everything new and worthy with no limits to the genre, platform, or price. We can’t guarantee that you’d love the genre of the game we’ve picked, but if you do, chances are you’d spend hours playing one of these games.
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Google is still keeping mum on Android 5.1 Lollipop, the seemingly-newest version of its OS, albeit it’s already been spotted on some Android One devices that got recently launched in Indonesia.
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Google Philippines, together with local phone brands Cherry Mobile and MyPhone, announced on Tuesday, February 17, that it is finally bringing the much-anticipated Android One smartphone into the country at a retail price of under P5,000.
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Where outcomes don’t meet thermal performance standards, variations mean innovation often becomes a casualty. InEnergy, a new open-source software tool engineered by Inhabit Group, aims to prevent the dumbing down of designs and assist clients and designers to achieve higher performance outcomes without adding to costs.
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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) serves as an international nexus of trust, protecting and promoting open source software as well as the communities that develop and depend on it. Primarily known for our work in certifing open source software licenses, the OSI’s work today has grown—just as open source has—to include a vaeirty of member-driven working groups and incubator projects that help practitioners and communities create and share resourcs, furthering the open source movement. For 17 years, the OSI has brought together open source developers, organizers, contributors, advocates, and businesses toward the common goal of creation through collaboration. Our membership campaign is dedicated to furthering this vivsion.
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It seems that running free software programs that will allow (in theory, at least) backdoors to be spotted in code, is not enough. The Kaspersky discovery shows that we must go even further, and demand open source firmware for hard drives (and presumably everything else), so that these too can be audited by independent researchers. It’s a salutary reminder that while there is any element of the software and hardware stack that is not open, there is always the danger the system can be compromised and turned against you.
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Events
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This year I’ve submitted, together with Sage Weil, a talk to the “Cloud Security” track with the title: “Storage security in a critical enterprise OpenStack environment”. The talk will provide insight into requirements for a secure setup and potential issues, pitfalls, and attack vectors against storage technologies used with an enterprise OpenStack cloud. We will present what Deutsche Telekom and Red Hat/Inktank, together with the community, are working on to build a security critical cloud with OpenStack and Ceph.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The best part about OpenOffice and LibreOffice is that they’re totally free. Even if they can’t compete with Office 2013 on a feature-by-feature basis, they still have plenty to offer. They’re simple to install and provide benefits not available with Office 2013, such as the ability to run on Linux.
Plus, the editions available to Windows, Mac OS and Linux are comparable, unlike Office, which lets the Mac version lag behind its Windows counterpart. In fact, OpenOffice and LibreOffice will run on Windows XP and Vista, something even Office 2013 can’t do.
In my next article, we’ll look at how open source suites compare with Office 365 and how OpenOffice stacks up against LibreOffice.
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Healthcare
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Three hospital trusts have taken a significant step forward in developing a pioneering electronic patient records system, which could be a blueprint for other NHS providers to follow.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There is a growing concern about government surveillance. At the same time, those of us who live and breathe technology do so because it provides us with a service and freedom to share our lives with others.
There is a tacit assumption that once we leave the store, the device we have in our pocket, backpack, or desk is ours. We buy a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, and we use applications and apps without even thinking about who really owns the tools and whether we truly own any of it. You purchase a device, yet you are not free to modify it or the software on it in any way. It begs the question of who really owns the device and the software?
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and defend the rights of all free software users. FSF proudly promotes the idea of free software—not “free” as in “free beer,” but “free” as in “free to modify the code, share the code, and distribute it freely.”
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Project Releases
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At the beginning of February I attended devconf.cz in Brno and the days before I had a hack week with Jakub Hrozek on cmocka. cmocka is a unit testing framework for C with support for mock objects.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Portugal is expanding its use of free and open source software solutions, to modernise the country’s ICT and to “target an effective expenditure”, says Pedro Viana, a ICT specialist working for the country’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA). Open source has been implemented since 2013, he says, “whenever a rigorous and objective evaluation analysis of maturity and total cost of ownership shows that it is advantageous.”
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Openness/Sharing
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On June 12, 2014, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s web site that “All Our Patent Belong to You.” In adopting an “open source” policy to allow others to use the company’s patented intellectual property for free, Tesla’s stock (NASDAQ-TSLA) went up and the company got lots of publicity. But the statement preserved patent rights by requiring “good faith”, which is definitely not “open source.”
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Open Data
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The Italian web portal www.openbilanci.it (Open Budgets) showcases the value of open data. The site provides financial statements from all Italian municipalities for the last ten years, and information on their mayors. Visitors can freely download and re-use all the raw data. The portal itself provides additional functions, such as the dynamic generation of charts and maps, and the ability to make comparisons between municipalities. The latter allows you to compare taxes and investments in culture and public transport, for example.
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Standards/Consortia
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Earlier this month a GDC 2015 session was listed for showing off “glNext”, the next-generation OpenGL. This major advancement for a cross-platform, multi-purpose graphics API is going to be presented by Valve, Epic Games, Unity, and the Khronos Group, among others. Besides the GDC session for glNext, on the same day they’ll be having a separate event about this new API.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Analysts say the deal for up to $6 billion of military hardware, could signal Europe’s growing acceptance of President Sisi’s rule
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The £487m MPs’ pension pot is in danger of taking a financial hit due to the failure of its trustees to acknowledge the economic risk posed by fossil fuel investments, a group of 11 MPs and two Lords have warned.
The trustees of the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund were challenged last year by the group, which include Green party MP Caroline Lucas, to shift its investments from oil and coal companies because of widespread fears that they are overvalued.
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Finance
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ACLU SoCal, L.A. Progressive and Occidental College hosted Prof. Wolff for a discussion on economic rights and reform…
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The eight-hour-day movement, which itself grew out of the ten-hour-day movement, was a central demand of the labor movement in its pre–New Deal phase, before the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act locked in a system that many of us would recognize even if we don’t work under its actual conditions. The five-day work week, the eight-hour day—the “nine to five” (thanks, Dolly Parton).
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Privacy
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The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
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In 2009, one or more prestigious researchers received a CD by mail that contained pictures and other materials from a recent scientific conference they attended in Houston. The scientists didn’t know it then, but the disc also delivered a malicious payload developed by a highly advanced hacking operation that had been active since at least 2001. The CD, it seems, was tampered with on its way through the mail.
It wasn’t the first time the operators—dubbed the “Equation Group” by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab—had secretly intercepted a package in transit, booby-trapped its contents, and sent it to its intended destination. In 2002 or 2003, Equation Group members did something similar with an Oracle database installation CD in order to infect a different target with malware from the group’s extensive library. (Kaspersky settled on the name Equation Group because of members’ strong affinity for encryption algorithms, advanced obfuscation methods, and sophisticated techniques.)
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The Obama administration is gloating over the recent conviction of Jeffrey Sterling in an Alexandria, Va. federal court for allegedly leaking details of a secret government program called Operation Merlin that was intended to damage Iran’s nuclear program. Attorney General Eric Holder described the verdict as “…a just and appropriate outcome. The defendant’s unauthorized disclosures of classified information compromised operations undertaken in defense of America’s national security. The disclosures placed lives at risk.”
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The United States has found a way to permanently embed surveillance and sabotage tools in computers and networks it has targeted in Iran, Russia, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and other countries closely watched by American intelligence agencies, according to a Russian cybersecurity firm.
In a presentation of its findings at a conference in Mexico on Monday, Kaspersky Lab, the Russian firm, said that the implants had been placed by what it called the “Equation Group,” which appears to be a veiled reference to the National Security Agency and its military counterpart, United States Cyber Command.
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It’s been known for a while that the NSA will intercept and bug equipment to spy on its soon-to-be owners, but the intellgency agency’s techniques are apparently more clever than first thought. Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered apparently state-created spyware buried in the firmware of hard drives from big names like Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. When present, the code lets snoops collect data and map networks that would otherwise be inaccessible — all they need to retrieve info is for an unwitting user to insert infected storage (such as a CD or USB drive) into an internet-connected PC. The malware also isn’t sitting in regular storage, so you can’t easily get rid of it or even detect it.
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Civil Rights
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Jeb Bush began his political career as a firebrand soldier of the Republican Revolution.
Although he’s now widely known as the moderate Republican choice for 2016, Bush ran multiple campaigns for Florida governor while promoting the “deinvention of government” through broad privatization and the rapid shrinking of the public sector—including the transformation of the state’s prison system into a for-profit industry.
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SN interviewed Joseph Hickman, a former Guantanamo staff sergeant and author of the recently published book, “Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantanamo Bay.” In the book, Hickman alleges that three Guantanamo detainees were murdered at a CIA black site, and that this was later covered up, the deaths portrayed as suicides.
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I realize that terrorism is scary and I certainly hope that the US doesn’t suffer any more attacks from Islamic extremists any time soon.
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Hilmy Bakri, president of the school’s Board of Trustees, said Sunday that racial slurs were spray-painted on the school, at 840 Rear Providence St.
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1. Turns out that Kaplan, which is a US-based educational company, is implementing an even more draconian version of the policy over in Britain. For similar reasons as U. Mass. And it’s caused some problems.
Kaplan, a US-owned education provider in the UK, is refusing students who are residents of Iran enrolment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects as well as any of its post-graduate courses, citing US sanctions.
Applications for more than a dozen Iranians students have been withdrawn since autumn 2013 because the company felt it had to comply with the US regulations and sanctions policy regarding the country.
Critics say sanctions were put in place to punish Iranian authorities, not ordinary people, and that such interpretations were based on a misreading of the policy.
Iranian students studying in Britain’s public universities can generally take such courses.
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Indeed, it is an agency with a long and storied history of serially destroying evidence. The Eastern District of VA US Attorney’s Office knows this, too, because they have so much experience reviewing cases where CIA has destroyed evidence and then deciding they can’t charge anyone for doing so.
And while I don’t expect Judge Leonie Brinkema of CIA’s own judicial district to therefore deny the CIA the presumption of regularity, I confess DOJ’s concern that Sterling might suggest CIA had doctored or destroyed evidence makes me pretty interested in what evidence they might have worried he would claim CIA doctored or destroyed, because with the CIA, I’ve learned, it’s usually a safer bet to assume they have doctored or destroyed evidence.
Especially given the two enormous evidentiary holes in the government’s case:
The letter to the Iranians Merlin included with his newspaper-wrapped nuclear blueprints
A report of Merlin’s activities in Vienna
As I lay out below, CIA’s story about the letter to the Iranians is sketchy enough, though the government’s ultimate story about it is at least plausible. But their story about Merlin’s non-existent trip report is sketchier still. I think the evidence suggests the latter, at least, once did exist. But when it became inconvenient — perhaps because it provided proof that Bob S lied in the cables he wrote boasting of Mission Accomplished — it disappeared.
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02.16.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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The CuBox-i is certainly an interesting mini PC. It offers a lot of flexibility since its support for Android and Linux is excellent, and it excels at running Kodi.
One of the most important commercial uses of a Single Board Computer (SBC) is as a prototyping and rapid development platform. Recently I reviewed the HummingBoard-i2eX, a SBC from SolidRun that is compatible with Android and Linux. Since the proof is in the pudding, SolidRun has used its own tech to create a truly miniature PC.
At just 2 inches x 2 inches x 2 inches (50.8 mm x 50.8 mm x 50.8 mm) the CuBox is a marvel of engineering. On one side of the cube is a set of ports including the power socket, HDMI, Ethernet and two USB ports. While the rest of the cube is fairly bland except for various labels, logos and LEDs.
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Inadvertently, this was a driver for adoption of GNU/Linux as one could install GNU/Linux and get better performance in the same amount of RAM, or one could keep an old PC snappy for years longer. GNU/Linux also increased use of RAM as did browsers… but the need to constantly double RAM every few years was gone for those first-adopters of GNU/Linux. Now it’s gone for everyone else. RIP Wintel.
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Server
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It’s been just over a year since my last review of Docker, heavily criticising it’s flawed architectural design and poor user experience. The project has since matured into 1.0 and gained some notoriety from Amazon, but has suffered growing user frustration, hype accusations and even breakout exploits leading to host contamination. However the introduction of private repos in Docker Hub, which eliminated the need to run your own registry for hosted deployments, coupled with webhooks and tight Github build integrations, looked to be a promising start.
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Kernel Space
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Being a good open source citizen—that’s where it starts. For Jon Cruz, navigating various technical opportunities over the years eventually led him there. Jon recently started working in the Open Source Group at Samsung where he works on the Wayland project as well as IoTivity, an infrastructure for the Internet of Things.
Cruz’s open source journey began when he started contributing to the Inkscape community. His connections with Inkscape contributors eventually led him to his current role at Samsung. I think it’s important to note that this is a common story for many people who get involved with open source. The first step is to find the right project and start contributing—you never know what career opportunities could stem from that first step.
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Linus Torvalds has yet to reveal whether Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0, but it seems the community at least really wants this version bump to happen.
Last week on Linus Torvalds’ Google+ page he polled the community over Linux 3.20 vs. 4.0. Torvalds has yet to say what version he’s going with for this next kernel — it will probably be revealed next weekend when he’s closing the merge window and bumping for -rc1 — but it seems overwhelmingly that people want this Linux 3.20 to 4.0 jump.
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If the Terminator movies are to be believed, we are getting closer to the end of the world. It looks like the T-800 model is running Linux kernel 4.x and we already know that Linus Torvalds is thinking about releasing the 4.x branch soon.
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Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel was under heavy fire after a leak by Edward Snowden which showed that Skynet, the US-based company which builds robots, was using the Linux kernel to power their machines. Skynet is one of the most secretive US companies which reportedly operates from a leased hanger in Area 51.
However, Linus Torvalds denied any association or knowledge of Skynet Corporation. During a local Linux conference in Portland, Linus was addressing a small crowd when a reddit user asked if he had been approached by Skynet? Linus, with a faint smile on his face, said ‘no’ while nodding (in yes).
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Graphics Stack
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The most recent pull request for the already very exciting Linux 3.20 / 4.0 kernel is the DRM graphics driver changes, which of course excite us a lot. This DRM pull request is another fairly heavy pull request with a number of end-user features for the popular open-source graphics drivers.
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Benchmarks
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Yesterday I ran some benchmarks from the new Core i3 Broadwell NUC to see how the latest Mesa Git affects the OpenGL performance for the Core i3 5010U chip with HD Graphics 5500. Today I’m complementing that testing to see if the latest Linux kernel Git makes any difference for this low-end, low-power Broadwell chip.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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ZeptoLab, the studio that made the famous “Cut the Rope” game a couple of years back has officially ported the title for the Ubuntu platform and is now available in the store.
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Kickstarter gets a lot of flack these days, and deservedly so, for being nothing more than a way for game development companies to take preorders. Every now and again, however, it’s a way for two guys who have been working in the garage for five years to complete funding on something that otherwise may not see the light of day…or at least not in such an impressive manner. This is the case with Strength of Sword Ultimate, a new fighting game that has now been funded for Mac, PC and Linux.
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Legends of Eisenwald never reached the Linux stretch goal to come to Linux right away, but it was always coming and the developers have reconfirmed this.
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Enter the Gungeon is a recent discovery that has me excited! It looks similar to Nuclear Throne in an over the top kind of way, and I love it.
Their official site notes that Linux will be a platform, and their publisher is the Linux-friendly Devolver Digital, so we are go!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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And so a port of Danbooru Client to C++ began. I took the opportunity also to learn some model/view programming (still baffling at times, but I’m getting ebtter) and then I even tried to implement a custom thumbnail view for posts (I managed more or less, with a lot of blood and tears).
Then the KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 arrived on the scene…
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I would like to announce two releases of KDE Partition Manager. Version 1.1.1 is a bugfix release. It was ported away from Solid to avoid the unfortunate udisks2 bug and uses libparted directly (partitionmanager was using libparted already anyway). That means packagers do not have to select -DENABLE_UDISKS2 cmake option anymore.
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First, let me come back to September: we didn’t talk about it here, and it’s a shame: we all must sincerely thank Akademy Jury for designating JB for Application Award! We all were really touched, he can be very proud of it and deserves it for so many years of hard work… and he did rise to the bait, as this raised back his motivation to come help us again! So double, triple, infinite thanks for that prize.
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Most apps feel like they’re designed for someone else, and I have to try and adapt to their workflow. Krita feels more like it was built with me in mind, and whenever I feel something should behave differently, someone is usually already on the case before I even make mention of it. As far as 2D software goes, Krita fits my needs better than any of the alternatives.
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KDE Frameworks 5.7.0 has just been released by the KDE Community and the developers have pushed a large number of updates and various fixes. It’s a maintenance update, but it’s an important one.
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So far we talked about the technical aspects of scaling your application, the dpi, the number of pixels, its nature, the nature of image formats and the implications of all that on the creation of visual elements for your UI.
But this is only a part of the problem, for although all this helps you to create answers to your scaling problems, it does not answer the problems that created the need for those answers: the fundamental part of the problem.
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We are proud to announce the official release of Netrunner 15 – Prometheus (64bit).
Netrunner 15 is revised from the ground up: As the first distribution, it officially ships the new KDE Plasma Desktop 5.2.
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Clemens Toennies from the Netrunner project had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, February 16, the immediate availability for download of the Netrunner 15 computer operating system, dubbed Prometheus, based on the Kubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) distribution and built around the KDE Plasma 5.2 desktop environment.
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A brand-new release of the Bridge Linux computer operating system arrived this past weekend, version 2015.02, which uses the latest ArchBang sources to provide a user-friendly Arch Linux distribution for those who want to easily install the acclaimed OS on their computers. The release is distributed in four editions, with the KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments.
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Roberto J. Dohnert, lead developer and project lead of Black Lab Linux, had the pleasure of announcing Softpedia earlier today, February 16, about the immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux MATE computer operating system, based on Ubuntu Linux and the MATE desktop environment.
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux MATE 6.1. Black Lab Linux MATE 6.1 is a distribution of Black Lab Linux that utilizes the Mate Desktop environment.
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Reviews
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The MakuluLinux KDE 7 distribution has been officially released this past weekend, bringing a rock solid, stable, secure, responsive, safe and gorgeous KDE graphical desktop environment based on the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Core operating system, which is supported with software updates and security patches until 2019.
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New Releases
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to support the Kodi media player hub and to run on most available hardware, is now at version 5.0.2 and is ready for download.
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We know how much you love screenshot tours, so at your request, we have decided to make a screenshot tour for the recently released Bridge Linux Xfce 2015.02 computer operating system based on the powerful Arch Linux distribution using the ArchBang sources.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There are indeed people using Rawhide day to day. I myself have for the last few years, and I know there are a number of others (based on IRC conversations and posts to the test list). Regarding the KF5 issues, this is a somewhat unstable time for KF5, as they are just now landing things and integrating them and also gcc just updated to 5.0, causing them some issues. Perhaps some of this work could have been done in a copr or the like, but sometimes it’s really hard to anticipate what will happen when you finally build in the official Fedora buildsystem. I don’t think the common answer here should be “you should expect that in rawhide”, but instead “You should understand that at times various parts of rawhide may be under more work and help them work around those issues”. I’ve definitely run into situations in the last few years where something was broken and I couldn’t use it, but I reported bugs on them and people fixed them up. In the mean time it’s always good to have alternatives.
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Debian Family
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This is a work-in-progress report on getting a functional Debian GNU/Linux system that does not have systemd or any systemd libraries installed, yet (with some inconvenience) is still functional. The process is not without risk, may require (required, as of 5am on 14th Feb 2015) some recovery procedures, and will almost certainly require ongoing maintenance that may be unattractive for some users. The recovery procedures utilised are also documented.
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Debian developers have just announced that 83.5% of all source packages in sid main can be rebuilt reproducibly, which is actually a huge percentage.
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Derivatives
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The first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Tails 1.3 amnesic incognito live system has been officially released for testing, bringing three major new features and four minor improvements that are described for your reading pleasure in the next paragraphs.
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Earlier this month we wrote how CrunchBang Linux was winding down with its lead developer halting development of this Debian-based distribution. However, there’s new developers now forming the CrunchBang++ project.
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Ten days ago, on February 6, 2015, we’ve reported that the CrunchBang Linux computer operating system is no more because its developer, Philip Newborough, decided to stop developing the distribution. As a result, a bunch of devoted CrunchBang Linux fans decided that it is not time for CrunchBang Linux to die just yet.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu on mobile phones has been a long standing project for Canonical and quite an ambitious one. Much like Microsoft and its new One Windows ideology, Canonical hatched the scheme for a unified cross-device application ecosystem long ago, but progress has been rather slow.
Meizu has been a vital part of the new OS development with various demo builds and rumor of Ubuntu-powered Meizu handset popping up ever since the MX 3 was the company’s flagship offer. Today the Chinese smartphone maker posted a rather interesting teaser on Facebook. The image hints at a new OS, which will join the ranks of Flyme and YunOS and probably be unveiled at this year’s MWC.
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Meizu is now teasing the launch of an Ubuntu OS-powered phone at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, which falls right into the plans that have been revealed until now via various rumors.
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The world’s first Ubuntu phone, the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, finally went on sale last week and promptly sold out within day. The Ubuntu OS offers an alternative to iOS and Android but it has a long way to go before it can take on the two market leaders.
Ubuntu’s phone itself is not that exciting; the most interesting thing about it is the software.
The first Ubuntu phone runs on Ubuntu for smartphones, the mobile version of Canonical’s leading Linux desktop OS brand Ubuntu. As such, there were high hopes for Ubuntu OS, which Canonical has seemingly met. The Ubuntu OS reimagines the mobile OS with Scopes, which consists of different home pages to organize your apps.
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Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems have been updated in order to fix a number of PostgreSQL vulnerabilities discovered to affect them.
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Flavours and Variants
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The new elementary OS 0.3 Beta 2 has been launched, but it looks like the people are focusing on a different aspect of this release. The development team changed the way they are providing the download, which is still free, but the online community went nuts.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony’s been trying the smartwatch thing for years, but the original SmartWatch and the SmartWatch 2 both…what’s the word I’m looking for here? Sucked? Yeah. But the SmartWatch 3 has solid performance and two nifty features you won’t find on any other Android Wear. It’s the first with built-in GPS and a screen you can read without backlighting.
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I’ve mentioned a couple of times the rising Chinese star Xiaomi, which could well become the leading manufacturer of Android-based smartphones worldwide if it manages to carry on as it has begun. In another sign of its global ambitions, it held a press conference in the US last week:
Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra, vice president of international for the company, announced at a press event in San Francisco Thursday that it plans to launch its e-commerce website in the U.S. and other international markets soon to start selling accessories like its fitness band, power banks and other accessories.
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Someone once said any edge is a good edge, even if it’s not a huge edge and that is what Android 5.0 Lollipop is enjoying right now given its stability edge over Apple’s iOS 8.
A new Crittercism report reveals the Android mobile platform Android 5.0 Lollipop has a tiny slight edge when it comes to stability when compared to Apple’s iOS 8 mobile platform. That means mobile application crash and burns don’t happen as frequently on Android 5.0 Lollipop as they happen on Apple iOS 8.
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In the long-term, Android Wear isn’t likely to be about just a small handful of watches. Fashion and individuality often go hand-in-hand, and now we’re starting to see some of the early Android Wear watch-makers reflect that, making different smartwatches for different styles. The latest? LG’s all-metal take on the G Watch R, the LG Watch Urbane.
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In Android’s domain, customization is one of the main selling points. One of the easier ways to refresh your device’s UI and give it a new look is by changing your icon pack.
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At a glance there’s very little visually different on the Samsung Galaxy S5 homescreen. Delve a little deeper and cleaner design can be found. Notifications have a much cleaner look, which work well, while being able to control app notifications is a welcome extra.
If you delve a little deeper there are stock Android treats to be founds on the Galaxy S5. The Easter egg for this version of Android has added another layer of fun with and Android style Flappy Bird game. Go to settings, select the version and tap until the Lollipop appears, you can tap this to change colours or hold to play the fun game.
Making the jump from KitKat to Lollipop on Samsung doesn’t feel as bold a move moving from stock KitKat to Lollipop, where the changes across the design are much more pervasive.
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Xolo has released the Android 4.4 KitKat update for the Xolo Q1200 smartphone. The update installation files as well as instructions are available on the Xolo website.
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Lenovo has announced that its devices – A5000, A6000, P70-A, S90-A, VIBE X2 (Lenovo X2), VIBE Z2, and VIBE Z2 Pro (Lenovo K920) – that currently run on Android 4.4 KitKat will receive Android 5.0 Lollipop update in the second quarter of 2015.
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Android 5.0 Lollipop started rolling out to the LG G3 on AT&T last week, and now it’s hitting another U.S. carrier. Sprint announced on Monday that customers should start seeing the latest version of Android hitting their devices over-the-air beginning now.
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Like other leading brands, Motorola is also trying its best to roll out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to its numerous devices. According to Mobile Syrup, some of the Moto G 2013 users have received an official notification message from Motorola about the arrival of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
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Continuing with my quest to make the engines display areas (as I did with Neverwinter Nights 2), I turned to Jade Empire the last two weeks. There was just one tiny issue: xoreos didn’t yet support the model format. While I could make use of other’s people reverse-engineering work for the model formats of other engines (Neverwinter Nights (Torlack), Neverwinter Nights 2 (Tazpn) and Knights of the Old Republic (cchargin), apparently barely anybody bothered to look into Jade Empire. A person called Maian tried to figure out a few thing with just a hexeditor, and while that was a great start (and confirmed my suspicions that the format is similar to Knights of the Old Republic’s), it wasn’t enough for full support in xoreos.
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For the first time ever, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is running a membership drive to recruit more individual members. The goal is to recruit 2,398 new members, with that number chosen in homage to the organization’s founding date on February 3, 1998. As an individual member of the OSI, you receive a number of benefits for joining:
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A company called OpenLegacy is beginning to gain momentum with a suite of free and open source tools for modernizing IBM i and z/OS applications. Besides giving away most of its technology (it charges for support in its professional edition), the company is also unique with its API-driven approach to giving older apps new life with Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces.
OpenLegacy was founded in Israel about a year ago with the goal of helping organizations expose their IBM i and z/OS assets in new and useful ways. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Romi Stein, is a former IBMer and its COO, Hans Otharsson, worked previously at Software AG, and they were in New York City recently to drum up interest in the venture-based company and its unique business model.
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Events
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I bring this up because since SCALE 8x, my life is never my own during mid-February. Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way — being part of SCALE every year, working with the rest of the SCALE team to make a great show, and leading a fantastic SCALE publicity team made up of Hannah Anderson, Dennis Rex, Sean McCabe, Sam Is, Michelle Klein-Hass, Jason Riker, and new this year, Mimi Cafiero.
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I am overwhelmed with the success of the event and to see the love of the people for Angika and how they are excited to know that Angika is going to be present with one of the languages in which Firefox is present. UNESCO says that Angika is endangered but now I am convinced that Angika cannot be an endangered language. How a language – a real Lok-Bhasha – can be endangered?
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Funding
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Field engineering veep at Concurrent, Inc Supreet Oberoi says that “2015 is the ‘show me the money year’ for Hadoop” — his firm offers an application development platform for big data applications.
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BSD
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I am going to make a prediction right now that FreeBSD is going to take off in a big way on or before 2020, perhaps even to the point where it threatens Linux Desktop share.
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m0n0wall was a BSD firewall operating system that’s been around for quite some time. It was recognized as one of the best, but there is a reason why we are now using past tense for it. The developer has stopped development and dropped the project.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.4.6.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Malta is to implement a repository and observatory of information systems to be used by the islands’ public administrations. The repository will make available open source solutions and share information on reusable tools and systems from across the EU.
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Amtega, Galicia’s agency for technological modernisation, has published the classroom management system XEA as open source. The software and its documentation can be downloaded for free from the repository of the Galician government (Xunta de Galicia).
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Programming
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GitHub uses Git, which is a distributed revision control system designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development back in 2005. Since then, it’s become the most widely adopted version control system for software development there is.
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Twenty-five years ago, as a nation officially divided into East and West worked out a plan for how to become simply Germany, Ines Geipel decided to get her name out of the record books.
Geipel – who under her maiden name, Ines Schmidt, had been a member of the formidable East German women’s track team when she helped set a German relay record in 1984 – had started wondering whether the little blue “vitamins” she’d taken as part of her official training regime didn’t taint any glory of being a champion.
The pills, it turned out, were steroids, banned under international competition rules. Geipel asked that her name be removed from the German record books. An asterisk instead of her name now appears.
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Hardware
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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After a lull of some two months – a break punctuated by the toppling of Yemen’s government – the US drone campaign in Yemen has resumed.
The pattern that has emerged is distressingly familiar.
While the US government can claim the death of radical preacher Harith al-Nadari, the victims also include Mohammed Tuaiman, a 13-year-old boy whose father and brother were killed in a drone strike in 2011.
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Could an international tribunal hold war criminals accountable?
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When Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 by U.S. forces, Iraq War advocates boastfully celebrated the event as proof that they were right and used it to mock war opponents (Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, for instance, gleefully exploited the event to demand that Howard Dean admit his war opposition was wrong). When Muammar Gaddafi was forced by NATO bombing in August, 2011 to flee Tripoli, advocates of U.S. intervention played the same game (ThinkProgress gleefully exploited the occasion to try to shame those who objected to the illegality of Obama’s waging the war even after Congress voted against its authorization: as though Gadaffi’s fleeing could render legal Obama’s plainly illegal intervention).
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The youngest to die was a 4-day-old girl, the oldest a 92-year-old man.
They were among at least 844 Palestinians killed as a result of airstrikes on homes during Israel’s summer war with the Islamic militant group, Hamas.
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In almost every way, the Gaza Strip is much worse off now than before last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas. Scenes of misery are one of the few things in abundance in the battered coastal enclave.
Reconstruction of the tens of thousands homes damaged and destroyed in the hostilities has barely begun, almost six months after the cease-fire. At current rates, it will take decades to rebuild what was destroyed.
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What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The CIA is worried that a foreign power may develop the ability to manipulate the global climate in a way that cannot be detected, a leading climatologist has claimed.
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A senior US scientist has expressed concern that the intelligence services are funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.
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A scientist has claimed that the US foreign intelligence agency sought his advice about techniques for disrupting the climate.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I’m not referring to the Oscars that particular films might win, but our embrace of their narratives of history. If “American Sniper” gathers a fistful of statues, even more people will see a film that presents a skewed view of the Iraq war. If the “Imitation Game” gets lucky, a lot more people will watch a movie that erroneously portrays Alan Turing as a social idiot. If “Selma” catches some of the limelight, more people may believe that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t entirely supportive of Martin Luther King.
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Who remembers the last time watching the nightly news on network television was an important part of their evening routine?
No one I know. So when Brian Williams fell into an abyss of amnesia over what he actually went through on a press junket covering the Iraq War in 2003, I just felt sorry for the NBC star because we all make mistakes, and as we get older, our memories aren’t what they used to be—along with every other part of our body. I’ve never taken Williams seriously or anyone from his generation of newscasters. But I do remember growing up with my parents being glued to the tube when the battle in my house was fought over whether we’d watch Walter Cronkite on CBS or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC—whoever was on ABC was never part of the evening equation.
What an uncanny coincidence—as we used to say in the tabloids—that in one week the news shows are the big news in America, and it has nothing to do with what they’re reporting but which anchor is doing the job on the air.
When Jon Stewart proclaimed on the same Daily Show where he announced his heart-rending pending departure from our nightly routines how happy he was that “finally, someone is held accountable for misleading America about Iraq,” we had to take notice because the irony factor was too large to ignore. He was describing how Williams had succumbed to “infotainment confusion syndrome” and that malady had messed up his memory.
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Folks should, for example, be aware of how things really work in government — as opposed to how they are ostensibly designed to work. They should also be familiar with some of those inconvenient tidbits from history that may not show us in our best light but nonetheless have had a drastic impact on the way we are today.
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Censorship
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Jordan’s state security court on Sunday sentenced a top official in the Muslim Brotherhood to 18 months in prison for criticizing the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the kingdom, his lawyer said.
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Throughout history, you can observe that many groups have fought over the information advantage – to know more about other people than those others know in return. Whoever has held the information advantage has usually risen to power.
We know little of spycraft before ancient times, but we do know that covert messaging was common in the Roman Empire. One well-documented method was to shave a slave’s head, tattoo a message into the scalp, let the hair grow back, and send the slave on foot to the recipient, presumably carrying a decoy message.
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Privacy
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A yet-to-be identified news outlet is preparing to release top secrets of the US National Security Agency (NSA), adding to the woes of the intelligence wing which is still suffering from the massive leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Though the NSA is characteristically not publicly discussing the matter publicly, reports citing private comments from the officials say that the agency is bracing for “major” new leaks.
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The National Security Agency, still reeling from massive leaks caused by Edward Snowden, is preparing to be hit with another major loss of secrets, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The leaks are expected to be published in the near future by a news outlet that was not further identified by the officials familiar with details of the compromise, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The NSA is aware of the news outlet’s forthcoming disclosures and is taking steps to try and minimize any damage they will cause.
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Dropbox and similar cloud storage services routinely get inquiries, warrants, non-disclosure NSLs (National Security Letters), etc. which demand information about their users and the content of those user’s files. Because most of those services encrypt your data with THEIR key, (if at all). they can easily hand this data over. Many of these cloud services make an honest effort to protect their customers, but in the end they all too often must surrender the data and keep their mouth shut about it. Many of these services are publishing so-called “transparency reports” detailing (well after the fact) the nature and type of such government demands.
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Documents first acquired and reported on by the Minnesota Star Tribune in December 2014 reveal that the FBI is working with State Bureaus of Investigation to “prevent disclosure” of how cell-site simulators are used to determine a phone’s
location and intercept calls.
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Every book you read on your Kindle (or Kindle app) and every word you highlight in those ebooks is recorded by Amazon and may be shared by the bookselling behemoth with the federal government.
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Earlier this month, the tribunal held that the British intelligence and security agency had been in breach of articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, referring to the right to private family life and to freedom of expression. But hard on the heels of the UK ruling came news that the US government is creating a dedicated agency to monitor cybersecurity threats, pooling and analyzing information across a spectrum of risks. The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC)’s mission will be to ‘connect the dots’ between various sources of intelligence.
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Civil Rights
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President George W. Bush was fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything.” He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.
[...]
Snowden revealed that Obama’s lawyers had persuaded these secret judges, without any opposition from lawyers representing the victims of this surveillance, that somehow Congress had authorized this and somehow it was constitutional and somehow it was not un-American to spy on all of us all the time. These judges actually did the unthinkable: They issued what are known as general warrants. General warrants were used against the colonists by the British and are expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. They permit the bearer to search wherever he wishes and seize whatever he finds. That’s what the NSA does to all of us today.
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Yes, they were on top of the world and undoubtedly chilled to the bone with fear as well. And fear and impunity turned out to be an ugly combination indeed. Both the fear and the sense of license, of the freedom to act as they wished, drove them fiercely. Take Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA, later of the CIA. Of that moment, he recently said, “I actually started to do different things. And I didn’t need to ask ‘mother, may I’ from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one in which I was located before the attacks took place.” In other words, on September 10, 2011, he was simply the director of the NSA. On September 11th, without ever leaving the NSA, he was the president, Congress, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court all rolled intone.
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It will come as no surprise to you that we’re top-notch when it comes to denouncing barbarism — as long as it’s theirs. So the responses here to the horrific burning to death of a Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State — the definition of an act of barbarism — were suitably indignant and horrified. Unfortunately, when it comes to our own barbarism, we turn out to be a tad weaker, whether you’re talking about torture, horrific abuses, the killing of prisoners and of innocents, or the deaths of children by drone (“collateral damage”) across the Greater Middle East.
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So: Ukraine’s troops are permitted to steal whatever they want from the residents in Donbass, the rebelling region. The particular victim here lives in an apartment, and so all that Ukraine’s troops can take from him are his belongings. He’s lucky they didn’t shoot him (if they didn’t).
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Kevin Gannon, a retired detective sergeant with the New York Police Department, spent just 10 minutes looking at official documents related to the case of Rodney Reed — slated for execution in Texas on March 5 — before concluding that something was very, very wrong.
It was October 2014 and Gannon was working as part of a three-cop team featured on the A&E channel true-crime show Dead Again. The program follows the trio of veteran detectives as they reinvestigate old murder cases. The team approaches the cases cold, not knowing what original police investigators concluded — or who was arrested and prosecuted in the end. Sometimes, Gannon says, he and his colleagues end up agreeing with the official outcome. Sometimes, they do not.
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AMID the car and mattress sales that serve as markers for Presidents’ Day, Black History Month reminds Americans to focus on our common history. In 1926, the African-American historian Carter G. Woodson introduced Negro History Week as a commemoration built around the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Now February serves as a point of collision between presidential celebration and marginalized black history.
While Lincoln’s role in ending slavery is understood to have been more nuanced than his reputation as the great emancipator would suggest, it has taken longer for us to replace stories about cherry trees and false teeth with narratives about George Washington’s slaveholding.
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Coup plotters planned on assassinating the Venezuelan president and installing a de facto government.
A coup plot against the Venezuelan government has been foiled, with both civilians and members of the military detained, President Nicolas Maduro revealed Thursday in a televised address.
Those involved were being paid in U.S. dollars, and one of the suspects had been granted a visa to enter the United States should the plot fail, Maduro said.
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Britain and Canada were co-conspirators in the latest plot to topple Venezuela’s government.
TeleSUR provided detailed coverage of Washington’s war on Venezuelan democracy. Its dirty hands manipulate violence and instability worldwide.
US funded and supported key opposition fascist figures Antonio Ledezma, Maria Corina Machado and Leopoldo Lopez released a joint February 11 communique a day before the foiled coup.
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Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro added that a U.S. Embassy advisor drafted the script that the coup plotters read in video they planned to air.
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Coup plotters planned on assassinating the Venezuelan president and installing a transitional government.
A coup plot against the Venezuelan government has been foiled, with both civilians and members of the military detained, President Nicolas Maduro revealed Thursday in a televised address. Below, teleSUR English’s indepth coverage explains the details and context behind the plan.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Yet, this trade deal faces the strongest opposition of any recent joint initiative. Fueled by remaining distrust vis-à-vis the United States, 1.2 million Germans signed a “stop TTIP” petition in just ten weeks. Given these realities, experts now recommend that the negotiations relaunched last week focus on getting an agreement more limited in scope–a work in progress–coupled with a strong education campaign to prevent a greater backlash against globalization. European and American leadership will face an uphill battle with public opinion, but a trimmed down deal coupled with public education efforts should create substantial progress on this deal in the next two years.
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02.15.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Lenovo’s new X1 Carbon is made of carbon-fiber construction as implied by its name and is very thin and light at 0.70″ and just under three pounds. Lenovo claims that the X1 Carbon can last up to 10.9 hours with its lone battery, and continues with all of the features collected over the years with the various ThinkPad laptops/ultrabooks. This third-generation X1 Carbon also has much anticipated improvements to the keyboard and touchpad/trackpoint.
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Kernel Space
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While we don’t yet know whether the next kernel version is Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0, what we do know is that this next Linux kernel revision will contain a lot of exciting updates.
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The latest pull requests sent in for the Linux 3.20 kernel are the various subsystems maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The changes for the USB drivers, char/misc, driver core, staging, and TTY/serial aren’t too jaw-dropping, but for staging at least is the usual heavy churn between kernel cycles.
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For those still relying upon the Reiser4 file-system and haven’t migrated off to ZFS On Linux or Btrfs, the out-of-tree Reiser4 kernel code has been updated for compatibility with the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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An indie tribute to J-RPG classics. Explore a universe blending fantasy with science-fiction, intense ATB battles and branching story. The Kickstarter has reached 21% of the goal already, and it’s trending to hit waaaay over the goal if you trust Kicktraq.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Finaly the wait is over, the new MakuluLinux KDE 7 has been released, grab your copy from the KDE section in menu or simply click here.
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The KDE community has done a Valentine’s weekend release of KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, the newest version of the add-on libraries used by KDE applications, KDE Plasma 5, and a growing number of other projects like LXQt.
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February 14, 2015. KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.7.0.
KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms.
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A bunch of KDE enthusiasts from the sunny Barcelona (Spain), decided to organize a dinner in a restaurant to celebrate the launch of KDE 4.6. At that time, I was not even using KDE 4 (I was a happy KDE3 user instead!) but I though it would be nice to meet other people and discuss about the problems I had with KDE 4.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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At the beginning of this month I wrote how I switched back to Fedora Linux on my main system to replace Ubuntu and also wrote about changes I made when installing Fedora 21 on my main system, a new ThinkPad ultrabook with Broadwell processor. There’s three small things that annoy me the most though about using GNOME 3.x.
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It was just a little while ago that the Linux world was shocked to find that CrunchBang Linux had died. The CrunchBang developer felt like it was time to move on, and so CrunchBang users were going to have to let it go and find a new minimalist distro for their computers…until now.
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Arch Family
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In comparison, the set-up of Arch Linux was a breeze and extremely fast once the hard drive partionning was figured out. I got a laptop that does not isn’t UEFI enabled so I had more choices and did not have to go through the rather complex tools such as parted or gdisk. I got to use cfdisk which I have relied on for several years.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s newest push in the virtualization realm is containers. You know, the good old BSD jail-type containers that leverages your hardware better than any other virtualization technology? Yes, that one.
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Fedora
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After much anticipation, we have decided to sponsor HackRU, a hackathon occurring on April 18-19th 2015 at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). As a hackathon attendee, I have noticed relatively little FOSS activity within the recent collegiate hackathon scene — as an organisation that strives to lead, not follow, Fedora will be sponsoring HackRU in April.
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As new upstream maintainer for the popular s3cmd program, I have been collecting and making fixes all across the codebase for several months. In the last couple weeks it has finally gotten stable enough to warrant publishing a formal release. Aside from bugfixes, its primary enhancement is adding support for the AWS Signature v4 method, which is required to create S3 buckets in the eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) region, and is a more secure request-signing method usable in all AWS S3 regions. Since releasing s3cmd v1.5.0, python 2.7.9 (as exemplified in Arch Linux) added support for SSL certificate validation. Unfortunately, that validation broke for SSL wildcard certificates (e.g. *.s3.amazonaws.com). Ubuntu 14.04 has an intermediate flavor of this validation, which also broke s3cmd. A couple quick fixes later, and v1.5.2 is published now.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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elementary OS is in news again, and for wrong reasons. In the latest blog post, the team accused those users of ‘cheating’ who chose not to ‘pay’ for the software.
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On the surface there isn’t much difference between Linux Mint and Ubuntu as Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu (except for Linux Mint Debian Edition) and apart from the desktop environment and default applications there isn’t really a difference.
In this article I am going to list 5 reasons why you would choose Linux Mint over Ubuntu. Now I am well aware that Ubuntu users are going to come back and say that there are loads of reasons to use Ubuntu over Linux Mint and so the counterargument to this list will be made available later in the week.
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The OpenPi on first look is a curious device – a nondescript black box with merely an HDMI and a microUSB slot. There’s no real indication of what it might be, however cracking it open reveals a custom board connected to a Raspberry Pi compute module. Inside as standard is a wireless dongle and a bluetooth receiver for a mini-wireless keyboard/mouse combo. It seems quite simple, and to be fair in this state it is – it’s basically just a (fully-functioning) Raspberry Pi.
That’s actually the point of it though. With the compute module and the OpenPi board, you have full access to the usual Raspberry Pi power and settings and such. The selling point of the OpenPi though is that you can then take this board – which is completely open hardware – and modify the plans yourself to make a custom board that fits your needs. Wireless Things thinks of it as an easier way to create an internet of things, and they’ve succeeded in creating the platform to do this really.
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Phones
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Android
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Ever had the feeling that certain phone operating systems are more likely to crash your apps than others? It’s not just you. Crittercism has posted its latest breakdown of crash reports from about 20,000 apps, and it’s clear that certain operating systems aren’t as friendly as others. On Android, Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) is most likely to wreck your day; KitKat (4.4) is close behind, while Lollipop’s early reputation for glitches apparently doesn’t affect apps. With Apple devices, however, the tables turn. While iOS’ app crash rate is lower overall, iOS 8 is a bit more problematic than its predecessor. That’s not surprising given that Apple hasn’t had as much time to tackle issues in 8, but you may feel better if you’re still holding on to 7.
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The update is now available for users in different parts of the world such as Russia, India, Slovakia, Germany and Czech Republic. Most European countries can also enjoy the update already. However, Galaxy S4 users from the US should wait for their mobile carriers to roll out the update.
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There’s another petty iOS versus Android controversy brewing. Apparently some folks have gotten it into their heads that Apple is teaching people to hate anyone who doesn’t use an iPhone by displaying SMS messages in green and iMessage messages in blue.
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In October 2014, Google announced the arrival of a new firmware update, Android 5.0 Lollipop. Motorola has been among the brands that promised the new firmware would be available to its devices. Motorola said that Android 5.0 Lollipop would be introduced in its flagships devices including 2013 editions of Moto G and Moto X.
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The mobile phone manufacturer made the Android update announcement on their official Twitter account on Feb. 12, saying that Android 5.0 Lollipop can now be downloaded for Moto Maxx and Moto E in selected markets.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Only ten days from today, on February 24, Mozilla will upgrade its ever-popular Firefox web browser to version 36.0, a release that won’t bring the highly anticipated native HTML5 playback on YouTube, according to a recent discussion on the Mozilla bug tracker, but will finally allow users to sync their new tab page’s pinned tiles across all of their devices where Mozilla Firefox is installed.
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If you’re in the market for an efficient ad blocker, you can now get uBlock from Mozilla’s extensions site to add it to your Firefox browser. uBlock can be a great alternative to AdBlock Plus and other ad blocking extensions since it seems to use less system resources.
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BSD
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For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development.
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on this day 12 years ago, I have released the first version of m0n0wall to the public. In theory, one could still run that version – pb1 it was called – on a suitably old PC and use it to control the Internet access of a small LAN (not that it would be recommended security-wise). However, the world keeps turning, and while m0n0wall has made an effort to keep up, there are now better solutions available and under active development.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It is that time of the year again – the day we display our affection to our significant other …and the Free Software we like best.
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Standards/Consortia
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The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Harvard and MIT yesterday, saying the two universities are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because they don’t properly caption their online course offerings.
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I do hope Time Out magazine didn’t rush its Global Dating Survey in order to publish it in time for Valentine’s Day. It would be very much against the spirit of the age. Sir John Chilcot has shown us the way: if an investigation is important, it mustn’t be rushed. We must take time to draw the right conclusions even if hell freezes over first – surely the perfect opportunity for Tony Blair to take up skiing.
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The stream of requests to the White House from Jeb Bush, a young but well-connected Republican leader in South Florida, ranged from the weighty and urgent to the parochial and mundane.
In 1985, he sent an emotional letter pressing his father, Vice President George Bush, to investigate the detention of Cuban children in Texas, asking, “Shouldn’t there be some compassion?” (The vice president’s reply: “Heartbreaking.”)
In 1989, after his father became president, Mr. Bush offered his recommendation for the next Supreme Court opening. (“Your suggestion will be given thoughtful consideration,” a senior aide responded.)
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A scorpion stung a woman on the hand just before her flight from Los Angeles to Portland took off.
Flight 567 was taxiing on the runway Saturday night when the passenger was stung, Alaska Airlines spokesman Cole Cosgrove said. The plane returned to the gate, and the woman was checked by medics. She refused additional medical treatment, but she didn’t get back on the plane.
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Health/Nutrition
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I asked Karen what she thought they were trying to do her. She said that she had no doubt she was a research subject. The purpose of all this was just an extension of MKULTRA – mind control experiments. The CIA and their “Frankenstein” doctors were investigating how and when a person will break, when they will talk, at what point you can make a person do anything you want and when is too much, where they will just die.
[...]
Apparently, 3,000 mysterious deaths from 1952-1973 at the Vermont State Hospital, hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled to the Hospital from the CIA, giving deadly and experimental drugs to mental health patients, putting them in strait jackets, giving them no bed, and making them urinate on the floor is not worthy of investigation. Is this not news in part because the CIA was acting criminally, or because these were expendable mental health patients? You tell me.
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It is rare to meet someone in the poverty world who does not profess to be motivated by politics, faith or social injustice. But Mark Game, who runs Community Shop, seems almost embarrassed by the idea that he might be trying to do anything other than run a successful business. Practical problem-solving, he says, is his thing. He is not religious, and he is not really a politics person.
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Resistance to polio campaigns in Pakistan have been growing since the 2011 U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. The CIA had used a vaccination campaign as a cover for gathering information on the whereabouts of the al Qaeda leader.
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Security
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The flaw potentially allowed mass deletion of photos using the identification number of a target album and an attacker’s Facebook Android app token. Any scripts to pull off this trick could be stopped by security controls like rate limiters.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Largely overshadowed by the crises in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, Libya’s unraveling has received comparatively little attention over the past few months. As this oil-rich nation veers toward complete chaos, world leaders would be wise to redouble efforts led by the United Nations to broker a power-sharing deal among warring factions.
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Libya’s Waha Oil Company has posted a video on its Facebook page showing the fire that raged through El Sarir oil field and halted oil flows to the Hariga port, in what is believed to be an act of sabotage.
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In 2006, 21-year-old Fahim Ahmad was arrested and charged with leading a group of young men who planned to bomb power stations, take hostages and “behead politicians” in order to compel the Canadian government to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Ahmad was also accused of planning to travel abroad to join Islamist insurgents fighting in foreign conflicts.
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Denmark is a relatively small country, with a population of 5.7 million. But it is relatively wealthy, being the 35th largest economy in the world, producing more goods and services than Malaysia, Israel or the Philippines. Its military is more important than the country’s small size would suggest, since it is well supplied with fighter jets.
The country is clearly in al-Qaeda’s sights, and not only because of the Jyllands Posten publication in 2007 of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. A Danish secret agent Morten Storm, went public with claims that he was key to tracking down Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. On the basis of Storm’s information, he says, the US were able to launch drone strikes against al-Awlaki and to kill him in September, 2011. AQAP therefore has a vendetta against Denmark. The country also supported the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq, so that Daesh / ISIL sympathizers have an animus against it. The Danish air force is bombing the radicals in Iraq nowadays.
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Police say three people have been wounded, including two police officers, in a shooting in downtown Copenhagen.
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Multiple reports indicated that shots were fired early Sunday morning at a Copenhagen synagogue. It was not immediately clear if the shooting was related to the earlier killing at the free speech event.
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Danish police shot and killed a man early Sunday suspected of carrying out shooting attacks at a free speech event and then at a Copenhagen synagogue, killing two men, including a member of Denmark’s Jewish community. Five police officers were also wounded in the attacks.
Officials have not identified the perpetrator but say it is possible he was imitating the terror attacks last month in Paris in which Islamic radicals carried out a massacre at the Charlie Hebdo newsroom followed by an attack on Jews at a kosher grocery store.
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By early Sunday, Danish police hunting for the shooter in each attack — one of which has been labeled a terrorist act — had shot and killed a man who opened fire on them near a train station, officials said.
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A Danish filmmaker was killed in the first attack. Nine hours later, a security guard protecting a bat mitzvah near a synagogue was slain. Five police officers were wounded in the shootings.
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The suspect was from Copenhagen but has not been named. He had been “on the radar” of the intelligence services, police said. They have recovered a weapon believed to have been used in the first attack.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, Israel is the only place where Jews can truly feel safe. His comments triggered an angry response from Copenhagen’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, who said he was “disappointed” by the remarks.
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Netanyahu responds to Copenhagen attack: Wave of terror attack in which Jews are killed for being Jews will continue – Jews of Europe, Israel is your home.
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The US assisted Israel in developing the hydrogen bomb, according to a declassified report by the US Department of Defense. The move violated international laws the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act enacted in 1978 which codified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty the US signed.
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Back in 1987, according to a tightly-held report produced for the Pentagon, (PDF) the Israelis were “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level.”
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A new report from the US National Academies looks at the ‘wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad’ idea of geoengineering the climate.
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The NAS report refers to ‘climate intervention’, a phrase that joins ‘climate engineering’ and ‘climate remediation’ as recent attempts to rebrand geoengineering. But at least with this new phrase there is recognition of the almost complete absence of engineering in geoengineering. The rapid growth of geoengineering as a form of magical thinking makes it easy to forget that the technologies are largely imaginary. Scientists talk as though we could cool the planet tomorrow. The truth is that our technologies are no closer to being able to do this than they were at the end of world war two. We may pretend towards certainty but when it comes to geoengineering, it is tempting to conclude that, as William Goldman said about Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”.
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A leading American climate scientist has said he felt “scared” when a shadowy organisation claiming to represent the CIA asked him about the possibility of weaponised weather.
Professor Alan Robock received a call three years ago from two men wanting to know if experts would be able to spot a hostile force’s attempts to upset the US climate.
But he suspected the real intention was to find out how feasible it might be to secretly interfere with the climate of another country.
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A climate expert was alarmed when a mysterious organization claiming to be part of the CIA asked him whether he would be able to identify cases of weaponized weather attempts against the United States.
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How feasible it might be to secretly interfere with the climate of another country? A leading American climate scientist has said he felt “scared” when a shadowy organisation claiming to represent the CIA asked him about the possibility of weaponised weather.
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The ending of the movie introduces a particularly unrealistic and irresponsible message: that killing North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un will result in a successful revolution by liberal dissidents. Living conditions in North Korea are so harsh that a revolution would have happened long ago if the hardship was really blamed on the government, rather than on US-led sanctions and diplomatic offensives. Although hawks and anti-communists often point at emigration out of North Korea as evidence of widespread political dissidence within the country, the argument does not resist serious scrutiny. A 2005 survey of 1346 North Korean émigrés living in China found that 95% had left their country for economic reasons, with only 2% leaving out of political dissatisfaction. According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification, political refugees are a small minority even among the émigrés that chose to resettle in the South: out of the 20,108 that had resettled by April 2011, only 7% indicated leaving because of dissatisfaction with the system. A 2011 South Korean survey of 102 North Koreans émigrés in China further showed that, even though 80% acknowledged that the South Korean economy gave the possibility of a better life than in the North, only 2% would want Korea to be reunified under a capitalist system. Obviously, even even if Kim Jong-Un was not just replaced with a new socialist leader, the country would be much more likely to descend into a protracted civil war than transform into a liberal democracy. While Americans may think they can solve the problem of nuclear-armed warlords battling for supremacy by marching into Pyongyang, so will the Chinese. This would leave us at best with a new, bloody division of Korean lands, and at worst with a new World War.
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The State Department confirmed late Tuesday that it has closed the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and evacuated its staff because of the political crisis and security concerns following the takeover of much of the country by Shiite rebels.
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The closure of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen has forced the CIA to significantly scale back its counterterrorism presence in the country, according to current and former U.S. officials who said the evacuation represents a major setback in operations against al-Qaida’s most dangerous affiliate.
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With the takeover of Yemen by Shiite rebels, Western nations are stumbling over themselves to evacuate diplomats. The US announced its embassy’s closure, and Britain and France are soon to follow. But also racing for the exit is the CIA, potentially leaving Yemen – and the world – vulnerable to al-Qaeda attacks.
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The US evacuation of its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, leaves a Middle Eastern country with 25 million citizens, a leading Al Qaeda branch, and real estate along one of the world’s busiest oil transit choke points without much of an American diplomatic presence.
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Ukraine’s 10-month attempt to reclaim its easternmost provinces has only made locals there hate the central government even more.
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U.S. President Barack Obama is not mentioned there; but, for him to reject their deal, and to send lethal weapons to Ukraine now and so escalate the war and its massive bloodshed — which has already cost “up to 50,000” dead and millions of refugees — would be extremely embarrassing for the United States: no American “boots on the ground,” just tens of thousands of Ukrainian corpses under it, in a war that Obama himself had initiated (and even the founder of Stratfor, the “private CIA” firm, says that the February 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which started the war, was “the most blatant coup in history,” which it certainly was, and is increasingly recognized as having been).
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A teenage female suicide bomber blew herself up at crowded bus station in northeast Nigeria on Sunday, killing at least 16 and wounding 30 others.
Most of the victims were children who had either been selling peanuts or begging for money at the time of the explosion, said witnesses.
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They didn’t have a choice. Giving the FBI Marwan’s dirty finger is apparently part of the deal. In any case, we didn’t have the means to determine if the chopped finger belongs to Marwan. The US, on the other hand, has DNA sample from the imprisoned brother of Marwan as well as the facilities to perform the tests.
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Jurgen Todenhofer, the German journalist who lived with ISIS recently in Iraq and Syria, said they had all the best weapons, and ISIS told him they buy all their weapons from the FSA. American taxpayers have sent their hard earned dollars to the FSA through numerous acts passed in the US Congress; most were championed by Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona. When Kayla was kidnapped, her parents contacted officials in Arizona, her home area, and they contacted Sen. John McCain.
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On Tuesday, a Laramie-based group called Wyoming Citizens Against Torture plans to protest a public presentation by Lynne Cheney, who will be accompanied by her husband and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
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President Barack Obama committed the ultimate political blunder the other day. He blurted out the truth.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, he warned his Christian brethren against “getting up on our high horse” when condemning the violence of Muslim terrorists.
“During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Naturally, all hell broke loose.
The Rupert Murdoch army launched into full attack, supported by Rush Limbaugh air strikes. Rabid Fox News commentators, foaming at the mouth, fought each other for control of the mics to condemn the president’s remarks as “un-American” and, even worse, liberal. He was derided as irreligious, weak, and not a real American.
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U.S. ‘intelligence’ repelled moderates, boosted extremist recruitment in Middle East.
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The CIA doesn’t assassinate often anymore, so when it does the agency picks its targets carefully. The story uncovered last weekend by the Washington Post and Newsweek the CIA’s reported role in the February 2008 assassination of Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh is the stuff of a Hollywood spy thriller. A team of CIA spotters in Damascus tracking a Hezbollah terrorist wanted for decades; a custom-made explosive shaped to kill only the target and placed in the spare tire of an SUV parked along the target’s route home; intelligence gathered by Israelis, paired with a bomb built and tested in North Carolina, taking out a man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone else until 9/11.
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When President Aquino first faced the nation to speak about the raid that killed Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, better known as Marwan, but also left 44 Special
Action Force troopers dead, he said the Philippine National Police had gathered “actionable intelligence” on the whereabouts of Marwan and his Filipino protégé,
Basit Usman. The phrase has been repeated many times since, during the testimony of various police officers in the Senate and in the House of Representatives.
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Brian Williams, American television network anchor caught telling his audience a fantasy version of his experience on a foreign assignment, has unintentionally provided us with a near perfect allegory and tale of caution about American journalism and the role it plays in politics and foreign affairs.
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Last Sunday, Leslie Stahl used the coveted first segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes to do a puff-piece on the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Project Research Agency. Her story, which included a minor scoop about the agency’s work on cyber security, was covered all week in the tech press and gave DARPA another opportunity to strut its stuff on the national stage.
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For most North Americans, the mention of 9/11 evokes grey airplanes against white cirrus; slow television seconds; and the obscene inward folding of metal and glass.
This collective memory is video-looped on CNN specials, honored by fire-fighter parades and nurtured at candlelit vigils, so that peripheral details – whether we were at biology class that day, or had told an ex we still loved them – can stick to its sides like post-it notes.
But 9/11 has entirely different associations in Chile, more difficult to pin to a central image. For Erika Arbulu, who met with a Peace Boat group when the ship docked in Valparaíso last week, the day began with radio interference, and then military songs over the transmitter.
At 7 am on September 11, 1973, Admiral José Toribio Merino’s navy captured the Chilean port city of Valparaíso. At 8 am General Augusto Pinochet’s army – secretly backed by the CIA – moved on Santiago. And by 2:30 pm, Chilean jets had bombed their own presidential palace and Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first popularly elected socialist president, was dead.
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A former Army sergeant with the nickname Rambo pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiring to murder a federal drug agent and another man, in what the government has said was his post-military role as a contract killer.
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Transparency Reporting
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If you are in charge for a news organization, quit following the official statements all the time and start devoting more space and energy to look for those persons who are willing to talk, those potential journalists who are more than just “sources.”
Instead of fearing the consequences and punishment, you can assure them to protect their identity.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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While Americans generate 2.6 kilograms of waste per person per day, or 5.7 pounds, to China’s 1.10 kilograms, the United States ranked lower on the list because of its more efficient waste management, Professor Jambeck said.
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About 140 pilot whales which stranded themselves on a remote stretch of beach in New Zealand have died, an official said today.
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Jeannette Kawas was an accountant whose concept of value was broader than any balance sheet. No number could capture for her the natural wealth she saw in the forests, rivers, beaches and mangrove swamps of Punta Sal, near her hometown of Tela in northern Honduras.
In the 1980s, cattle ranchers, resort developers and loggers all wanted a slice of this landscape. As their hunger grew, Kawas formed an environmental organization, PROLANSATE, to protect the land, and in 1994, it convinced the government to allow it to create and manage a new national park there.
Within three months PROLANSATE renamed Punta Sal National Park to honor its founder, who was shot dead in her home on February 6, 1995. Years later a ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights said Kawas’s work in defense of the environment had motivated the murder.
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Water from the iced-over Connecticut River numbed my hands as I cradled a hard, scaleless fish at the US Geological Survey’s anadromous fish laboratory at Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Its back was dark brown, its belly cream. Five rows of bony plates ran the length of its thin body to the shark-like tail. Four barbels covered with taste buds dangled from its flat snout in front of the sucker mouth. At 20 inches it was a baby. Adults can measure 14 ft and weigh 800 pounds.
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All the recent declarations that 2014 was the hottest year on record seems to have prompted a spate of panic denial among climate change contrarians, denialists and ideologues.
We’ve had a declaration of one of the “most extraordinary scandals of our time” from UK climate science manglers Christopher Booker and James Delingpole.
The accusation is that climate scientists have been “fiddling” the world’s temperature data with the express motivation of showing the world is warmer than it really is.
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The survival chances of crown-of-thorns starfish increase by as much as 240% if sea-surface temperatures rise 2C, say Australian researchers
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Finance
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Leaked files show how controversial tax status, aimed at encouraging foreign investors to spend time in UK, is used to legally hide fortunes in HSBC’s Swiss private bank
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Public banks in North Dakota, Germany and Switzerland have been shown to outperform their private counterparts. International private competitors have responded by pushing for regulations limiting the advantages of the public banking model, but public banking advocates are pushing back.
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Before this week’s big Swiss banking leak, authorities had been trying to get information on that opaque and shady side of global finance for decades.
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The EU legislature approved the creation of the committee on Thursday by a 612-19 margin with 23 abstentions.
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This isn’t a revelation. Many proponents of truly trying to handle the homeless problems in our country have been pointing to studies and generating numbers to prove that helping the homeless, just a tiny bit, would save tons of money.
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That could be tough for Mr. Schnatter, who has already threatened to jack his prices up for fear of having to offer healthcare to workers, thus taking important financial resources away from black hair dye.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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To assure this, they did an extraordinary thing: they founded an Israeli newspaper, solely devoted to the furthering of the interests of Binyamin Netanyahu. Not of the Likud, not of a specific policy, but of Netanyahu personally.
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…NBC has also declined to publicly discuss any details relating to Williams and his suspension.
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Embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ claim that he once flew on a mission with Navy SEAL Team Six is far-fetched and likely untrue, one former SEAL said on Sunday.
“What Brian Williams is saying, none of it can be true. For a reporter to be embedded with SEAL Team Six or any Tier One unit, that just doesn’t happen,” Don Mann, the former SEAL, told CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter.
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Pentagon…Vladimir Putin has a form of autism… same kind of people… urged Martin Luther King to commit suicide
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American Fund “KKR investment”, headed by former CIA chief General David Petraeus, from October 2013 until this day, in less than a year and a half, has put under its control a significant part of Serbian media, internet portal “Vaseljenska” reported.
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Chip Beck hasn’t taken a typical path for editorial cartoonists. A self-taught artist, he’s mostly worked for the United States government, including for the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Closer to the end of his career than many local cartoonists, Beck remains as active as any of them.
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The neocons now control the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, a dangerous development for the American people and the world. Yet, the Post remains the more extreme of the two, pushing for endless confrontations and wars, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.
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Censorship
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Allegations that UK intelligence agencies ordered redactions to a US report on CIA torture in order to cover up its role in the mistreatment of detainees are unfounded, MPs have ruled.
An investigation by the British parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) has concluded that redactions to documents in December’s report into CIA torture were all made on the grounds of national security and not to avoid embarrassment to the UK authorities.
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The Irish and UK governments are about to clash in the European court of human rights over an infamous torture case involving the British army from the early years of the Troubles.
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UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee claims that the redactions made to the report on CIA torture practices did not concern London’s awareness of the mistreatment of detainees.
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Though the government of the United Kingdom has long maintained that it played no active part in the torture of prisoners subjected to extraordinary rendition by the CIA — beyond allowing planes to refuel at Diego Garcia — recent revelations from a senior U.S official entirely contradict those claims of innocence.
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British spies asked for material to be redacted in a U.S. Senate report about the CIA’s mistreatment of terrorism suspects but were not trying to hide any complicity in wrongdoing, a senior parliamentary committee concluded on Wednesday.
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UK intelligence agencies requested redactions to the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, a senior parliamentary committee has confirmed. But the redactions requested were “directly related to national security interests” and did not concern alleged UK complicity in the mistreatment of detainees, according to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).
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Nothing says innovation like a regimented choral performance.
At least that seems to have been the thought process at the Cyberspace Administration of China, the government agency in charge of Internet policies, and increasingly, censorship.
During the talent show portion of a Lunar New Year celebration held on Tuesday by the Beijing Internet Association and attended by many of the country’s leading media figures and Internet executives, the Cyberspace Administration debuted what can only be described as a semiofficial anthem.
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Creating patriotic songs is an age-old solution to difficult problems, albeit one that is out of fashion in the Western world.
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Europe calls it protecting privacy. But a controversial judicial approach to ridding the Internet of links that might be embarrassing or upsetting to individual Europeans amounts to a stealth form of censorship.
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“The use of violence on a gathering exploring the intersection of religious and artistic freedom should send shivers down our spines.
“The Charlie Hebdo murders inspired intensified public debate about free speech and its value. Many people who had previously given little thought to free speech were drawn for the first time into online discussions or attended events to help them get a better understanding of the issues. It would be terrible if violent acts such as that in Copenhagen shut down free speech even further.”
“The ability to express ourselves freely, to attend meetings and debates without fear of violence, is fundamental to a free society. Free speech must be protected.
“This is not just about cartoons or offence. If violence is allowed to win, free speech – and all of our ability to be who we are, practice what religion we like, have relationships with whomever we want – dies.”
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Privacy
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On January 22, journalist and political prisoner Barrett Brown was convicted in a Texas court of controversial charges. In addition to a 63-month sentence, Brown is expected to pay $890,250 in restitution to the private spy agency, Strategic Forecasting (a.k.a. “Stratfor”).
This monumental fine, which turns a theoretically free citizen into an indentured servant of a corporation, is meant to hold Brown responsible for a hack by the Anonymous group LulzSec — even though the government admitted it didn’t have any concrete evidence to show he’d taken any material part in the hack.
Jeremy Hammond, a member of LulzSec, pled guilty in May of 2013 and was sentenced to ten years in prison. The hack, carried out under the instruction of the FBI’s agent saboteur and snitch Sabu, revealed millions of emails that showed the complex interrelationship between the private intelligence firm, multinational corporations, and the surveillance state. The emails also revealed how Stratfor had infiltrated activist groups from Texas to India.
On February 2, 2015, George Friedman, Stratfor’s CEO, was scheduled to sign his book “Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe,” at Book People, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas. It would be Hammond’s 1,065th day in prison; Brown had been incarcerated for 874.
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Last year, the Central Intelligence Agency took the 17 agencies within the intelligence community to the cloud through a ground-breaking $600 million contract with Amazon Web Services.
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The social network has a history of telling its users that the names they’re attempting to use aren’t real. Drag queens and overseas human rights activists, for example, have experienced error messages and problems logging in in the past.
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What do drag queens, burlesque performers, human rights activists in Vietnam and Syria, and Native Americans have in common? They have all been the targets of “real names” enforcement on Facebook. And despite reports from the media last year that seemed to indicate that Facebook has “fixed” the issue, they’re still being targeted.
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The NSA has had a lot of fun with the lovey-dovey holiday by apparently debunking myths that their analysts spy on couples whispering sweet nothings in bed.
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In 1949, George Orwell published a book that conveyed a dystopian society in a perpetual state of war under the watch of its totalitarian dictator, “Big Brother.” At the time, it was a fascinating concept partly because it echoed the deepening fears around the danger of absolute political authority in Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union. Now, in the Digital Age, “1984” is becoming eerily relevant once again—not because of the political environment, but because of how surveillance technology has started to potentially compromise our privacy.
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On 10 February, EDRi-member Metamorphosis, expressed grave concern about the publicly announced allegations of mass and unauthorised surveillance of citizens. Invasions of privacy directly affect freedom of expression in Macedonia, and fuel the overall climate of fear and silence.
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One of those bugged all those years ago was Nick Kaldas, now Deputy Commissioner. Another was journalist Steve Barrett.
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The Metropolitan Police has barred Press Gazette from requesting information about its use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to spy on journalists.
Last night, the force rejected a Freedom of Information Act request on the grounds that it was the sixth question submitted since September.
Explaining its decision to reject further FoI requests from Press Gazette, the Met said in an email that it has the right to refuse “vexatious requests… which are intended to be annoying or disruptive or which have a disproportionate impact on a public authority”.
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Tom Quinn and Jason Janego, who head the distribution label, discuss the secrecy involved with releasing the controversial film (code names, encrypted messages) and their fears about how it would be received (“Would Harvey fire me?”).
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On 6th February 2015, in an unprecedented ruling, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that for a period of seven years the UK’s intelligence services had been acting unlawfully in accessing communications collected by the NSA.
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GCHQ now has seven years of data gathered through a process now ruled unlawful. Seven years of data gathered about millions of innocent people. Privacy International has challenged GCHQ to delete it all, and are working on putting together an online form to help people do so for themselves.
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There are no heroes, only heroic actions. That’s what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told a cheering crowd of more than 1,000 libertarian students at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, Snowden was able to accept his award via video feed, and answered questions from ISFL President Alexander McCobin.
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Civil Rights
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On the surface, the police shooting of an unarmed man in a housing project stairwell in Brooklyn seemed like a freakish accident.
The officer, Peter Liang, told his superiors that his gun had gone off unintentionally, the bullet rattling off a wall and into an unsuspecting man’s chest, killing him. Even the New York City police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said there was no suggestion that the officer intended to shoot the man, Akai Gurley.
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The family of a Washington Post reporter imprisoned in Iran for more than half a year has engaged a prominent defense attorney known for taking sensitive cases involving Americans ensnared in legal issues in the country.
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“A moratorium is just a ploy,” the association said in a statement. “Make no mistake, this action is not about waiting for a study– it’s about the governor ignoring duly enacted law and imposing his personal views against the death penalty.”
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In the US, there has been a culture of impunity for the CIA operatives responsible for torture of suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks
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The European Parliament today voted to investigate the extent of the CIA’s detention, torture and rendition programme in EU countries.
The decision comes two months after the US Senate intelligence committee published a redacted summary of its six year investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme.
The European Parliament’s committees on civil liberties, foreign affairs and human rights previously investigated the CIA’s programme in 2006, and they will now resume their inquiry with new details from the Senate’s report.
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The torture methods used by the CIA to extract information from detainees have sparked another debate in Parliament in the wake of the US Senate publishing its report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme. MEPs were asked to vote on two different resolutions on this on 11 February, but only one of them was adopted. We talked to S&D member Birgit Sippel and EPP member Elmar Brok to find out why their political groups had different views on the issue.
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The torture methods used by the CIA to extract information from detainees have sparked another debate in Parliament in the wake of the US Senate publishing its report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
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Parliament’s civil liberties, foreign affairs and human rights committees will resume investigations into the CIA’s alleged transportation and illegal detention of prisoners in EU countries, in the light of the US Senate’s new revelations of the use of torture by the CIA, says a resolution passed on Wednesday. MEPs also again call on EU member states to investigate these allegations and prosecute those involved.
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Latest embarrassing incident demonstrates that military tribunals cannot mete out justice to detainees
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Government prosecutors confirmed in a Guantanamo Bay war court today that an interpreter for one of five alleged co-conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks had earlier worked for the CIA. But they insisted no federal agency had tried to place the interpreter on the defense team to gather intelligence. Defense lawyers cried foul and asked that all further proceedings be suspended until the issue is resolved.
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John Brennan, the CIA head, has strongly denied that his organisation spied on Senate staff working on last year’s report on the agency’s involvement in torture and secret rendition – but memos from a CIA lawyer suggest the contrary.
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When the CIA got caught spying on Senate staffers working on the 6,000 page torture report, John Brennan, who heads the agency, denied the transgression. “As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into computers, nothing could be further from the truth,” he said on March 11, 2014. “That’s beyond the scope of reason.” Four months later, the CIA Inspector General found that the CIA did, in fact, improperly spy on the Senate intelligence committee. After that, Brennan apologized.
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The ACLU had gone to the court in Washington, D.C., last month seeking to protect its right to receive a full copy of the 6,963-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the CIA’s use of torture.
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The American Civil Liberties Union early Monday withdrew an emergency motion filed late last month in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that blocked the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from collecting all copies of the committee’s full, unredacted report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.”
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The CIA has some good news for a group demanding a copy of the agency’s database of nearly 12 million declassified documents: it won’t take 28 years to release the set, only six.
A Central Intelligence Agency official told a federal judge Friday that the spy agency has found a way to streamline the review process so that the 11.6 million pages of records requested by the open government outlet Muckrock can be released with only a “spot check” of the documents for snippets of stray classified information that might get tangled up in the files during the release process.
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The Obama administration isn’t planning on handing 6,900 classified pages of a Senate Intelligence Committee report back to Capitol Hill, until a court has time to weigh in.
In a court filing on Friday, the Department of Justice said it would let a lawsuit over the secret report play out before giving it back to Congress, as the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee has asked.
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A lawyer for a man accused of helping to plot the 9/11 attacks said today his captive Saudi client was rectally abused while in CIA custody, “and continues to bleed now, at least eight years later.” He and other men were forced to submit to rectal exams with excessive force, conducted by CIA operatives. The other words for this are rape, or sodomy.
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The one refreshing thing about the hearings in the 9/11 military commission case at Guantanamo this week is that defense lawyers are now allowed to say the word “torture” without the censor blacking out the audio feed. And the word “torture” came up a lot.
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The ACLU, one of the United States’ most respected civil liberties organizations, collaborated with President Reagan’s CIA in writing secrecy laws that enabled the prosecution of Bush-era CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou, according to Mark Ames at Pando Daily.
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John Kiriakou is out of prison two years after his conviction under The Espionage Act. In his first exclusive interview after his release, Kiriakou talked to Sputnik about torture, prison life and whistleblower protections and how torture committed by the CIA “was official U.S. policy.”
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This case reveals, as do whistleblowing cases in general, that the discloser is presumed to be guilty, the tribal member who went against the creed. The result of that disclosure – exposing an illegal program, implemented by individuals who, one would think, would be the subject of prosecution – is evaded. Twisted logic ensues: the perpetrator of abuse escapes the exposure; and the one doing the exposing received due punishment. Rules, not substance, matter.
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After World War II, Americans led the way in establishing landmark human rights principles, including a repudiation of torture. But more recent U.S. leaders have chosen to disgrace those ideals by devising euphemisms and end-runs to continue the barbaric practices, as Peter Costantini describes.
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If it hadn’t been for sergeant named Joseph Darby, we might never have known about the abuses at Abu Ghraib
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“Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But while it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out it was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.
Unfortunately, the debate around it unleashed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report has largely missed the point.
Certainly, the report did provide overwhelming evidence that torture did not produce useful intelligence. The CIA had concluded previously that torture is “ineffective”, “counterproductive,” and “will probably result in false answers.”
An FBI agent wrote that one prisoner had cooperated and provided “important actionable intelligence” months before being tortured. Some CIA agents and soldiers reportedly questioned the legality of the policies and resisted carrying them out.
A Bush Justice Department lawyer acknowledged: “It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program.” In any case, it is inherently impossible to know that any intelligence purportedly extracted by torture could not have been elicited by legal interrogation.
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A new, faculty-initiated petition is requesting that Fordham University revoke its honorary degree to John Brennan, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Calling Brennan’s honorary degree “indefensible,” the petition calls upon Fordham University to revoke the degree, citing what the petitioners call his defense and support of torture.
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In January, a federal jury in Virginia convicted former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on nine felony counts, including espionage. Prosecutors accused Sterling of leaking classified information about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program to journalist James Risen of The New York Times. Risen later revealed how the risky operation could have inadvertently aided the Iranian nuclear program. Supporters of Sterling described him as a whistleblower, but prosecutors claimed he leaked the information to settle a score with the agency. Sterling is scheduled to be sentenced in April. He faces a maximum possible sentence of decades in prison. We speak with Norman Solomon, who reported from the Sterling trial. “We’ve got to support investigative journalists and whistleblowers. We can’t allow the government to drive a wedge between the two,” Solomon says, co-founder of RootsAction.org, which has launched public campaigns to support both Sterling and Risen.
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It was this mindset that informed the decision to unleash the CIA to use the methods that the Senate Intelligence Committee report correctly criticizes. If our very survival as a nation was imperiled by Islamic fanaticism, then some justification might have existed for Cheney’s sneering dismissal of any concern that we were brutalizing prisoners and his lack of any regard for the fact that dozens of undeniably innocent people were among the victims.
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I’m not sure how one is supposed to review a book like Guantánamo Diary. It’s not literature; its historical account of a complex episode is subjective; and perhaps a fifth of its contents are redacted. Some of the pages are comically over-censored: a slab of black with only one word left uncut. Page 301 begins “But anyway. . .” and then, there are seven pages of redactions (see picture below). But even if Guantánamo Diary is not a perfect book, it is a necessary one.
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Kenya Harris sued the City of Albany, Ga., police chief John Proctor and officers Ryan Jenkins and Richard Brown, Jr. for excessive force, assault and battery and infliction of emotional distress.
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The outgoing head of Turkey’s top court launched a final broadside against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday, warning that the judiciary was being turned into an “instrument of revenge” by politicians.
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Zulkifli Anwar Ulhaque – better known as Zunar – taken into custody after using Twitter to criticise judiciary involved in sodomy case
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Capital punishment and ongoing racial injustice in the United States are “direct descendents” of lynching, charges a new study, which found that the pre-World War II practice of “racial terrorism” has had a much more profound impact on race relations in America than previously acknowledged.
The most comprehensive work done on lynching to date, the investigation unearthed a total of 3,959 racially-motivated lynchings during the period between Reconstruction and World War II, which is at least 700 more killings than previously reported.
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From monitoring sales of Charlie Hebdo to using facial recognition technology on innocent people, Britain’s police are showing a lack of respect for our freedoms
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Kevin Davis did the right thing. On December 29, Kevin called 911 for help. His girlfriend, April, had just been stabbed and the man who did it, Terrance Hilyard, fled the scene. Within minutes, the family dog, Tooter, and Kevin were each fatally shot by Dekalb County Police Officer Joseph Pitts.
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Police in Georgia who cuffed a man to his hospital bed for two days after he was fatally shot by an officer have been accused by his family of barring them from visiting him to stop full details of the shooting from being disclosed.
Kevin Davis was detained at Grady hospital in Atlanta after being shot three times by a DeKalb County police officer, who was responding to a 911 call made by Davis and his girlfriend when she was stabbed by another man at their apartment in the suburb of Decatur.
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In further evidence U.S. police forces include way too many racist thugs who slam ‘em to the ground and beat ‘em up first and (possibly) think second, Madison, Ala. police partially paralyzed a 57-year-old Indian gentleman after assaulting him for taking a morning stroll through his engineer son’s affluent white neighborhood. The cops were called after a caller declared Sureshbhai Patel “suspicious,” apparently believing he was scouting garages for the right place to plant a bomb because he hates our freedom, when in fact he was admiring the clean streets before going in to help take care of his newborn grandson. When police accosted him, he repeatedly said “No English” and pointed to his son’s nearby house, but police just pounded him anyway. Surely an understandable mistake, yes? No, said Hank Sherrod, the family’s attorney, who did not mince his words. “There is nothing suspicious about Mr. Patel other than he has brown skin.” The family is suing. On their part, Madison police admitted no crime was committed. They did suspend the officer, launch an investigation, and wish Mr. Patel “a speedy recovery.” Only in America, where this sort of thing inexplicably keeps happening, day in and day out, far too often, and will likely continue to until a big enough fuss is made about it.
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Hundreds of Miami police officers aren’t happy with Waze’s police-finding feature, and they’re not content with asking Google to remove it. According to NBC Miami, a number of cops in the city are taking matters into their own hands, downloading the app and inundating it with fake police sightings. We’re sure a lot of people love the app for that particular feature, as they can use it to make sure they’re driving well below the speed limit in the presence of law enforcement. Some American officers told AP last month, though, that the app could pose a threat, as wanne-be cop killers can easily use it to find a target.
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Hundreds gathered in southeastern Washington on Saturday to protest police brutality in the wake of a deadly shooting of a man who had been throwing rocks at the police.
Before the midday rally, children and adults hand-lettered signs, calling for justice for Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who witnesses say was running away when police fired on him Tuesday in a busy intersection.
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American anti-war activists gathered in front of a CIA base in Virginia, asking for the shutdown of Guantanamo prison.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The first of seven people indicted over Kim Dotcom’s now defunct Megaupload website has pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges.
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Last year, we wrote about Rep. Blake Farenthold introducing a small, but important piece of copyright legislation, the You Own Devices Act (YODA), which just says that if you buy some piece of computerized equipment, you can sell it with any included software, without having to get permission from the software provider. As we noted, the reality is that this is just making it clear that the first sale doctrine applies to computer equipment too — which shouldn’t need a new law, but some tech companies (especially in the networking space) feel otherwise.
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Eircom was one of the first ISPs in Europe to implement a voluntary “three strikes” anti-piracy program but strangely it’s now hiding the prospect of disconnections from customers. Together with music group IFPI, they also fail heavily on the piracy education front.
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Send this to a friend
02.14.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day and a lot of Open Source is feeling mushy. The Free Software Foundation began a campaign to show all the hard-working developers, managers, and support staff appreciate and has dubbed February 14 I love Free Software Day. openSUSE and the Document Foundation are in the act as well. Elsewhere, the Mageia project has announced their Valentine’s gift – Mageia 5 Beta 3.
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Desktop
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Google is planning to push 2-in-1 devices in 2015, according Digitimes Research’s inquiries within the upstream supply chain. Google’s 2-in-1 Chromebook designed by Quanta Computer is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter.
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So I think it a good idea for Linux gamers and gamers in general to try to be patient while Valve does its work. The worst thing that could happen is for Valve to prematurely release SteamOS or the Steam Machines before they are ready for prime time. A buggy, slow version of SteamOS would cause many gamers to think twice about using it. And a badly designed controller or other hardware screw up would also damage the entire SteamOS platform.
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Cutegram is one of those new apps that you fall in love with them instantly, especially if they provide overwhelming features. It is a Telegram client for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems, written in Qt5/QML and designed to blend perfectly into the KDE Plasma graphical desktop environment and dubbed by its developers “Best Telegram Client Ever.”
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Server
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… is the new hype these days. Everyone seems to want to be part of it; even Microsoft wants to allow Docker to run on its platform. How they visualise that is slightly beyond me, seen as how Docker is mostly a case of “run a bunch of LXC instances”, which by their definition can’t happen on Windows. Presumably they’ll just run a lot more VMs, then, which is a possible workaround.
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Kernel Space
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Nearly one year after the release of PulseAudio 5.0, the release of PulseAudio 6.0 is finally here with many changes.
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F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren’t too exciting.
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Back in 2013 Torvalds talked of renaming Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0 when the time came, but as talked about in several articles since then, there hasn’t been much communication whether the in-development Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0. Like with the move from Linux 2.6.x to Linux 3.0, Torvalds wanted to move to v4.0 simply since the minor point release numbers were getting high.
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Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
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Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 “Hawaii” users of the open-source driver.
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Graphics Stack
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While we’re only in the middle of the Linux 3.20 kernel, for what might still be called Linux 4.0, Intel already has updated DRM driver code for testing that will not be merged until Linux 3.21 (or what might also be known as Linux 4.1).
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While Intel’s official Mesa DRI driver has supported “Gen8″ Broadwell graphics for many months, today the support for these latest-generation HD/Iris Graphics processors landed within the unofficial ILO Gallium3D driver.
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While the X.Org Foundation is voting on joining SPI and the SPI already represents a range of open-source projects from PostgreSQL to Debian, this organization is being criticized this week over how they negatively interacted with the Elementary OS project.
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Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine’s Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server.
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Applications
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It’s been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize.
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Jonathan Thomas posted an update on OpenShot and the new features its gained recently in the lead-up to OpenShot 2.0. Among the progress shared in the “OpenShot Valentines Weekend Update” is read/write animated GIF support, major video playback improvements, cross-platform improvements, a new icon and branding, and libOpenShot 0.0.4 has been released. Jonathan has also made good progress on the Qt user-interface to OpenShot.
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Frederik Gladhorn created the QtTextToSpeech module a while ago as a test to see how feasible it would be to wrap all the platforms Qt is supported on’s TTS APIs in one easy to use Qt API. This turned out to be a great idea in my opinion. The predecessor to QtSpeech in KDE applications was Jovie, formerly known as kttsd. While it worked for the most part it required a daemon to be running which spoke with different synthesizers (originally) then was modified to use speech-dispatcher directly instead (when it was renamed to Jovie). QtSpeech on the other hand is a library. If you want to use it, you link to it in your application, create a QTextToSpeech object, and pass any text to speak to it’s “say” method. No D-Bus connection required, no daemon required, just a small, light library that wraps the native platform TTS API directly.
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Tonido is a cross platform, free application that allows you to access all files on your computer from a web browser, smartphone, tablet or even DLNA enabled devices. You can access your files from anywhere, and ofcourse you can share them to your friends, family, and colleagues as well. Additionally, you can create a secure private share that only authorized people are allowed to access them. As you’re the only person to access or share your files to others, you have a private and secure Cloud on your hand.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alright, so Colossal Order thinks they can mend our broken city builder hearts with Cities: Skylines next month, March 10th. What demands are they going to make of our Mayoral PCs to achieve this?
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Artifex Mundi has had a strong presence on Steam for Linux since they got through Steam Greenlight last year. Last month they published their 14th game on the digital store, and as usual it was a same-day release for Linux on Steam.
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I know some of you are wanting this badly, so the good news is that Age Of Wonders III will be officially released on Linux in beta form soon.
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The developers working on the Linux versions of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux have released a long-awaited new patch release.
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Linux gamers still seem to be unable to play co-up, the motion blur when running is still there when turned off (not as bad as it was), and performance is still utterly abysmal. I have relayed my feedback to Techland as usual in the hopes they fix it up.
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New Releases
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The Parsix GNU/Linux Project proudly announced a few minutes ago, February 14, that the first maintenance release of the Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (codename Nestor) computer operating system based on the Debian 7 Wheezy distribution has been officially released and is now available for download from its website or as an upgrade to existing Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 users.
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Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (code name Nestor) brings the latest stable GNOME desktop environment, a brand new kernel built using or modernized kernel build system, updated installer and support for UEFI based systems. This version has been synchronized with Debian Wheezy repositories as of February 6, 2015. Parsix Nestor ships with GNOME 3.12 and LibreOffice productivity suit by default. Highlights: GNOME Shell 3.12.2, X.Org 1.14.7, GRUB 2, GNU Iceweasel (Firefox) 35.0.1, GParted 0.12.1, Empathy 3.12.7, LibreOffice 3.5.4, VirtualBox 4.3.18 and a brand new kernel based on Linux 3.14.32 with TuxOnIce 3.3, BFS and other extra patches. Live DVD has been compressed using SquashFS and XZ.
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We’re proud to announce the release of Rebellin Linux v2.5! Plenty of great news from the Rebellin Project!
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including the untroublesome and fast Exton|OS, had the pleasure of informing us today, February 14, about a new build for its MeX Linux computer operating system based on Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Debian 8 Jessie, and Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The third Beta of the forthcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially announced via Mageia’s blog on February 13, as a gift for Valentine’s Day “The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests.”
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The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests. You will find more information about it on the Release Notes page.
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The third beta to the much delayed Mageia 5 is now available for some Valentine’s weekend testing.
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Red Hat Family
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There’s a new trend called “devops” that is sweeping the enterprise IT world and its become a life-or-death career situation for many IT departments.
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Fedora
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At the DevConf.cz conference last weekend, I was given the okay to let it slip that Remy DeCausemaker will be joining Red Hat to work full-time on Fedora Community Action and Impact. Remy has been around Fedora a long time, and from his previous position at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was instrumental in launching the first minor in Free and Open Source Software. Remy will join the Fedora Council and lead initiatives for even greater Fedora community success and growth.
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DevConf.cz 2015 took place last week in Brno, Czech Republic as the annual Red Hat / Fedora focused open-source Linux event. For those interested, the videos of the sessions are up online.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”
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Version 0.11 of the Mir Display Server was released this week for Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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A recent post on the elementary blog about how they ask for payment on download created a bit of a stir this week. One particular sentence struck a nerve (it has since been removed from the post): “We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.”
No, they aren’t. I understand that people want to get paid for their work. It’s only natural. Especially when you’d really like that work to be what puts food on the table and not something you do after you work a full week for someone else. I certainly don’t begrudge developers asking for money. I don’t even begrudge requiring payment before being able to download the software. The developers are absolutely right when they say “elementary is under no obligation to release our compiled operating system for free download.”
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Phones
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Android
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Taking a look back at the week’s news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including all of Samsung’s leaks around the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge, the Sony Xperia Z4, phablets fight it out, Android’s crash rate beating iOS, Microsoft and Samsung team up, who’s using Android Wear, the dates for I/O 2015, and OnePlus loves Tuesdays.
Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android over the last seven days (and you can read the weekly Apple news digest here).
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Yesterday, I linked to a page on Amazon that offered $140 of free Android apps for a limited time. But I goofed because there’s also another page that includes an ongoing list of the one hundred top free Android apps in Amazon’s store, and I forgot to include it. The list includes free games as well as free apps, and it’s updated hourly.
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Paul Ford, once again, has written up something fascinating. He discusses something I had no idea happened: when an iPhone user texts with another iPhone user using iMessage, the outgoing texts appear in calm blue bubbles. When an iPhone user texts with a non-iPhone user (or an iPhone user using something other than iMessage — meaning mainly Android users, obviously), those outgoing texts are in a harsh green. Here are the two examples Paul shows, starting with the iPhone to iPhone:
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Google is testing a way to make its super-cheap Android One smartphones more useful and accessible to people in emerging markets.
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Google’s latest ad spot centered around their new motto — “Be Together, Not the Same” — hit the net late last night. The video doesn’t feature a slew of Canadian Androids or thousands of Android devices singing in unison. None of that. It’s rather simple, showing a variety of videos from around the net in which people are engaged in their own, unique, sometimes complex handshakes. That’s about it.
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The popular Xposed Framework, which adds tons of customization options to Android, is now available as an alpha build for Android 5.0 Lollipop. Just the other day, developer rovo89 posted a teaser on XDA hinting that Xposed for Android 5.0 would be available ‘soon’. That day has finally come, so if you’re rooted and running Lollipop, get to it!
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Samsung’s products include the Galaxy S4/S5, Galaxy S5 with KNOX, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition with KNOX 2, Galaxy Note Edge with KNOX 2, Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 LTE with KNOX 2, and the Galaxy Alpha with KNOX 2. For Samsung, Knox provides the added security features key to making the grade in the CSfC program.
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However, never say never: Xiaomi revealed last year that it plans to invest $1 billion in online video content, which could eventually pave the way to target Chinese expats, or even wider audiences, outside of China as well. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a closer look at Xiaomi’s Mi TV, the company’s 47-inch smart TV, which was on display at the press event as well.
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With many organizations incorporating open source code into their software, business managers should have a basic understanding of what open source is all about. After all, Gartner and Accenture report open source adoption rates nearing 100% so it’s likely that your development team is already incorporating open source code into their projects.
So, what is open source? When a developer chooses to make his or her project open source, it gives third party developers the right to tinker and innovate with it. Check out this comprehensive video for an in depth explanation.
Developers incorporate open source into their projects to accelerate development time, thus reducing costs for the organization overall. Most of the time, the code is open to the public; but it is imperative that collaborators refer to a set of chief regulations and terms involved in open source software license management and dispersal.
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Google has announced the launch of PerfKit, an open source cloud benchmarking tool aimed at aiding developers evaluating performance features.
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Events
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In less than a week, SCALE13x kicks off in Los Angeles! The hotel it takes place in is full so it promises to be busy – of course, there are more hotels around.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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My blog post on the Oracle/Sun merger got quite a bit of attention, and a few folks from Oracle took exception to my portrayal of Sparc dying on the vine and a thin roadmap. After a few conversations, I have a better picture of things, and I was wrong.
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CMS
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But before Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was on the path to being a billion-dollar company, Mullenweg was simply an eager coder with a healthy attitude for self-experimentation.
In conversation with author Tim Ferriss this week, Mullenweg elaborated on some of his productivity hacks, including his now-famous stint with the “Uberman” polyphasic sleep schedule. Polyphasic sleep simply means more than one sleep period per day; many of our friends in Spain are on a polyphasic sleep cycle with their luxurious afternoon siestas.
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Healthcare
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The OpenEMR community has released version 4.2.0. This new version will be 2014 ONC Certified as a Modular EHR.
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Funding
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What’s big data analytics worth in monetary terms? Hitachi gave a clue this week with news that it intends to acquire business intelligence company Pentaho for a sum rumored to range between $500 million and $600 million.
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BSD
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We hope to continue rolling these –CURRENT images as a way for testers and developers to tryout both FreeBSD and PC-BSD bleeding edge features, often months before a planned release. These images include a full PKG repository compiled for that months image. Users of this system will also be able to “upgrade” when the next monthly image is published.
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The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Valentine’s Day traditionally is a day to show and celebrate love. So why do not take this as a chance to show your love for Free Software this year?
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Every year on 14th February, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all Free Software users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
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Today the Free Software Foundation Europe reminds us to thank and celebrate all those in Free Software we love and whose work we enjoy and built upon. In KDE, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything we do in some way depends on Free Software written by many other people – the huge ecosystem around us.
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A picture is worth thousand words and describing love with letters is much more harder than with images. On this page we collect some examples of people from all over the world expressing their enthusiasm for freedom in both software and society with photos.
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Openness/Sharing
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Last night I had a crazy realization: I could probably replace the majority of what my team hopes to accomplish with standup meetings, design documents, project management apps, and social code sharing features with a single tool.
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Health/Nutrition
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Jennifer White’s painful family story is convincing hundreds of vaccine-hesitant parents around the world to rethink their actions.
On Tuesday, White wrote a Facebook post about her newborn baby’s possible exposure to measles in a Markham doctor’s office waiting room in late January. In it, she slammed anti-vaxxers and their refusal to protect their children, and hers.
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Virginia could keep the suppliers of the drugs used in executions secret, as well as all the components they mix to make the drug cocktail used in lethal injections under a bill the state Senate approved Tuesday.
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Security
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The internet has connected millions across the globe, rooting itself into the day-to-day activities. If something happens to it, it’s not just the end of kitty pictures – the whole world’s economy would collapse. What would the fallout be? How much harm can be done online? What does it mean to be a hacker these days? We ask professor at the University of Sussex and author of a book about hacking communities, Tim Jordan, on Sophie&Co.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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President Obama says he has not yet decided whether to send arms to the Ukrainian military to fight Russian-backed rebels. Obama criticized Russia’s role in the conflict during a joint news conference at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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The emotional weight a photojournalist endures in covering conflict can be suppressed, but it can never be understated. And the commitment to highlighting the spirit of survival in the victims of the conflict can never be overstated. For American photojournalist Heidi Levine, that emotional toll has been severely challenged over her nearly 30 years documenting the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In the past year, she has done her work while also facing the almost simultaneous passing of two family members–her grandmother and father–while on assignment nearly 8,000 miles away from home.
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The news that President Obama has formally asked US Congress to authorize military force against ISIS is not surprising. What may come as a shock to Americans oblivious to these developments is that the administration has de facto declared war on Syria.
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The U.N. envoy to Yemen has returned to Sanaa and resumed contacts with major political players to find a way out of a deepening crisis caused by a Shiite rebel takeover, participants in the talks said Sunday.
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‘The devastating and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that when we give military authority to the executive, it should not be a blank check,’ says Congressional Progressive Caucus
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What is not silly is that we still have local employees at Embassy Sana’a. They, typically, are not evacuated when post suspends operations. In 2003, Ghulam Sakhi Ahmadzai, the building maintenance supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was the Foreign Service National Employee of the Year. He was recognized for his exceptional efforts in Afghanistan during the 13-year absence of American employees and following the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001. His loyalty to the U.S. government and to maintaining the integrity of the embassy during that absence, despite personal risk, could not be repaid by that one award. No doubt there are other Ghulams in Tripoli and Sana’a and in other posts where we have suspended operations in the past. Please keep them in your thoughts.
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The arson attack was the third incident of Islamaphobic violence this week.
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An early morning fire Friday at an Islamic center in southeast Houston left the facility’s faithful wondering if what appears to be an intentionally set fire was tied to their religion.
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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday criticized President Obama for his silence following the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina this week, the latest sign relations between the two leaders have become strained.
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Mohammad Na’us was one of the most respected men in al Bab. He was the undertaker who washed the bodies of the dead prior to burial, a pious Quranic scholar who issued the sundown call to prayer in the Syrian town near the Turkish border, and for the past year, a seller of bread in his neighborhood.
But on Dec. 28, the bakery’s delivery was late and he missed the prayers at sundown. Religious police arrested Na’us, a father of five in his 50s, and ordered him to spend one night in prison.
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If American mass media seemed reluctant to cover the murder of three Muslims students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a hate crime, the same was not true in the Middle East, where strong opinions were aroused.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan criticized President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for not speaking out on the issue (which is under investigation by local police and the FBI).
Erdogan said, “If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don’t make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you . . . As politicians, we are responsible for everything that happens in our countries and we have to show our positions.”
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The good folks at NBC send over a partisan breakdown. Fifty two percent of Republicans support Obama’s authorization request, as do 51 percent of independents and 60 percent of Democrats.
A few points about this. First, Republican voters appear at odds with GOP lawmakers on this topic. The latter have been arguing that, if anything, Obama’s request is too limiting. As Marco Rubio put it so felicitously, Congress should give Obama an authorization that says nothing more than we “authorize the president to take whatever steps are necessary to defeat ISIS. Period.” But a bare majority of Republicans supports the limits in the authorization Obama proposed, such as they are.
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President François Hollande of France on Thursday announced the sale of nearly $6 billion worth of military hardware to Egypt, including two dozen Rafale fighter jets and a naval frigate.
The contract represents the first foreign sale of the Rafale for its manufacturer, Dassault Aviation, which has been under intense pressure to find export customers for the warplane as France scales back its orders as part of government spending cuts.
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The four-star general in charge of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan told senators today that he has given the Pentagon different options for slowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
There are now roughly 13,000 international troops in Afghanistan, 9,800 of them Americans, Campbell said. President Obama’s current plan would have reduced that to 5,500 soldiers, mostly centered in Kabul, by the end of this year. Army Gen. Cambell said that the Afghan government under its new president, Ashraf Ghani, did not want the U.S. to pull back so quickly.
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FBI Director James Comey repeatedly defended the police in a speech intended to address race relations after a series of high-profile killings by law enforcement officers.
Speaking at Georgetown University this morning, Comey said citizens need to have more empathy for police, that police response time is not influenced by race, and that “law enforcement is not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods.”
Comey also cited and quoted from the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the Broadway play “Avenue Q,” adding that while everyone has a duty to try and overcome bias, “racial bias isn’t epidemic in those who join law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts.” And yet “after years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel” and begin viewing black citizens differently.
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Dr. Suzanne Barakat, sister of one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims, appeared on Morning Joe Friday morning to strongly dispute the early police theory that her brother, his wife, and sister-in-law were shot by Craig Stephens Hicks over a “parking dispute.” That all three victims were Muslim, and that Hicks had loudly proclaimed anti-religious sentiment, has led many to label the triple murder a hate crime.
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Three years before 9/11, Ash Carter was already talking catastrophe.
Carter, confirmed Thursday as Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, vividly predicted in 1998 a near-future terrorist attack that would have long-lasting consequences beyond the immediate loss of thousands of lives.
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Mohammed Saleh Tauiman was just 13 years old in 2014 when the Guardian newspaper gave him a camera so he could record life under the drones that flew over Marib province, Yemen.
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One of more than 150 religious leaders who drafted a statement opposing the use of lethal drones by the United States military said Feb. 11 it’s an issue that more Baptists should care about.
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After readings from the Bible and the Qur’an the worshippers dedicated themselves to peace and shouted out “Stop the drones!” and “Drones kill”. Most of the protestors were men and women training for ordained ministry in the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Bishop Edward Musonda from the Anglican Church in Zambia said: “It is a pleasure to take part in this act of Christian witness against this savage military weaponry.”
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A US drone strike which killed a senior al-Shabaab leader in Somalia a week ago appears to have been part of a change of tactics by the Americans since they started targeting the militant group in 2007. It was the fifth consecutive such strike against al-Shabaab’s leadership, with drones now appearing to have superseded other, manned aircraft and cruise missiles in the seven years since attacks began in Somalia.
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Morality is missing in action as innocent people die in the strikes, fueling anger around the globe.
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For years, the US has relied on drones to prevent Yemen from collapsing. The strategy hasn’t worked.
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Sen. Rand Paul is joining three Democrats in urging a federal court to release secret documents about the government’s use of drones to kill three Americans.
Along with Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.), the Kentucky Republican filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Wednesday supporting a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and The New York Times.
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Saying the government cites “national security” too often to shield information from scrutiny, four U.S. senators urged a federal appeals court Wednesday to divulge more about rules it follows when it makes U.S. citizens the target of anti-terror drone strikes.
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While deployed, I concluded our drone strikes disproportionately kill innocent people. As a military chaplain, I preached a sermon questioning the morality of such warfare. After my commander read it, he said “the message does not support the mission” and had me investigated, officially reprimanded and released from active duty for “retraining.”
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No military technology is perhaps more viscerally upsetting than the idea of a machine, armed with a gun, making the decision on its own to kill people. It’s a theme throughout dystopian fiction and films, and it animates protests against drones, despite the fact that military drones still have humans at the controls. Autonomy for weapons–where a gun turret or future machine will be programmed to press the trigger on its own–is a definite possibility in future wars. A new report from the Center for New American Security, a Washington D.C. think tank, wants to guide us calmly into understanding this future of armed thinking machines.
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The peace movement is dead, the media are mute, and, in all likelihood, we will soon be engulfed in an electoral season in which the plain fact that Democrats and Republicans know not what they do will hardly even come up.
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Well, not exactly. New James Bond novels and movies pop up all the time, but Gérard de Villiers (who died in 2013) wrote either 100 or 200 novels about an Austrian (and freelance CIA operative), named Malko Linge, that have sold millions of copies in France and made him “the most popular writer of spy thrillers in French history.” The discrepancy with the numbers (100 or 200) hardly matters, though those figures are cited in the biographical information about the writer at the beginning of the two novels discussed here: Chaos in Kabul and The Madmen of Benghazi, both originally published in France in 2013. Clearly, the guy was prolific—much more than Ian Fleming. His expertise was the Middle East, which made his stories not only current but, often, prescient.
[...]
At the beginning of Chaos in Kabul, Linge is hired to eliminate Hamid Karzai. Yes, you read that correctly. So Linge is flown into Afghanistan after responding to his CIA agent, “This mission is impossible. The Agency has everything it needs in Afghanistan. You operate a fleet of drones that can hit anything. What can you expect from one man against the Karzai machine? Besides, you know I’m not a killer.” And the answer to his response? It can’t be obvious that Americans caused Karzai’s death. So, Linge agrees, but first he’s got to find an accomplice who will do the actual killing. That guy is a South African thug, and the plan is that Karzai will be shot when he’s riding in his motorcade.
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Even Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, the author of numerous books and a legal expert for Fox News, in an otherwise excellent history of the usurpation of unique American civil liberties at the expense of ever expanding executive power (see Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty) focuses too much on President Barack Obama’s killing of American citizens without due process – for example, Anwar al Alawki in Yemen in 2011. Napolitano correctly argues that an American president is essentially claiming the right to murder his own citizens without prior legal niceties, but he focuses too much on the use of exotic drone technology to do so and not enough on a larger and more important problem. If anyone – U.S. citizen or not – is attempting to attack the United States, the president should have a right to take them out, provided the Congress has authorized military action or declared war. Even then, according to the founders’ original constitutional vision, if the country is under imminent threat of attack, the president can take appropriate action and get congressional authorization at the earliest possible time. If the president doesn’t have such legislative approval or a legitimate “imminent attack” rationale, he is essentially murdering people – U.S. citizens or not.
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In light of the threat posed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, President Obama wants Congress to authorize military force against the Islamist group in the Middle East. Although the president believes a 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives him the legal grounds to go to war on his own, he has sent Congress a draft authorization for their approval.
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If you already understand U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, that’s what you might take away from the movie, “American Sniper.” But many viewers, unaware of the truth behind the war, receive a distorted message. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film looks at the events only through U.S. eyes. It twists the truth, falsifying historical context while adding poisonous anti-Arab bigotry.
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I didn’t think much of this until hours ago when I read a banner story of the Manila Times written by its chairman emeritus Dr. Dante Ang. The burden of the piece is that in the Mamasapano raid, codenamed Operation Wolverine, the main protagonists were American agents out to get the Malaysian terrorist Marwan and the BIFF leader Abdulbasit Usman. The PNP-SAF commandos were only security escorts to the agents.
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This was revealed by its commander then, now relieved Police Director Getulio Napeñas, during a hearing Monday, February 9, on the operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, that claimed the lives of at least 68 individuals, including 44 elite SAF troopers.
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Lives: A total of 66 lives, not including Marwan’s, were lost – 44 SAF, 18 MILF and four civilians. The SAF casualties were nine of the 42 members of the 84th SAF Company dispatched to Pidsandawan to get Marwan and 35 of the 36 members of the 55th deployed in Tukanalipao – the lone survivor PO3 Robert Lalang.
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Like many children, 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman suffered from nightmares. In his dreams, he would see flying “death machines” that turned family and friends into burning charcoal. No one could stop them, and they struck any place, at any time.
Unlike most children, Mohammed’s nightmares killed him.
Three weeks ago, a CIA drone operating over Yemen fired a missile at a car carrying the teenager, and two others. They were all incinerated. Nor was Mohammed the first in his family to be targeted: drones had already killed his father and brother.
Since president Barack Obama took office in 2009, the US has killed at least 2,464 people through drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones. The figure is courtesy of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says that at least 314 of the dead, one in seven, were civilians.
Recall that for Obama, as The New York Times reported in May 2012, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are counted “as combatants” – unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.
It sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
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Transparency Reporting
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Far too many politicians and legislators aren’t happy with the fact that their emails are subject to public records requests. Some attempt to dodge this layer of accountability by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is one such politician.
Unfortunately for Kitzhaber and many others just like him, public records laws anticipate this endaround. In many states, personal email accounts are also FOIA-able if the emails discuss official (read: public) business. Kitzhaber, however, believed he could outbludgeon the system.
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At the end of an hour-long panel discussion on the film Citizenfour on Thursday night that he was moderating, David Carr sat back in his chair and in his distinctive, weather-worn voice asked Edward Snowden, the NSA exile, a final question via video link. “I’ve got to channel all the moms in the audience for just a sec,” he said. “You’re in Russia. So are you getting enough to eat? Is the food good?” It was classic David Carr. Unexpected, empathetic, funny. It raised a robust laugh from the packed crowd.
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On Twitter Thursday night, I tried to fight the rumor that beloved New York Times media columnist David Carr died the same evening. I’d seen him less than three hours earlier, interviewing Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (via satellite) at a sold out “Times Talk.” He was sharp and funny; he seemed happy; he had a bad cough. But he could not possibly be dead.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We still haven’t reached peak oil. But peak milk happened in 2004, peak soybeans in 2009, and peak chicken in 2006. Rice peaked in 1988.
A new study published in Ecology and Society explains that 21 key resources that humans rely on—mostly food—have already passed their peak rate of production.
“Peak,” in this case, doesn’t mean that we’re actually producing fewer chickens or less milk yet. Instead, the researchers looked at the fact that the rate of production has plateaued, at the same time that population is increasing.
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So it turns out that building your own regional water system is costly, time-consuming and difficult. Who knew?
Apparently not officials in Genesee, Lapeer and Sanilac counties, which unhooked from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to build their own system, the unpronounceable Karegnondi Water Authority, helmed by Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright.
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Since the turn of this century, the US south-west has spent more than a decade in drought. Last year was the warmest on record in California, which is in the middle of its driest spell for more than 400 years. But according to a new scientific study, that’s nothing compared to what comes next.
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Finance
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But Alderman got the primary surplus back to front. The definition should actually be before interest payments–the primary surplus being a measure of whether a government would be spending more than it takes in if it weren’t paying back past borrowing. Could it be the Times reporter does not understand the magnitude of Greece’s financial challenges?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prosecutor leading the probe into possible coordination between Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and outside groups has asked some Wisconsin Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from hearing a challenge to the investigation.
A notation in court records titled “Motion for Recusal and Notice of Ethical Concerns” indicates that on February 12, Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz filed a sealed motion for one or more of the Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case. Schmitz was previously on George W. Bush’s shortlist for U.S. Attorney and said that he voted for Walker.
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Scott WalkerAlso on the show: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was just a “drafting error” that led to his proposed budget calling for the evisceration of the central philosophy guiding the state’s university system, along with $300 million in cuts. Reporters and activists showed that to be a falsehood, and Walker’s proposed changes look like a revealing peak at the agenda of the man who wants to be the next president. We’ll hear from a key player in that story, Mary Bottari from the Center for Media and Democracy.
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Sun News Network, the right-wing Canadian news network described as “Fox News North,” is shutting down.
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It was the NYPD’s very own “Hot Coffee” case–a sign of a supposedly hyper-litigious system spiraling out of control. A “machete-wielding mad man” attacks the cops, gets shot in the leg, and then sues the NYPD for damages.
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We first spotted a version of this quote in a Bloomberg column by David Weigel, and then checked the quotes with our colleague Jose DelReal, who had attended the conference.
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Hillary Clinton has everything she needs to run for president: money, name recognition, staff, organization. Everything except ideas.
The 2016 presidential campaign will begin in earnest in late summer. This hasn’t snuck up on her; she has known this was coming since at least 2008. Yet here she is, six months before the unofficial start of her run, starting to figure out what she’ll do if she wins.
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Censorship
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François Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark who was also at the event, tweeted that he was “still alive.”
Vilks, a 68-year-old Swedish artist, has faced several attempted attacks and death threats after he depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a dog in 2007.
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Privacy
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The BBC could be given new powers to access to people’s private and public data as part of a raft of new measures to tackle licence-fee evasion.
An independent consultation suggested that the corporation could be given access to “new data sources” to help make collection of the charge more efficient.
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It is also striking that the codes of conduct were released on the same day that the UK’s secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that British intelligence services had broken the law, but that they were now in compliance because previously unknown policies had been made public. As Nyst speculates, it could be that the UK government is releasing more details of its spying in the form of these consultation documents in an attempt to head off future losses in the courts.
Whether or not that is the case, it certainly seems that the attempts by civil liberties groups to end or at least limit mass surveillance are already having an effect on the UK government, and forcing it to provide basic details of its hitherto completely-secret activities. That success is a strong incentive to continue fighting for more proportionality and meaningful oversight here.
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You might not think Canada’s digital spies are on par with those in the US and UK—but rest assured, America’s northern neighbour is just as capable of perpetuating mass surveillance on a global scale. Case in point: at over 200 locations around the world, spies from Canada’s cyberintelligence agency have been monitoring huge volumes of global internet traffic travelling across the internet’s core.
From these locations, Communications Security Establishment (CSE) can track who is accessing websites and files of interest. Its analysts can also log email addresses, phone numbers and even the content of unencrypted communications—and retain encrypted communication for later study, too—as well as intercept passwords and login details for later access to remote servers and websites.
But perhaps more importantly, tapping into global internet traffic is a means for CSE to monitor, and also exploit, an ever growing list of digital threats, such as vulnerabilities in networks and computers and the spread of malware as well as botnets and the computers under their control. In the process, analysts can keep tabs on both friendly and foreign governments conducting covert cyber attacks and infiltration of their own.
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The National Security Agency, still reeling from massive leaks caused by Edward Snowden, is preparing to be hit with another major loss of secrets, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The leaks are expected to be published in the near future by a news outlet that was not further identified by the officials familiar with details of the compromise. The NSA is aware of the news outlet’s forthcoming disclosures and is taking steps to try and minimize any damage they will cause.
According to the officials, the latest NSA disclosure of secrets is not the result of an insider stealing documents, as occurred in the case of fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Instead, the leaks will reveal certain NSA technical cyber intelligence gathering capabilities. The officials did not provide details about the leaks.
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For most Oscar nominees, the weeks before the February 22 ceremony are a whirlpool of stress.
But Laura Poitras, up for best documentary for “Citizenfour,” insists it is like going for a healthy walk — compared to what she went through to get here.
When former National Security Agency (NSA) consultant Edward Snowden, who revealed the massive scope of US intelligence surveillance, contacted the filmmaker, she found her life turned into a spy novel.
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The top executives of Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Facebook Inc. won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all were invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to be at the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama has signed an executive order that will attempt to protect America’s crucial computer networks by sharing knowhow between g-men and techies.
The new order instructs federal agencies to set up a clearing house of real-time, up-to-the-minute information on what’s menacing US infrastructure. Companies running those networks and systems will be able to look into the intelligence stream, get an idea of what’s about to hit them, and beef up their defenses accordingly. This is assuming the system works as described.
This sharing of information is supposed to go two ways: businesses can use the clearing house to tip off the Feds about threats that everyone ought to know about, we’re told.
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President Obama called for companies to voluntarily share more cyber attack information with federal agencies during a first-ever White House summit on cyber security issues, signing an executive action to help pave the way for such sharing.
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The Obama administration is expected to take executive action Friday, sweeping aside two years of congressional negotiations and bickering in an effort to bolster the country’s cyber-defenses.
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A California court has once again upheld the legality of the US National Security Agency’s Bush-era mass telephone surveillance program, but has withheld its reasoning on grounds of national security.
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A US JUDGE HAS ruled in favour of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a personal privacy case, despite the protests of rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Jewel vs the NSA was ruled on by judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, who told plaintiffs that they had failed to prove that the government violated a long established hope that ‘a man’s home is his castle’, or rather the Fourth Amendment.
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An entire ballroom of more than 1,000 stood to applaud Edward Snowden as he was introduced at the Students for Liberty convention in Washington, and again after Snowden challenged them to “win” against the government’s attempt to expand its own power.
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An NSA document newly published today suggests two interesting facts that haven’t previously been reported.
The Intercept, which published the document, highlighted that in it the NSA expresses fear that it may be teaching Iran how to hack, but there are two other points in the document that merit attention.
One concerns the spy tool known as Flame; the other refers to concerns the NSA had about partnering with the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters and Israeli intelligence in surveillance operations.
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The document suggests that such attacks don’t just invite counterattacks but also school adversaries on new techniques and tools to use in their counterattacks, allowing them to increase the sophistication of these assaults. Iran, the document states, ‘has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.’”
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A federal judge ruled in favor of the National Security Agency in a key surveillance case on Tuesday, dismissing a challenge which claimed the government’s spying operations were groundless and unconstitutional.
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This week, a US District Court judge ruled in favor of the NSA in a case challenging its tactics of intercepting messages on the internet without a warrant. California District Judge Jeffrey White said that the plaintiffs in Jewel vs. NSA didn’t establish the legal standing needed to pursue claims that the US government violated their Fourth Amendment rights. White ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence presented by the plaintiffs, and that the risk of revealing of state secrets would prevent the case from going forward even if they had. The group, who are all AT&T customers being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), still has a case against the wider telephone record collection and other forms of mass surveillance employed by the National Security Agency. Jewel vs. NSA was filed in 2008 and is one of the earliest lawsuits brought against the federal government over its monitoring practices, preceding the whistleblowing work of Edward Snowden.
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On Wednesday, Tennessee legislators filed bills to directly take on NSA spying by withholding vital state resources and material support from any federal agency engaged in warrantless surveillance.
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruling that GCHQ’s access to information intercepted by the NSA breached human rights laws is feeding a growing and increasingly heated global debate regarding the whole issue of digital privacy.
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U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday that revelations of U.S. surveillance on German Chancellor Angela Merkel “damaged impressions” Germans hold of the U.S. government.
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Though Snowden beamed in remotely, conversation hosted by New York Times brings together trio that revealed vast secretive surveillance network to global public.
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President Barack Obama has called for the German people, and by extension Europe, to trust that the US is not infringing on their privacy, despite the Snowden leaks.
Obama issued the call for “trust” about the PRISM leaks during a joint press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel when asked how the leaks have affected the two nations’ relationship.
“There’s no doubt that the Snowden revelations damaged the impressions of Germans with respect to the US government and our intelligence cooperation,” he said.
“What I would ask would be that the German people recognise that the US has always been at the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, and that we have traditions of due process that we respect.
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Talks in Washington on Monday focused on the conflict in Ukraine, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama also touched on issues including NSA espionage and nuclear negotiations with Iran.
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President Barack Obama is asking Germans to give the United States “the benefit of the doubt” on National Security Agency surveillance, given U.S. history.
Obama says “there’s no doubt” that NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. spying programs damaged the impression of U.S. intelligence operations among Germans. He says that’s understandable, given Germany’s history.
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It’s been a lousy week so far for opponents of U.S. spy tactics: a federal judge shut down a long-running challenge to the NSA’s mass collection of customer internet data, while President Obama brushed off a call to do something about the sprawl of government surveillance.
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One year ago, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) reviewed the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata program and concluded the program was both illegal and imprudent as a policy matter. Under this program conducted pursuant to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA on a daily basis indiscriminately collects Americans’ calling records from telephone companies, including each call’s date and time, duration, and participating telephone numbers. This “metadata” does not include the contents of telephone conversations. The program is intended to enable the government to identify communications among known and unknown terrorism suspects. PCLOB recommended that the program be discontinued and that the government instead seek telephone call records directly from phone companies on a case-by-case basis where there is evidence of potential terrorist activity.
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A bill filed in Montana yesterday would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
Montana Rep. Daniel Zolnikov (R-45) introduced HB443, a bill that would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the 10th state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
“The best thing about privacy is that it is not a partisan issue,” said Zolnikov. “Groups like the ACLU and the Tea Party can work together to protect the rights of Montanans.”
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ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock will talk about mass surveillance, liberty and activism. He’ll say why mass surveillance is a danger to democracy and how we can work together to curb it.
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MPs wants guarantees from the government that the decision to give the security services wider powers to tap phones and internet traffic will not be abused, website nu.nl reports on Tuesday. Home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk and defence minister Jeanine Hennis are due to present their draft legislation for expanding the security services’ intelligence-gathering powers shortly. Nu.nl questioned various party representatives about their position.
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VVD Parliamentarian Klaas Dijkhoff denounced the phantom images raised by opponents that large scale data trawls will soon be conducted in the Netherlands, just like the NSA does in the United states, NU. reports. “The fear exists and people like to call up that feeling, but there is not country in the world where information is dealt with more carefully.” he said. But the Tweede Kamer (lower house of parliament) still wants guarantees that the expansion of the intelligence services’ surveillance capabilities will not lead to NSA practices.
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President Obama won’t end the government’s controversial collection of data about millions of Americans on his own, because he’d rather the matter be dealt with by Congress.
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Oklahoma HB1738 would deny much-needed material support or resources to warrantless federal spying programs. And SB444 would ban the state from participating in an unconstitutional federal-state information program. HB1738 must pass out of the House State and Federal Relations Committee while SB444 must pass out of the Senate Judiciary Committee before the bills can receive full votes in their respective chambers.
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As we continue to read through documents released on February 3 that collectively detail the intelligence community’s efforts to implement Presidential Policy Directive-28, (PPD-28), we thought it would be helpful to overview briefly, and to compare. implementing documents issued by three agencies in particular: NSA, CIA, and FBI.
Overall, there is a great deal of overlap between the three agencies’ implementation policies. But they differ from each other in interesting ways, both with regard to retention and dissemination of information, and with regard to permitted departures from general rules contemplated by the policies themselves.
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To drive the point home, he signed an executive order to this effect, in the hopes of inspiring collaboration between companies and government security agencies.
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Twitter said today that the U.S. government has filed a highly redacted version of the company’s draft national security transparency report, a step that shows for the first time information about data requests Twitter has gotten from the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
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Mass surveillance of the internet by GCHQ prior to December was unlawful, according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
It said that the “intelligence sharing” process did not comply with human rights law, and there was a lack of transparency.
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In the end – and maybe this is the biggest change of all – we all have to accept that perfect safety is illusory. Doing so would make society will be a little more open, a little more liberal, a little more scary, and perhaps a little more dangerous. But I think any democracy worthy of the name can live with that, because it’s the price of freedom.
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A new US government “cyber threat” agency will take information on computer security breaches at private companies, pair it with classified intelligence – and put it back out to businesses so they can learn how to beef up their defences.
That’s the dream, anyway, according to President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, who launched the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) on Tuesday in Washington DC.
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Next time Brian Williams or his carefully-coiffed successor assigns blame to some foreign actor for a cyberoutrage, I expect the “Cyber Threats Intelligence Integration Center” to figure prominently in the coverage.
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We live in privacy obsessed times, which is rather ironic. After all, many of those who complained most vociferously about the alleged snooping of the NSA on our personal emails failed to realise that by posting every conceivable piece of personal information on social media, the average spook merely needs to follow you on Twitter to find out everything they need to know.
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It’s a bad week for Samsung. After the firm addressed privacy concerns, some of its Smart TVs began displaying annoying pop-up ads. Meanwhile, the White House plans to form a cybersecurity agency, and smartphone thefts decline thanks to kill switches.
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Our smartphones and computers, of course, listen to us when we’re making audio and video calls. But the microphones are always there, and there are ways a hacker, government, or clever company can turn those microphones on without our knowledge. Sometimes we turn them on ourselves. If we have an iPhone, the voice-processing system Siri listens to us, but only when we push the iPhone’s button. Like Samsung, iPhones with the “Hey Siri” feature enabled listen all the time. So do Android devices with the “OK Google” feature enabled, and so does an Amazon voice-activated system called Echo. Facebook has the ability to turn your smartphone’s microphone on when you’re using the app.
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If there’s one thing we can thank this whole Samsung privacy brouhaha for, it’s casting data retention debates in a whole new light.
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The head of a federal privacy board is reiterating his call to end the government’s bulk collection and storage of Americans’ phone records.
David Medine, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, called for either President Obama or Congress to shut down the National Security Agency program. Obama has deferred to Congress to make the change.
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While some citizens fight back against more encroachments on privacy, the NSA and its backers in the White House, Congress and the Courts are expanding their own reach, now monitoring literally trillions of messages. While legislators have been unable to restrain the NSA, corporations and enterprising journalists are using encryption. Even as intelligence agencies in the US and abroad are escalating their cyber war capacities, private companies are commercializing their technology. All of these issues concern whistleblowers, who say they fear the emergence of a police state if the mass surveillance is not curtailed or stopped.
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Those days of calling your bank to let them know that, yes, you really are in Thailand, and yes, you really did use your credit card to buy $200 in sarongs, may be coming to an end.
The payment processing company Visa will roll out a new feature this spring that will allow its cardholders to inform their banks where they are automatically, using the location function found in nearly every smartphone.
Having your bank and Visa know where you are at all times may sound a little like “Big Brother.” But privacy experts are actually applauding the feature, saying that, if used correctly, it could protect cardholders and cut down on credit card fraud.
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Look, his net neutrality proposal was great. It’s clear that Obama has a deeper understanding of how the internet works than at least a shitload of other politicians. But this cybersecurity order looks potentially milquetoast on the threat-prevention front and straight-up worrisome on the government-slurping-all-our-data horizon.
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Not only were Yahoo, Facebook, and Google among the original “PRISM” companies revealed by Edward Snowden to have been forced into turning over information about their customers to the NSA, but France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Germany were among nations the NSA is accused of spying on as part of related programs. Perhaps today is a bit late to ask for a more open policy of sharing information.
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What we’re witnessing is Reform Theater. A sort of kabuki act which is intended to provide the impression that, in the wake of Ed blundenSnowden’s revelations, something is being done. Officials create the perception of action by occupying themselves with narrow aspects of mass interception and this is intentional. They wouldn’t dare do anything substantial that would threaten the gears of the surveillance state. Instead they’ll leave Big Brother’s infrastructure in place and dither around the edges.
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The Sun was an unlikely advocate for privacy in its special investigation piece early this week on the snooping Samsung telly. Forget phone hacking, it’s the technology companies you need to watch out for. The Sun’s outrage was not confined to Samsung: a neighbouring article reminded us of recent privacy complaints against Facebook and Google.
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After the bruising recriminations between the White House and the technology industry over the National Security Agency, Barack Obama will travel to the Bay Area on Friday to enlist Silicon Valley’s support for his post-Snowden push for cyber security legislation.
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Facebook is teaming up with other big names on the interwebs to create a security information sharing portal, dubbed ThreatExchange*, which went live on Wednesday.
ThreatExchange is billed as a platform that enables security professionals to “share threat information more easily, learn from each other’s discoveries, and make their own systems safer”.
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If we are to end our post-9/11 national security state, the congressional leadership must come to believe that blocking efforts to restore the Bill of Rights will result in real political consequences. If, however, they continue to see no political consequences, Americans’ rights to privacy and due process will continue to diminish into artifacts of a bygone era.
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President announces executive order ahead of summit to spur development of go-between for technology sector and government to share information
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The top executives of Google Inc, Yahoo! Inc and Facebook Inc won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were all invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook is planning to show to the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama will meet here on Friday with the nation’s top technologists on a host of cybersecurity issues and the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers. But nowhere on the agenda is the real issue for the chief executives and tech company officials who will gather on the Stanford campus: the deepening estrangement between Silicon Valley and the government.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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On Friday, the White House convened a “cyber summit” at Stanford’s campus in Palo Alto so that business and government leaders could get together and talk, essentially, about how scary hackers are.
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President Barack Obama took the hot seat with Re/code’s Kara Swisher Friday as the two talked about a range of tech-focused topics, including cyber warfare, the White House’s relationship with Silicon Valley tech giants and the Apple Watch.
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President Barack Obama said Friday that he probably leans more toward strong computer data encryption than many in law enforcement, but added that he understands investigators’ concerns over the matter because of their need to protect people from attacks.
He suggested having a “public conversation” about the issue because “the first time that attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn’t follow up on it, the public’s going to demand answers.”
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In fact, it seems noteworthy that this whole issue of increasing encryption by the tech companies to keep everyone out has been left off the official summit schedule. As the NY Times notes (in the link above), Silicon Valley seems to be pretty much completely fed up with the intelligence community after multiple Snowden revelations revealed just how far the NSA had gone in trying to “collect it all” — including hacking into the foreign data centers of Google and Yahoo.
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Last week, the Obama Administration released a report and documents cataloging progress toward signals intelligence (SIGINT) reform goals set a year ago by the President in a document known as PPD-28. PPD-28 promises foreigners some of the same privacy protections given to US citizens and residents. But it turns out that those protections, even for citizens, are fairly meager, in ways that have not yet fully entered the public conversation about surveillance. US citizens and residents have been — and remain — exposed to suspicionless electronic surveillance. Implementation of PPD-28 will do little to change that.
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This week the Obama administration is releasing its second Executive Order in as many years on computer (“cyber”) security, which reports are saying will create a new department in the intelligence community to handle computer security threat information sharing. Officials are hailing the center as “new” and unprecedented.
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Civil Rights
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Larry Harvey, 71, thought he was doing everything right growing medical marijuana for his personal use. His home state of Washington legalized medical cannabis in 1998, and Harvey says his cultivation of plants with his wife, other family members and a close friend complied with the law.
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Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them.
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The US Senate Committee on Intelligence has issued a significant correction to an appendix to its report on CIA torture after mistakes were highlighted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
A “notice of errata” was published earlier this month showing amendments for almost half of the 119 prisoners held in the CIA’s rendition and enhanced interrogation programme.
The mistakes, which have been put down to a “technical error”, relate to the number of days the detainees were held by the CIA during the programme.
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Random American Citizen Roger Vanderklok (aka “Josef K.“) had the misfortune of going through TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser’s security-screening area. Vanderklok, 57, pictured with his wife, is a Philadelphia architect who runs half-marathons. He flies around the country for weekend races.
The TSA said it was concerned about the gear in his carry-on bag, and pulled him out of line. The items of concern turned out to be only a running watch and some Power Bars, wrapped in a small PVC pipe for protection against crushing. Nonetheless, for the next 30 minutes, screeners checked and rechecked the bag. They found nothing dangerous. Vanderklok protested that he was no threat, and that the items were of no danger to anyone, and insisted on making a complaint.
Electronics and “organic mass” can be used to make bombs, TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser said in response to Vanderlok’s complaint. “The passenger made a bomb threat to me,” Kieser testified later according to a court transcript. “He said ‘I’ll bring a bomb through here any day that I want… and you’ll never find it.’”
- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2015/02/13/man-held-20-hours-for-asking-to-file-tsa-complaint/#sthash.3S4vcvuH.dpuf
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The world needs its whistleblowers. They are indispensable to a healthy society. The employee who, in the public interest, has the independence of judgment and the personal courage to challenge malpractice or illegality is a kind of public hero. Yet, as Sir Robert Francis reported on Wednesday , in the NHS as in any large and bureaucratic organisation, whistleblowers are far more likely to be resented than respected, as Helene Donnelly, the nurse who protested about the failings in care at Mid Staffs, found out. Far from having their names embossed on a roll of honour, Francis found that the doctors and nurses and other NHS staff who reported their anxieties about failings in patient care had been shunned, suspended or even sacked by hospital bosses. Many were left struggling to find a new job. Some have been driven to contemplate suicide.
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index Thursday and revealed the U.S. has received its lowest score since 2006.
The U.S. is ranked 49th in the world — dropping from 46th — right behind Malta, Niger, Burkina Faso and El Salvador.
In comparison, our northern neighbor Canada was ranked eighth this year. Mexico, on the other hand, is 148th.
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Imprisoned former Chicago-area police sergeant Drew Peterson was charged today with hiring a hitman to kill the prosecutor who sent him to prison for 38 years.
Dressed in his prison uniform, Peterson asked for a public defender after hearing the charges against him. Peterson has been in jail since 2012, when he was found guilty of the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio.
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We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Twenty-five years on from the web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.
Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine’s March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.
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Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
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I’ve written before about the GOP’s peculiarly uncompromising stance on net neutrality. At its core, net neutrality has always been a battle between two huge industry groups and therefore never really presented an obvious reason for Republicans to feel strongly about one side or the other. But they’ve taken sides anyway, energetically supporting the anti-neutrality broadband industry against the pro-neutrality tech industry. Today an LA Times article dives more deeply into the problems this is causing:
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In May 2013 I engaged in an hour long web chat with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, a think tank that describes itself as “dedicated to understanding global challenges by applying technological solutions.”
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DRM
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New submitter Dharkfiber sends an article about the Hardened Anti-Reverse Engineering System (HARES), which is an encryption tool for software that doesn’t allow the code to be decrypted until the last possible moment before it’s executed. The purpose is to make applications as opaque as possible to malicious hackers trying to find vulnerabilities to exploit. It’s likely to find work as an anti-piracy tool as well.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So the saga of the Left Shark and Katy Perry’s lawyers keeps getting more and more strange. We’ve already covered the legal threat from Perry’s lawyers to the guy who was offering a 3D printed figurine of the Left Shark, followed by the response explaining to Perry’s lawyers that there is no copyright in left shark, leading to Perry’s lawyers to issue a uh huh there is… while also using the figurine maker’s own photo of his 3D printed shark in their (now abandoned) trademark application.
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Andrus Nomm, one of the Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a year in prison. Nomm signed a plea deal and admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from Mega’s sites.
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A few days ago, it came out that programmer Andrus Nomm had flown to Virginia to be arrested. Nomm had worked for Megaupload in Europe and had been listed in the criminal case against Megaupload and its various employees. His name had mostly fallen off the radar, since he wasn’t down in New Zealand with most of the rest of them. It was obvious in his move to come to the US and be arrested that he must have worked out a plea deal with the feds, and that’s confirmed today with him pleading “guilty” to criminal copyright infringement with prosecutors asking for a year and a day in prison, which the court granted. Kim Dotcom noted that he has “nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm.”
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
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The text from the TPP reads “penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of corresponding gravity.” The EFF suggest that countries who do not have “sufficiently high” fines could be subject to pressure from the US Trade Representative to impose fines the US deems suitable.
It doesn’t stop there though, TPP’s current copyright provisions enable judges to order the seizure, destruction or forfeiture of anything that can be “traceable to infringing activity”, used in the “creation of pirated copyright goods” or is “documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offence”. I find the last quote the most troubling, ‘documentary evidence’ could include the machine on which the content was created, servers it’s hosted on and could, at a stretch, include seizure of another persons machine based on chat logs if the activity was being discussed with a friend.
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