04.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Regrettably, the owner of WikiLeaks-Forum strives to manipulate public opinion in several ways with the help of his staffers. The forum pretends to host lively discussions of a huge community while in fact most of the forum posts (more than 90 percent) are done by staffers.
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Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?
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I had fairly well concluded that the most likely cause was a fire disrupting the electrical and control systems, when CNN now say the sharp left turn was pre-programmed 12 minutes before sign off from Malaysian Air Traffic control, which was followed fairly quickly by that left turn.
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Almost everything is fake. The brave proverbs with which we were brought up – the truth will out, cheats never prosper, virtue will triumph – turn out to be unfounded. For the most part, our lives are run and our views are formed by chancers, cheats and charlatans. They construct a labyrinth of falsehoods from which it is almost impossible to emerge without the help of people who devote their lives to navigating it. This is the role of the media. But the media drag us deeper into the labyrinth.
There are two kinds of corporate lobbyists in the UK. There are those who admit they are lobbyists but operate behind closed doors, and there are those who operate openly but deny they are lobbyists. Because David Cameron has broken his promise to shine “the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and … come clean about who is buying power and influence” we still “don’t know who is meeting whom. We don’t know whether any favours are being exchanged. We don’t know which outside interests are wielding unhealthy influence … Commercial interests – not to mention government contracts – worth hundreds of billions of pounds are potentially at stake.” (All that was Cameron in 2010, by the way) At the same time, the media is bustling with people working for thinktanks which refuse to say who is paying them, making arguments that favour big business and billionaires.
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The channel has made an extraordinary connection with its target audience of 16- to 34-year-olds. Its closure could alienate a generation
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Posted in Intellectual Monopoly at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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A spokesperson for BIS (the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills), commented on the reforms, saying, “One of these measures is copyright exception for archiving and preserving. The existing preservation exception will be updated to apply to all types of media and to museums and galleries, as well as libraries and archives.”
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The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and Information has blocked access to The Pirate Bay, for reasons yet unknown. In addition to the notorious torrent site, Torrentz.eu, Rarbg and possibly several others are blocked too. As always, local users are already discussing ways to work around the restrictions.
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In 1989, a little known group from New York released an album that would change the course of hip hop. De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising sounded like nothing else: spoken word, skit, and psychedelia; sampled exhaustively, sampled from life. 25 years in, it sounds all the more remarkable. It sounds like the Internet.
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Two individuals accused of millions of dollars worth of Android piracy signed plea agreements with the U.S. Government last week, but at least one other defendant has different things in mind. With the hiring of a “much-feared civil rights lawyer”, the former operator of Applanet is going on the offensive against the DOJ.
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It’s been almost a year since US District Judge Otis Wright issued a sanction order repudiating the lawyers behind the “copyright trolling” organization known as Prenda Law. Since then, several other judges have pounded Prenda with expensive sanction orders. Just last week, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and John Steele—the three lawyers commonly linked to Prenda—were found to be in contempt of a devastating sanction order won by AT&T and Comcast.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mostly chronological:
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Next week, on 3 April, Members of the European Parliament will vote on the future of Net Neutrality and the open Internet in Europe. After years of struggle across the European Union, either solid legal protections for the freedom of expression and innovation online will be introduced or telecom operators will be given free reign to discriminate between online communications and use this to force out competition. In light of approaching European elections, citizens must call on their representatives to vote in favour of the protection of fundamental rights and the internet as we know it.
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A few days before the vote that will decide the future of Net Neutrality and the Internet commons in Europe, La Quadrature du Net calls on all Members of the European Parliament to support the amendments proposed by the Social-Democrats (S&D), the Greens (Greens/EFA), the United Left (GUE/NGL) and the Liberals1 (ALDE). These amendments contain strong provisions to protect freedom of expression and freedom of information online, reassert the principle of fair competition and guarantee that users may freely choose between services online. From now until 3 April, citizens should urge their representatives to support this cross-party package of amendments in order to preserve the Internet commons.
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The battle to preserve the open internet is reaching its final stage, with the big European Parliament vote taking place on April 3rd. The report adopted by the Industry Committee two weeks ago includes provisions undermining the principle of net neutrality, putting the open internet and freedom of speech at risk. The good news is that four political groups have tabled proposals for final vote that would prevent discrimination and enshrine real net neutrality in law. Now it is up to our representatives to choose – openness and competition or closed, uncompetitive networks.
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The European Parliament took a major step towards enshrining net neutrality in law today, when the EU Parliament voted yes to a new Regulation for a Telecommunications Single Market.
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Today the European Parliament adopted in first reading the Regulation on the Single Telecoms Market (see the vote call). By amending the text with the amendment proposals made by the Social-Democrats (S&D), Greens (Greens/EFA), United Left (GUE/NGL) and Liberals (ALDE), the Members of the European Parliament took a historic step for the protection of Net Neutrality and the Internet commons in the European Union. La Quadrature du Net warmly thanks all citizens, organisations and parliamentarians who took part in this campaign, and calls on them to remain mobilised for the rest of the legislative procedure.
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Earlier this month, the U.S. government surprised the Internet community by announcing that it plans to back away from its longstanding oversight of the Internet domain name system. The move comes more than 15 years after it first announced plans to transfer management of the so-called IANA function, which includes the power to add new domain name extensions (such as dot-xxx) and to alter administrative control over an existing domain name extension (for example, approving the transfer of the dot-ca domain in 2000 from the University of British Columbia to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority).
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04.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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GOG (Formerly Good Old Games) have become extremely popular amongst gamers for a number of reasons: Lack of DRM, good selection and a variety of both new indie titles and, as the name suggests, “good old games”, classic titles like System Shock and Baldur’s Gate, many from the golden era of PC gaming.
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Voglperf is a quick Valve tool for benchmarking Linux OpenGL games that comes down to just spewing frame information (FPS, frame time and min/max values) every second. That data can then be plotted, etc. Voglperf doesn’t integrate any test automation but just dumps the frame data for whatever OpenGL game/application is loaded by it. Voglperf is supported on SteamOS and works with Steam on Linux.
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Valve recently put up their patched branch of the Mesa on github for anyone to study and modify. The company used it for SteamOS. With this move Valve has once again showed that they not only support Linux programming practices, but also embrace the Linux culture practices.
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At its core, the game is about designing airships and fighting with them. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools – and sometimes their fallen comrades.
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Leadwerks was kickstarted back in July of last year, so it’s good to see it so soon. It promises to be an easy-to-use game development system.
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The developers of Star Conflict, a massively multiplayer space simulation game developed by Star Gem Inc. and published by Gaijin Entertainment, have confirmed that a Linux version is in the works.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Default file managers are usually limited in what they offer. While you can perform all major file operations with them, how you do so is often not that comfortable.
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Midnight Commander, a visual file manager and a feature-rich full-screen text mode application that allows users to copy, move, and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files, and run commands in the subshell, is now at version 4.8.12.
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It has been a long time in the making, but I have finally cut a new release of the Transmageddon transcoder application. The code inside Transmageddon has seen some major overhaul as I have updated it to take advantage of new GStreamer APIs and features. New features in this release include.
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VLC is definitely one of the best media player applications available for any platform. I make it a point to keep it on all of my computers. OMG! Ubuntu! reports that VLC is about to get even better with the addition of an add-ons manager in version 2.2.
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When I started the Zed project about a year ago I intended to build an editor just for me: something minimal, simple and stable. Writing something for myself seemed a natural thing to do after spending about a year and a half having a job building an IDE: once you’ve built your own tools, there’s no going back. Also, having built this sort of thing before (although not from “scratch”), it was fairly quick to get something working.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Imagine having the equivalent of four 1920×1080 monitors in a 2×2 grid, on your desk, with absolutely no seam between them. This article describes my journey towards that goal…
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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College campuses have been experimenting with the idea of using unmanned drones since early 2012. On a more larger level, drone usage has been a point of conversation since aerial warfare came to the forefront over 100 years ago. The first targeted attack from an unmanned aerial vehicle took place Feb. 4, 2002, in an attempt to kill someone the US thought was Osama Bin Laden.
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A group of people who have lost loved ones to US drone strikes in Yemen yesterday (3 April) launched a national organisation, which will support affected communities and highlight the civilian impact of the “targeted killing” programme.
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Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Republican Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, a frequent critic of “war on terrorism” policies, introduced the “Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act.” The goal? Find out who is dying in drone strikes.
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Fein noted that during the Watergate years of the 1970s, the Justice Department stood up to Richard Nixon; no such backbone exists today, Fein said. He despaired that there is no moral outrage when U.S. predator drones kill civilians, or when the government collects massive amounts of data on American citizens.
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Munter recounted one incident in which two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed by a U.S. drone strike in retaliation to a group of Afghan and American forces being fired upon by Pakistani border guards in November 2011. The clash, he said, strained ties between the two nations and marred the reputation of drone strikes. – See more at: http://dailytrojan.com/2014/04/02/former-us-ambassador-to-pakistan-speaks-on-past/#sthash.shc9jTHM.dpuf
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Even if we’re not at technically at war with a nation, we’re almost always still involved. We’re still creating enemies by involving ourselves wherever we see fit — sending weapons to the Syrian opposition (linked to Al Qaeda and known to kill members of the Christian minority in cold blood), flying drones over Pakistan to kill civilians, and even now drawing lines in the sand to combat Russian influence in the Ukraine. It all leads to a senseless sacrifice of lives and worsening of diplomatic relations.
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NDAA
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A bipartisan group of senators has quietly begun discussing a push to repeal or rewrite the broad law granting the president sweeping powers to wage war against individuals and groups across the globe.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told BuzzFeed that several lawmakers have held informal conversations on possible changes to the 9/11-era rules of war on terrorism, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
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PANDA is People Against the National Defense Authorization Act
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House Republicans are quietly working to insert immigration legislation into the text of the Department of Defense authorization bill that would allow so-called DREAMers to obtain permanent legal residency by joining the military, Breitbart News has learned.
CIA Torture and Deception/Lies
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A still-classified Senate Intelligence Committee report contains damning information on both the extent of US torture methods and the lies of top CIA officials about these programs, according to information in a Washington Post article on Monday.
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Senate aides and government officials continue to leak details from a classified report on the CIA’s Bush administration torture program, giving us a fuller picture of who was tortured, how it happened, and what limited information the government learned.
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The Defense Department isn’t properly keeping track of senior officials who leave the government to take jobs with defense contractors, the DOD Inspector General reported Tuesday.
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The Obama administration is violating the Convention Against Torture by delaying declassification of the report and by refusing to bring those responsible to account
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Mike Morell said Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence committee knew al-Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi terror attack from the start, but said it wasn’t publicized because the sources through which they knew that were classified.
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Venezuela
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is planning to overthrow Venezuela’s government by using student organizations throughout a wide variety of educational institutions in the country, according to an ex-CIA collaborator Raúl Capote.
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Fascism
Deception Over Expansion
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If American media seem filled these days with bellicose, jingoistic, uniform perspectives on a new Cold War, that’s probably because so many news outlets can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to framing new events in the tired terms of the last generation’s ingrained propaganda. At a time that needs fresh contemplation, even people like Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW are talking about recent events in and around Ukraine as having “sparked the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War” or words to more extreme effect.
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As Western and Russian rulers rattle sabres, Simon Basketter says we must take on a system that drives the world to war
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Ukraine just happened to be a conveniently available ideal to put Americans entrenched status and Western European odyssey into spotlight but with a revamped force of achieving the strategic goals and to enhance the Russian lost vision of invincible Empire. So far, nobody could dare to disturb the progressive dream turned into attainable reality in weeks and days to foresee Crimea annexed into the Russian Federation and Ukraine being put under watchful guidance and controlled maneuverability of the Russian foreign policy objectives.
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On March 2, Secretary of State John Kerry described Russia’s action in Crimea as “an incredible act of aggression … You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said. And on March 17, President Barack Obama declared, “Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, and international law must be upheld.”
Messrs. Kerry and Obama must be joking!
The U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan “on completely trumped up pretexts.” (If you still believe George Bush had legitimate reasons to attack Iraq, please read the transcript of his press conference of Aug. 21, 2006. There, he confessed that both his “reasons” were bogus.)
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Ukraine is a perfect example of how the US uses the worst elements of a society to do their dirty work in other countries and how the US/NATO has a problem finding honest quislings. Since the US favors the nazi coup in Ukraine they talk about sovereignty and the right to self-determination of the Crimean people is made into some outrageous business for which Russia is demonized. John McCain, the chief chicken hawk and key “moral support” figure for the US’ insurrectionists and nazis in Ukraine, urged dissidents in Russia to rise and through that the effect of Ukrainian “freedom” would spread into Russia. McCain and the rest are engaged in subversive incitement, and once again their complete lack of intelligence and knowledge has left them looking like fools to the world. Professor Edward Herman spoke to the Voice of Russia regarding these issues and more.
Clapper’s Lies
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United States intelligence officials have been scouring the personal communications of innocent Americans, the nation’s top spy chief now acknowledges, using a procedure that’s allegedly lawful and constitutionally sound.
Germany
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The United States has not responded to repeated requests for information on the NSA’s surveillance activities, Germany’s government said Wednesday.
In a reply to a written question from the opposition in the Federal Parliament, the government said both the Ministry of Interior and former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger had sent letters to U.S. officials without recieving any reply.
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‘Reform’
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Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced HR 4291, the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act (.pdf), to end the collection of all Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Both have vehemently defended the program since June, and it’s reassuring to see two of the strongest proponents of NSA’s actions agreeing with privacy advocates’ (and the larger public’s) demands to end the program. The bill only needs 17 lines to stop the calling records program, but it weighs in at more than 40 pages. Why? Because the “reform” bill tries to create an entirely new government “authority” to collect other electronic data.
Yahoo PR and encryption
NSA
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Results of a study, carried out by Chinese telecom giant NTT Communications, were released yesterday and revealed the effect that last year’s NSA revelations have had on the way corporate decision makers view cloud technology.
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“Connectivity,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview last year, “is a human right.”
If it surprises you that one of the kings of the corporate Internet would repeat a slogan used by Internet activists to mobilize against companies like his, examine the context. Zuckerberg made his remark to support and explain a new set of Facebook strategies that will, if successful, put the world’s Internet connectivity under his company’s control.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin joins us to discuss her new book, “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” Currently at ProPublica and previously with The Wall Street Journal, Angwin details her complex and fraught path toward increasing her own online privacy. According to Angwin, the private data collected by East Germany’s Soviet-era Stasi secret police could pale in comparison to the information revealed today by an individual’s Facebook profile or Google search.
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Microsoft
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Microsoft’s big investment in cloud computing—a large part of its reinvention strategy—could be derailed by concerns about U.S. government snooping and an emerging price war among the big players.
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Dick Cheney
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…Obama sounds faintly like that guy who ran to replace George W. Bush.
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But it turns out Obama was not against indulging the whims of a stubborn ruler if that ruler happens to be him. Upon arriving in the White House, he left the Bush-Cheney surveillance programs largely alone. Why? “He has more information than he did then,” one former aide confided to The New York Times. “And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.”
The fact that Obama trusted himself with these powers is ample reason the rest of us shouldn’t. But we already had sufficient cause for suspicion. Our Constitution does not show an abundance of trust in elected officials. It rests on the belief that those in power need to be curbed and checked at every turn.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Servers
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Reuven M. Lerner starts us out this month, this time with information on how to leverage geolocation information in your Web application. Whether you want to give your Web visitors a local weather forecast or just want to present them with location-appropriate options from your Web applications, geolocation is a powerful tool. Since the Internet is global, it’s important to know where users are located. Reuven shows how to integrate geolocation awareness into your Web applications. Dave Taylor follows with the next in his series on Zombie Dice. It may feel like you’re just making a cool game, but it’s really just a ruse to help you learn something. (Well, it’s a cool game too, but you really are learning!)
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At a cloud event today, Google announced it was cutting its cloud-services prices by huge margins — up to 85 percent in some cases. But that’s not all the good news.
Google also announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux SUSE on the Google Cloud Platform
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Softaculous Ltd., the developer of AMPPS Installer that simplifies Application deployment on various Desktop and Servers, today announced the launch of AMPPS 2.3 for Linux distros. Ampps Linux will work with most of the desktop / GUI distros of linux like Fedora, CentOS, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc.
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At the Women in Tech Networking event at South by Southwest Interactive last week, Rackspace Hosting launched its new training program, Linux for Ladies, aimed at helping women get top jobs in the IT industry.
Cumulus Linux
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Midokura, a global company focused on network virtualization, today announced its partnership with Cumulus Networks, the company bringing the power of Linux to networking. The companies plan to offer a joint technology solution that will enable customers to manage workloads on virtual and non-virtualized infrastructure with a technology preview by May 2014 and a GA offering by Q3 2014. This partnership further extends the new networking open ecosystem where businesses can have the flexibility to choose between various industry standard networking hardware, network operating systems and applications.
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Cumulus Networks has announced that IXLeeds has chosen the Cumulus Linux operating system for the company’s upgraded Internet Exchange Point. IXLeeds is a not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) based in Leeds, UK. A bid process that included Extreme Networks and Juniper Networks preceded the deployment of Cumulus.
SDN
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That said, Jessup stressed that there is still a core networking track that is still at the foundation of Interop. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is once again a popular track for discussion as networking professional seek to learn how to benefit from the new networking paradigm.
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The first wave of SDNs broke data centers free from single-vendor “blobs,” concede the architects of MidoNet, but they left a new problem in their wake.
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In a Cumulus Networks-sponsored webcast SDN panel on March 21, Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s director of technical operations, explained why the social networking website has embraced the open SDN model.
Ahmad said that when it comes to the reasons SDN makes sense for Facebook, it boils down to two key things: scale and agility. He noted that there is a lot of traffic going between machines today that runs over network infrastructure. In order to scale the network to meet the needs for increasing machine-to-machine traffic, the traditional hierarchy-based network structure isn’t a good fit.
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The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Project conducted a third-party survey that found 95 percent of networking pros want open-source software-defined networking technologies.
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Forgetting to Change Default Password or Apply Patches
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Security boffins at ESET, in collaboration with CERT-Bund, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing as well as other agencies, have found a cybercriminal campaign that has taken control of over 25,000 Unix servers worldwide.
Dubbed “Operation Windigo” it has resulted in infected servers sending out millions of spam emails which are designed to hijack servers, infect the computers that visit them, and steal information.
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