08.23.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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In the early 2000’s I had repurposed an older PC by installing an early version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enabling it as a file server, hosting both NFS and SMB. The computer ran well and gave me almost zero issues once it was fully configured. It ran 24/7 and unless we experienced power outages, it was never turned off. It is important to highlight that the system, upon boot, would only load in runlevel 3. In Red Hat speak, this equates to CLI only with networking support; that is, no GUI.
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Server
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Earlier this year, IBM launched the new z13 mainframe, its first in nearly three years. Bolstered by strong sales, the company is putting more of a focus on mainframes, partnering with Linux in a new strategy.
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Kernel Space
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With Linux 4.2 hopefully being released this weekend, here’s a look at some of the features that are currently out on the horizon for likely merging into the Linux 4.3 kernel.
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A five year old file system built by Kent Overstreet, formerly of Google, is near feature complete with all critical components in place. Bcachefs boasts the performance and reliability of the widespread ext4 and xfs as well as the feature list similar to that of btrfs and zfs. Notable features include checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching and eventually snapshots and other “nifty” features.
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Bcache was first announced by ex-Google engineer Kent Overstreet a little over five years ago. Now the Linux kernel block layer cache is being used as the basis for a new open source filesystem. The focus is on speed, but it is also hoped that the file system could be used for servers and storage arrays because of its reliability.
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The annual Linuxcon North America conference was once again highlighted by none other than Linux creator Linux Torvalds. Torvalds was not on the original scheduled for the event, rather he filled a slot originally identified as ‘surprise guest.”
Rather than the typical Linux kernel panel keynote where Torvalds has typically participated, Torvalds did a one on one question and answer ten minute session with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. It’s a format that seemed to suit Torvalds well, though the questions ranged from the mildly technical to the personal.
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The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continues maturing for making it easy for Linux users to update their system firmware/BIOS from the Linux desktop.
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Graphics Stack
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Just days after the big libdrm 2.4.63 release that brought initial AMDGPU DRM support, version 2.4.64 of Mesa’s DRM library is now available.
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Benchmarks
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In this article are more AMD vs. NVIDIA GPU tests on Ubuntu Linux for this game with slightly more demanding settings plus looking at the CPU and GPU utilization.
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Given the current state of the AMD Catalyst Linux driver, there exists games on Linux that will run with this closed-source Radeon driver but where the performance of a EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW that retails for $180 USD can exceed the performance of a AMD Radeon R9 Fury that sells for more than $550 USD. Here’s some of those cases where — given the current state of Catalyst on Linux — the OpenGL performance is so far down the gutter.
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These games were left out since when setting up the test system for the assortment of AMD/NVIDIA graphics card tests, it turns out recent Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive updates broke support for the pre-existing time demo tests. With the demos we’ve been using in all of the CS:GO/TF2 benchmarks for the past year or so, a recent update changed/removed some shaders and caused issues for these demos. Thus the tests failed to run.
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Complementing the benchmarks from yesterday are some more results today with Bcachefs compared to EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS with testing being done from the same Intel M.2 SSD as yesterday’s testing and using the same 4.1-based Bcachefs-dev kernel.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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ET:Legacy is not available only for Linux gamers but also on OS X and Windows too. More details on this eight-month update to the open-source Enemy Territory can be found via ETLegacy.com.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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So, after the Tangent Normal Brush was merged, Krita didn’t have any new releases because it was decided to do some major bugfixing. Which in turn means I haven’t had any bugreports yet.
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The next part of my summer was spent in understanding KDE terminology, how KDE software works, how to make KDE software work (pun intended), and understanding PackageKit by pinging a lot of people on IRC. After making a compilation of KDE documentation for myself and playing around with Frameworks 5 and Qt, I started working on making an application that would install a given package via PackageKit. This involved understanding the PackageKit API and also PackageKit-Qt, a Qt Wrapper for PackageKit. Building this application took more time than was estimated, but at the end of this exercise, I was pretty much well versed on using PackageKit and building a Frameworks application. This application has been put on KDE’s git repositories and would be helpful to anyone who’d want to do this exercise in the future.
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Last year I went to Akademy with two notebooks and sharpies and asked people to draw or write about one thing they think would make KDE better. This year I did the same again. The question was: “What’s the one thing KDE should do to have more impact?” Here are some of the great results:
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Continuing the series about KDE Incubator let’s hear how KXStitch went through the process. KXStitch was incubated early and quickly.
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Gentoo Family
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Google’s OnHub is a WiFi router that also has home automation support for their Nest products as well as support for devices using the Zigbee, ZWave, and Thread protocols. OnHub is designed to be easy to setup via a mobile app, its firmware is self-updating, and is optimized for today’s (largely streaming) web needs.
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Arch Family
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While digging the Internet, we’ve found a new community spin of the ever-growing Manjaro Linux operating system, built around Solus Project’s simple, modern, and intuitive Budgie desktop environment.
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Slackware Family
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But the real interesting stuff is not just those sheer number of updated packages – it’s the new 4.1.6 Linux kernel, the gcc 4.9.3 compiler suite, glibc 2.22 C libraries, mesa 10.6.4, a new libepoxy package which was required to get glamor 1.0.0 into the xorg-server… exciting times for the adventurous who are running slackware-current!
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Red Hat Family
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“We’re building a platform … so that people can consume on demand, as they need it, what they’re looking for,” said Chris Wright, chief technologist for Red Hat, Inc. Wright, along with Dave Ward, CTO of engineering and chief architect at Cisco Systems, Inc., joined theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015 discuss the current Red Hat/Cisco partnership that aims to bring open source to the next level, making it a carrier-grade technology.
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One of the S&P 500’s big losers for Friday August 21 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT). The company’s stock fell 3.54% to $72.47 on volume of 1.27 million shares.
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Fedora
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Rawhide, the name of Fedora’s development version and repository, may be restructured and improved as part of an initiative following discussions last week at the distribution’s Flock conference.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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The Q4OS Team sent an email to Softpedia HQ a few minutes ago informing us about the availability of the Q4OS 1.2.8 ‘Live’ operating system, a release that introduces a revamped Setup utility and fixes several annoying issues reported by users.
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As I’m writing this, DebConf 15 is coming to an end. I spend most of my time improving the situation of the Haskell Packages in Debian, by improving the tooling and upgrading our packages to match Stackage 3.0 and build against GHC 7.10. But that is mostly of special interest (see this mail for a partial summary), so I’d like to use this post to advertise a very small and simple package I just uploaded to Debian:
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Software Center is withering away.
Canonical has silently discontinued the paid app store without informing developers, Ubuntu flavors are dropping it, and free software enthusiasts aren’t happy with it. It’s still fine for installing free software from Ubuntu’s software repositories—but it can be slow and clunky even for that.
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Black Lab Software’s Linux kernel enablement kit for Black Lab Linux and Ubuntu-based operating systems, but today we have been informed by Roberto J. Dohnert that the kernel 4.1.6 Update Kit has been released.
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Most likely, Canonical has forgot to replace Yahoo with Google as the default search engine, the Firefox browser for other platforms using Yahoo.
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Phones
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Android
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Like the last device, Blackphone 2 will come with Silent OS, an Android-based ROM which has features like Spaces to help separate work life and personal life securely where no data is shared between the two. The ROM also features Security Center which allows configuration of spaces, management of apps in each space and fine tuning of permissions that apps have.
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Expected to arrive in late 2015, the latest update to Android promises great new features and enhancements. Here are the top reasons to get excited about the new Android.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Most modern web browsers let you surf in incognito or private mode, which ensures websites you visit aren’t saved in your browser history. But that doesn’t offer true anonimity—as Google Chrome warns: “Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit.”
Mozilla’s trying to change that with a truly private browsing mode for Firefox. According to PC World, this new feature “is designed to block outside parties like ad networks or analytics companies from tracking users through cookies and browser fingerprinting.” This feature is still in the pre-beta phase. While it’s available in the latest developer editions of Firefox, this feature will likely show up in a general release of the browser sometime in the near future.
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BSD
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François Tigeot, the developer that’s been prolific in porting the DRM/KMS code from Linux to DragonFlyBSD, now has the Radeon DRM code matching that of the Linux 3.17 kernel.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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At the GNU Tools Cauldron 2015 in Prague, the developers have announced that they are thinking of switching to Git as the default version control system. A mailing list has been created and the developers have started asking questions.
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Programming
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Today the Go project is proud to release Go 1.5, the sixth major stable release of Go.
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The Met Office has lost its BBC weather forecasting contract, it has confirmed.
The UK’s weather service has provided the data used for BBC forecasts since the corporation’s first radio weather bulletin on 14 November 1922.
The BBC said it was legally required to secure the best value for money for licence fee payers and would tender the contract to outside competition.
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Sometimes it is hard to find words even to describe, let alone to explain, the Obama administration’s consistently gauche, blundering, even self-damaging policy decisions and actions toward China.
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From government hacks to industrial theft, Chinese intelligence operations are making more headlines now than ever before.
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The Obama administration has delivered a warning to Beijing about the presence of Chinese government agents operating secretly in the United States to pressure prominent expatriates — some wanted in China on charges of corruption — to return home immediately, according to American officials.
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Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef’s Stalin’s daughter, led a remarkable, if extremely ruptured, life. Her mother, Nadezhda, died in 1932 when Svetlana was 6, likely through suicide. Her father, the brutal dictator, had no compunction about sending Svetlana’s close relatives to the gulag. Her half-brother, Yakov, died in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. Her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic. She married four times and died as Lana Peters in 2011, at age 85. In 1967, when Svetlana defected to the United States, she left her two children behind in Russia. Her story is vividly told by Rosemary Sullivan — who has also written biographies of Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen — in Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Our conversation has been edited for length.
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Fiorina is “wrong on the social issues as well as a lot of technology issues” and is “culturally not aligned with the ethos in the Valley,” on top of the fact that “there are also a lot of people who have negative impressions of her” from HP, said Jim Ross, a Democratic consultant in the tech hub of San Francisco.
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Health/Nutrition
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Former pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson said Sunday that the fight to abolish slavery influenced his views on abortion.
Carson was asked about a 1992 ad on abortion on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Carson had originally taken a pro-life position on a Maryland abortion referendum, but then appeared in an ad taking back his previous statement and merely asking voters to be educated on the issue before voting.
Carson said that 20 years ago, “I personally was against abortion, but I was not for causing anybody else to do anything.”
“I’ve changed, because I’ve learned a lot of things,” said Carson. “I began to think about if abolitionists … had said ‘I don’t believe in slavery, but anybody else can do it if they want to,’ where would we be today? So that changed my opinion.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Now, Los Angeles-based artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore has taken that data and created an interactive installation titled Artificial Killing Machine that visualizes the attacks in real time.
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The increase in drone flights will give the military more intelligence access as well as increase its firepower, which is needed to take on hot spots around the world, a senior defense official told The Wall Street Journal about the upcoming plan.
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“Legal, ethical, and wise”: these are the three adjectives that the Obama administration has used again and again to describe its program of conducting targeted killings by drone strikes. John Brennan, then the White House’s counterterrorism advisor, used the phrase to justify the drone program in a speech at the Wilson Center in April 2012. Almost a year later, Press Secretary Jay Carney invoked the same phrase in defense of the leaked Department of Justice White Paper on the permissible targeted killing of a U.S. citizen and senior Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operative who posed an imminent threat.
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The U.S. military wants to boost its drone presence by 50 percent in four years, and it’s hiring help. General Atomics, maker of the ubiquitous Predator and Reaper drones, began flying intelligence missions for the Defense Department this month.
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Generals and other top military staff who ran the US “Drone Wars” in the Middle East now work for the top drone firms, with lucrative positions at private contractors holding big contracts to help run the remotely controlled killing machines.
Supposedly “targeted killings” by drones have led to international concern, as victims of “surgical strikes” carried out by the unmanned weapons include wedding parties in Yemen, friendly-fire killings of Afghan soldiers, and nearly 200 children in Pakistan.
So, wreaking mass death from above is a negative, but on the positive side they have also led to big contracts for defense firms. A Bureau of Investigative Journalism report identified a bunch of large companies that have major contracts for analyzing data and providing other support work that drones need to operate.
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There is, of course, some debate about the morality of drone warfare. Is it ethical to deliberately kill people without trial? Where is the warrior code, the moral hazard, for those who attack with impunity from thousands of kilometres away? What happens when mistakes are bloodily made? How does one define a terrorist? Which side are we on again? Why?
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The U.S. contends that it’s going after Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but since the CIA-led drone program is officially secret, little is known about how drone attacks are conducted or targets are chosen. According to a 2014 study by Forensic Architecture, a research project in London, and the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent initiative, this secrecy has contributed to lax bombing practices. To date, the bureau has found that 423 to 965 civilians have been killed in the bombings — 170 to 207 of them children. Most of the victims remain unnamed and unidentified.
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“The primary [inspiration] was this interactive piece about drone strikes,” Udayasankar tells Co.Design. “Less than 2% of fatalities were high-profile targets. I was fascinated by the fallibility of technology itself and the collateral damage that it facilitates, and, moreover, how we do not take the time to talk about it.”
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“Bycatch” is a term used by fishermen to describe the extraneous marine life that unintentionally gets caught in their nets. It’s also the name of a card game that deals with a very different sort of collateral damage: the civilians killed by drone strikes.
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Islamist militants demanded the U.S. government pay ransom for the return of the bodies of two hostages accidentally killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan last January, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Operation Aphrodite was a top-secret attempt by the Army and Navy to turn old airplanes into suicide drones during World War II. B-17s and B-24s that were past their service life would be packed with several tons of Torpex, an explosive with twice the power of TNT, and then piloted into heavily-fortified targets.
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Troops from at least 10 countries, including Russia and Kazakhstan, will join an unprecedented military parade in Beijing next month to commemorate China’s victory over Japan during the World War-II, Chinese officials said.
China is inviting foreign troops to participate in a military parade for the first time. It will also be a milestone for President Xi Jinping, who took over as Communist Party leader and military chief in late 2012.
The parade on September 3 will involve about 12,000 Chinese troops and 200 aircraft, Qi Rui, deputy director of the government office organising the parade, told reporters in Beijing on Friday.
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Critics of drone strikes point out that innocent civilians sometimes die in the attacks. And, there was a friendly fire incident in 2011 involving a Predator missile strike triggered from Creech that left a U.S. sailor and a Marine dead in Afghanistan.
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America actually is relatively safe. Aside from a few cases such as the tragic Chattanooga shootings, Americans killed by terrorists most often are murdered outside of our country, in war zones. However, if we don’t start focusing on the economic instability in vulnerable countries from which most terrorism originates, it is only a matter of time before we see more attacks in our country.
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The Israeli military staged a large-scale drill last week to prepare for a potential ground operation into Syria in the event of an attack by Islamist rebels or the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, according to local media reports.
The rising number of Islamist fighters, many aligned to the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, arriving near the Israeli border area in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights has placed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on high alert, Israeli television station Channel 2 reported.
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As part of a new deal, Israel will supply Jordan with strategic and tactical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in order to help combat the Islamic State, according to a local media report.
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Allan is on the 63rd day of his hunger-strike in protest of his detention by Israel without charge.
At least six Palestinians were detained late Sunday and on Monday by the Israeli authorities from the West Bank districts of Hebron and Bethlehem, according to local and security sources.
A Palestinian man who attacked an Israeli soldier with a knife was shot dead Saturday by Israeli soldiers in the north of the occupied West Bank, said the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the Israeli police.
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Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian-controlled portion of the Golan Heights have killed at least five unarmed civilians, according to Syrian state media, in what Israel says was retaliation for rocket fire into its territory. Israel says those killed were Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad militant group.
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Israel’s air force has carried out a drone strike in southern Syria – killing five people – while a soldier was killed and seven wounded in an air raid, Syrian state TV has reported.
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A new Israeli attack with a drone, killed at least five in al-Koum shanty town, in the Syrian province of Quneitra, at about 67 kilometers southwest of this capital.
The missile launched from the drone exploded at 10.35 (local time) this Friday, just 50 meters from a popular market, also causing serious material damage.
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An Israeli air strike on the Syrian Golan Heights killed at least four Palestinian militants responsible for Thursday’s rocket fire on an Israeli village, an Israeli defense official said on Friday.
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A Syrian army rocket attack on the rebel-held city of Douma reportedly killed at least 50 civilians.
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The US drone strategy frequently undermines the sovereignty of other countries which can damage its own national security, Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane told Sputnik.
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The US might carry out air strikes again in Libya, but it won’t improve the conditions on the ground, says Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The US would rather allow Egypt and the UAE to carry out certain aspects of this foreign policy in Libya, he adds.
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As if in complete defiance of the extensive contention at home and abroad, the Pentagon announced plans this week to dramatically ramp up global drone operations over the next four years.
Daily drone flights will increase by 50% during this time, and will include lethal air strikes and surveillance missions to deal with the increase in global hot spots and crises, according to an unnamed (and unverified) senior defense official, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“We’ve seen a steady signal from all our geographic combatant commanders to have more of this capability,” said Defense Department spokesperson, Navy Captain Jeff Davis to reporters at the Pentagon.
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On today’s BradCast, we are joined by retired, 27-year CIA analyst turned peace activist Ray McGovern, who personal delivered the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefings to several Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His organization,Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — which includes several high-ranking former intelligence professionals and whistleblowers — have called, once again, on the U.S. to release any evidence to support their claims that Russia was behind the downing of MH17.
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During a recent interview, I was asked to express my conclusions about the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, prompting me to take another hard look at Official Washington’s dubious claims – pointing the finger of blame at eastern Ukrainian rebels and Moscow – based on shaky evidence regarding who was responsible for this terrible tragedy.
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A U.S. government report implicating Russia in the July 2014 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was created by political writers rather than intelligence analysts, a former CIA analyst-turned-political activist told Russia’s Sputnik News. Sputnik is wholly owned by the Russian government, which reportedly backs Ukrainian separatists accused of firing a missile at the plane as it flew near the Russia-Ukraine border.
“What [U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry] offered was a ‘government assessment,’ which means it was written in the White House, which means it was a political document written by political hacks, and that the intelligence analysts would not sign on to it,” Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, told Sputnik. McGovern was previously known for implying that President George W. Bush could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City and Arlington County, Virginia.
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Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, an influential and vocal critic of the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, said Wednesday that Congress actually should consider approving the accord — but only after tacking on a number of conditions designed to pressure Iran not to cheat on the deal, including an authorization for military action.
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When the foreign secretary visits Tehran on Sunday to reopen the British embassy after a closure of nearly four years, he will doubtless talk of new beginnings. Now Iran has signed a deal limiting its nuclear programme, the way is clear for new business contracts, new opportunities, a new chapter. That approach may appeal to the British businesspeople on the trip, licking their lips at the prospect of selling oilfield equipment or financial services, but Iranians do not discard history so easily.
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Nearly every major western country has recently sent trade missions to Iran in anticipation of sanctions being lifted. Representatives included major international oil companies, banks, and manufacturers. Their enormous influence and immense wealth will weigh heavily in resolving the issue.
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We would do well to remember that Iran didn’t start this crisis. The crisis didn’t start with Iranians overthrowing the Shah and taking of American hostages in 1979. It started when the U.S. CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator (the Shah) in his place.
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Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the U.S. Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”
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President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran gained momentum in Congress on Friday as a key Jewish Democrat from New York bucked home-state opposition to support the deal.
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This week’s 62th anniversary of the coup upending Mohammad Mossadegh comes with interest as strong as ever in Iran’s best-known prime minister. But while historians and journalists see the coup of 19 August 1953 as a pivotal event for Iran, they agree on little else (including the transliteration of his name into Latin letters).
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Britain will reopen its embassy in Iran this weekend nearly four years after protesters ransacked the elegant ambassadorial residence and burned the British flag.
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Iran’s official IRNA news agency says the military has shot down a reconnaissance drone in western Iran near the border with Iraq.
IRNA quoted Col. Farzad Fereidouni, a local air defense system commander, in a report Saturday as saying the unmanned aircraft was shot down in recent days after it “confronted” the air defense missile system. He didn’t say which country the drone belonged to, or give specifics on the timing.
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Iran is remembering the anniversary of the 1953 coup against the government of then democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.
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Mohammad Mossadegh (pictured) became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951 and was hugely popular for taking a stand against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British-owned oil company that had made huge profits while paying Iran only 16% of its profits and often far less. His nationalization efforts led the British government to begin planning to remove him from power. In October 1952, Mosaddegh declared Britain an enemy and cut all diplomatic relations. Britain looked towards the United States for help. However, the U.S. had opposed British policies; Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the British had “a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran.”
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•Quit sending arms to anyone in the region
•Quit telling Iranian people what to do
•Offer to help, but not militarily
•Start lifting sanctions slowly, unilaterally
•Wait for reciprocity and repeat (Rapoport’s tested game theory)
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In a letter to three U.S. senators that recently came to light, CIA director John Brennan outlined how his intelligence agency deals with abusive partners, referring – it would appear – primarily to foreign security forces. But even more striking than the approach he outlines is his brutally honest admission that the CIA sometimes partners with human rights abusers.
The agency’s covert nature leaves its laws, rules and regulations opaque. However, it has long been known that the CIA is not subject to human rights vetting requirements when it comes to partnering with foreign security forces, as the State and Defense departments are, under what is commonly known as the Leahy Law, named for Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy. Congress first approved the law in 1997, when it was revealed that Colombian army units were receiving U.S. funds while massacring civilians. The Leahy Law restricts the State Department and Pentagon from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to assist, train or equip any foreign military or police unit that is credibly believed to have engaged in gross violations of human rights – such as extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and forced disappearances.
On moral grounds alone there can be little objection to this restriction. But it also makes sense for national security. While Brennan may not acknowledge it, abusive security forces combatting domestic insurgencies typically exacerbate long-standing grievances and provide armed opposition and terrorist groups with a very powerful recruiting tool.
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North Korea’s main ally is China, which provides fuel and food aid, while it maintains a close relationship with Russia.
However positive ties with the US and South Korea are non-existent.
The promotion of Kim Jong-un has leader following the death of his father Kim Jong-Il in 2011 has done little to improve that.
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The former prime minister of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki, who a domestic investigation has found responsible for Mosul’s conquest by Islamic State in June, 2014, has slammed the panel’s findings on the humiliating fall of the key northern city as having “no value.”
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A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).
The book establishes a crucial context for recent admissions by Michael T. Flynn, the retired head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), confirming that White House officials made a “willful decision” to support al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Syria — despite being warned by the DIA that doing so would likely create an ‘ISIS’-like entity in the region.
J. Michael Springmann, a retired career US diplomat whose last government post was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reveals in his new book that US covert operations in alliance with Middle East states funding anti-Western terrorist groups are nothing new. Such operations, he shows, have been carried out for various short-sighted reasons since the Cold War and after.
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Whoever the new Labour leader is, they’ll have a lot on their plate and one of the first big issues is likely to be Syria. The on-going civil war is only getting worse, and defence secretary Michael Fallon has already announced that a vote on military intervention will take place later in the year.
In one sense, the question of whether the UK military should be taking part in bombing is a moot one, because it already is. A freedom of information request from Reprieve found UK military personnel have already engaged in air strikes as part of US operations. The admission showed the public and parliament had been misled. MPs voted against bombing Syria in 2013.
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So said American Defense Secretary Ash Carter in testimony before an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee on July 7, explaining that the $500 million American project, announced over a year ago, to train and arm a new Syrian rebel army to bring the Islamic State to its knees and force a political settlement on the Syrian regime simultaneously has, to date, trained just 60 fighters.
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Division 30 was the first contingent of Syrian rebels deployed under a $500 million “train and equip” plan authorized last year by Congress. It’s an overt program, run by U.S. Special Forces, separate from a parallel covert program run by the CIA. The idea is to generate over 5,000 trained fighters a year who could help clear Islamic State extremists in Syria and then hold the ground.
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In this regard, Obama is following the position that was expressed by his friend Brzezinski who has expressed it many times, such as, in 1998, reprinted later under the heading, “How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen.”
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In a recent article, Robert Fisk, senior Middle East correspondent for the Independent, compared Turkey to Pakistan in the 1980s, and said that the recent air bombardment was no surprising given that all powers in the region have betrayed the Kurds. We spoke to Fisk both about the details of the matters he touches on in his article, and whether power balances have changed in the Middle East. Fisk says that Turkey has become a market place and when seen from this perspective there are more important issues at stake besides whether or not Turkey will enter the war in Syria. “I believe that Syria has started penetrating Turkey. Suruç is an example of this. From this view, the Syrian War but not the Syrians have occupied Turkey. It is not the reverse.”
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On July 24th, highlighting the first Turkish air strikes against the Islamic State and news of an agreement to let the U.S. Air Force use two Turkish air bases against that movement, the New York Times reported that unnamed “American officials welcomed the [Turkish] decision… calling it a ‘game changer.’” And they weren’t wrong. Almost immediately, the game changed. Turkish President Recep Erdogan promptly sent planes hurtling off not against Islamic State militants but the PKK, that country’s Kurdish rebels with whom his government had previously had a tenuous ceasefire. In the process, he created a whole new set of problems for Washington, including making life more difficult for Kurdish rebel troops in Syria connected to the PKK that the Obama administration was backing in the fight against the Islamic State. Erdogan’s acts also ensured that chaos and conflict would spread to new areas of the Middle East. So game-changer indeed!
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Reports from the PKK-aligned Kurdistan National Congress indicate an internal war by the Turkish state against the Kurds in the country’s east, approaching levels of violence not seen in 20 years. Several villages in Diyarbakir province are said to be under heavy shelling by the Turkish army. Many of these villages are reported to be currently burning, with many injured, and an unknown number killed. After hours of shelling, Turkish soldiers reportedly entered the village of Kocakoy, Lice-Hani district, putting homes to the torch—sometimes with families still inside, resulting in further loss of life. Troops then proceeded to force an evacuation of the villages. It is not said where the survivors fled to. A similar attack is reported from Şapatan (Turkish: Altınsu) village in Şemdinli district, Hakkari province, where the blaze has spread to surrounding forest areas. (KNC, KNC, Aug. 18)
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None of this is news. Turkey’s not even among the top ten spenders, as far as foreign lobbies go. (That honor usually goes to Canada, although apparently in 2013 it went to the UAE.)
But here’s the thing that chaps my hide. I’m fine with selling our politicians to foreign governments. We’re running a $43.8 billion trade deficit, after all. We can’t afford to be fussy.
But aren’t you insulted that we’re selling them so cheaply? We’re the United States of America. Shouldn’t Porter Goss be worth more than a measly 32,000 bucks a month? We borrow more than that every minute, so why should we sell him for less than 32,000 dollars a second? What kind of superpower do these people take us for?
And if we’ve already established that, and we’re just haggling over the price, we need to get serious about dollars and cents. Because that’s peanuts, and it’s not going to pay the bills.
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‘Manageable chaos’ is a myopic idea that has torn the Middle-East apart. To understand why, we need to go back a hundred years in the past. In 1916, Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in secret. Then, in the middle of the First World War, they decided the Ottoman Empire needed to go. Sultan Mehmed VI in Istanbul controlled crucial shipping lanes and the oil riches of the Persian Gulf. So, while T.E Lawrence duped the Arab sheikhs with promises of a “Greater Syria,” the European powers divided the Levant as it suited them.
The problem was not that outsiders drew the borders. The problem was these borders were indifferent to the people who lived within them. The clean lines carved through the Middle-East ignored sectarian, tribal or ethnic geographies. Many Shia majority areas ended up under Sunni control, and vice-versa. Thirty-million Kurds also ended up homeless. These progeny of the mighty Median Kings of Asia Minor became minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
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A member of the U.S.-trained Syrian rebel forces says he expects to fight forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, even though they pledged only to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in order to participate the Pentagon program.
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The United Nations Security Council today condemned “in the strongest term” the storming and seizure of the United Arab Emirates embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, by the Houthis on the 17 August 2015.
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A Saudi-led military offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen has scored major gains this month, including recapturing the strategic port of Aden and the country’s largest air base, after the Pentagon more than doubled the number of American advisors to provide enhanced intelligence for airstrikes.
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A commercial ship docked in Aden on Friday, the first to reach the former southern capital since Yemen’s devastating war came to the port city in March.
The Venus, operated by United Arab Shipping Co, carried a cargo of 350 containers of products ordered by businesses in Aden, said port deputy director Aref al-Shaabi.
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Al Qaeda militants took control of a western district of Yemen’s main port city of Aden on Saturday night, residents said, in another sign that the group is drawing strength from five months of civil war.
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Iranian-allied fighters controlling much of Yemen said on Friday air strikes led by Saudi Arabia killed 43 people in the central city of Taiz.
Taiz has become the latest focus of fighting for supporters of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was driven into exile in Saudi Arabia by the Houthi fighters. Medical sources said Houthi attacks on the city killed 13 people, including seven children.
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Nonetheless, we have just about bankrupted ourselves trying.
We have employed our military abroad more than 70 times since 1945, and also engaged in innumerable instances of not-so-covert CIA interference in the affairs of other sovereign nations.
The latter include instances of overthrowing democratically elected governments we considered too leftist.
And the truth is that in none of these instances have we had any long-lasting success in achieving our goals. We have, instead, uselessly wasted an enormous amount of treasure and human lives while creating more and more enemies all over the globe. We have created these enemies because almost all of our high-handed meddling has had unforeseen and unfortunate, often tragic, consequences.
We now have about 1,000 military bases abroad (the exact figure depends on the number of smaller bases included), well over 300,000 U.S. military personnel deployed abroad, 1.6 million Americans working in defense industries, and the good Lord knows how many working for the CIA and other surveillance/intelligence government agencies and private contractors.
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When President Barack Obama took office, he promised to overhaul the nation’s process for interrogating terror suspects. His solution: the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a small interagency outfit that would use non-coercive methods and the latest psychological research to interrogate America’s most-wanted terrorists — all behind a veil of secrecy.
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After a suspected militant was captured last year to face charges for the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, he was brought to the U.S. aboard a Navy transport ship on a 13-day trip that his lawyers say could have taken 13 hours by plane.
Ahmed Abu Khattala faced days of questioning aboard the USS New York from separate teams of American interrogators, part of a two-step process designed to obtain both national security intelligence and evidence usable in a criminal prosecution.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, when asked about the implications of the sale, was said to have scoffed at the threat of U.S. sanctions and said they cause no worry for Moscow.
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Chinese authorities warned that cyanide levels in the waters around the Tianjin Port explosion site had risen to as much as 277 times acceptable levels although they declared that the city’s drinking water was safe.
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High levels of dangerous chemicals remain at the site of last week’s deadly chemical warehouse blasts in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin — hundreds of times higher than is safe at one spot — officials said Thursday, signaling that a cleanup has a significant way to go.
Water tests show high levels of sodium cyanide, an extremely toxic chemical that can kill humans rapidly, at eight locations at the blast site, Ministry of Environmental Protection official Tian Weiyong said.
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At least seven people are dead after a vintage military aircraft crashed Saturday on a busy road in southeastern England, police said.
The Hawker Hunter jet was taking part in an air show at an airport near Shoreham in Sussex.
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NOTHING gets US Republican Party politicians fired up like Iran.
In the first televised debate for candidates competing to lead the Republicans in the 2016 presidential election, Scott Walker promised that he’d tear up the Iran nuclear deal on day one of his presidency. Carly Fiorina blamed the country for “most of the evil that is going on in the Middle East.” Mike Huckabee vowed to topple the “terrorist Iranian regime and defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”
Oddly, when the candidates complain about the “evil forces of radical Islam” or trouble in the Middle East, they never seem to mention Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s no democratic paradise. But on many counts, Washington’s Saudi allies are even worse. The Saudi royals crush dissent with an iron fist, spread extremist ideology, and invade their neighbors with impunity.
Domestically, the Saudi regime oppresses women, religious minorities, and millions of foreign workers. And it brutally represses criticism from human rights activists, prompting condemnation from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes just for writing a blog the government considered critical of its rule. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in prison — including Badawi’s lawyer, who was sentenced to 15 years for his role as a human rights attorney. New legislation effectively equates criticism of the government and other peaceful activities with terrorism.
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OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine deputy head Alexander Hug said at the Aug. 19 briefing in Donetsk that the rebels had threatened to kill OSCE observers if they would come again to Bezimenne, Novoazovsk rayon, UNIAN reports.
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When are Americans going to demand our leaders protect us against drones? Our politicians did nothing on gun control. Now they will look the other way on drones.
Drones should not be produced or manufactured. Take away permits and the right to manufacture them. The U.S. Armed Forces should be the only ones to purchase drones. If I can’t put a 10-by-10 addition on my home without bureaucratic regulations, why is it permitted to manufacture drones?
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Officials in a Florida city have approved the request of a businessman to serve alcohol in a restaurant he plans to open in a building with an indoor shooting range.
CNN affiliate WFTV reported that Daytona Beach city commissioners have signed off on Ron Perkinson’s proposed facility, which Perkinson hopes to open by late November. The facility will be located near Daytona International Speedway just off Interstate 95.
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Ferguson police are searching for clues about the killing of a 9-year-old girl who was shot when someone fired into a home where she was doing homework on her mother’s bad.
No arrests have been made in Tuesday night’s fatal shooting of Jamyla Bolden and police don’t yet know if the home was targeted or the shots were random, Ferguson Sgt. Dominica Fuller said Thursday. Jamyla’s 34-year-old mother was struck in the leg and treated at a hospital.
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On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense 1033 Program, to return 61 M-16 assault rifles we believe are still in their possession, and to apologize for being in the program in the first place. Students said, after three public comment testimonies, four long letters (September 2014, November 2014, May 2015, July 2015), over 3,500 petitions, appeals, and every other method of persuasion “Why is the LAUSD trying to kill us?” This campaign is part of the Strategy Center’s No Cars in LA and the U.S., No Tanks in LA and the U.S.
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Transparency Reporting
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In truth, Hillary Clinton’s current controversy over keeping sensitive, classified information on home computers had its basis in which her husband, former president Bill Clinton pardoned former CIA director John Deutch who likewise kept classified material on unsecured, private computers.
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Hillary Clinton, in her memoir “Living History,” recounts her struggle to defend her privacy while residing in the White House. Some of her stories have a gothic tone. After Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, Harry and Linda Thomason, friends from Hollywood, found a jocular note under a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was from Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host. How did the note get there? “I don’t believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities,” Clinton writes.
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Now, however, the F.B.I. is involved. This is because an inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies, and another for the State Department, reviewed a sample of Clinton’s e-mails and identified classified information in some of them. By near-automatic protocol, that finding was referred to the Justice Department. One of the F.B.I.’s tasks in the weeks ahead will be to look into whether, amid all the e-mailing to and from Secretary Clinton, any crime may have been committed, by anyone. There is no indication that Clinton is the target of a criminal inquiry.
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And, if it turns out that Clinton was indeed informed of this potential security risk, by the info security chief directly or via a trusted Clinton adviser, and that she rejected the advice and directly refused to also use a department email for major security emails, then that Washington problem will have just grown to a new level.
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As the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official government business heats up, the Washington Times reports that a double-standard exists in the Obama White House for those who leak or “mishandle” classified information: Benign punishment, or none at all, for the president’s inner circle and a heavy hand for everyone else.
While the Obama administration has “investigated and prosecuted more security leakers and people who mishandled secrets than any other in history” — six people have been imprisoned — high-ranking officials who have committed similar, or more egregious, offenses have received slaps on the wrist.
Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and a top Obama national security adviser, received a plea deal to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information for top secret information he provided to his biographer, who was also his mistress. He reportedly lied to FBI agents during the investigation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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“The seagulls are a protected species and therefore it is illegal to remove nests and eggs or to kill these birds”.
Drones would alleviate the need for people to move physically close to nests to coat the eggs and could rapidly increase the number of eggs sterilised.
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FOR YEARS they have been the focus of anger along the Yorkshire coastline – squawking menacingly as the swoop to pinch visitors’ fish and chips.
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The distressed seagull is pictured flapping its wings and struggling as Mr Arkle wraps his hands around its neck.
His graphic posts suggest he carried out the act of cruelty because seagulls stopped him sleeping.The distressed seagull is pictured flapping its wings and struggling as Mr Arkle wraps his hands around its neck.
His graphic posts suggest he carried out the act of cruelty because seagulls stopped him sleeping.
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LASER beams, special paint and even hooded tops are among a raft of new measures put forward to defend Seaton against nuisance seagulls.
The animal rights group PETA has written to councils across Devon and Cornwall offering them advice on how to deal with the gull problem in a “humane” way.
The call for action comes in the wake of increasing concern that members of the public are targeting gulls in vigilante attacks.
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In the country’s bid to fight against poachers, Mexico is using a new weapon in its war against sea turtle poachers. Drones.
Mexico has one of the highest sea turtle populations in the world, with an estimated 1.1 million nests in 2014.
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Rising also called for the extradition of Palmer in Zimbabwe and for UPS and FedEx to stop the transportation of trophy animals.
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Japan has begun to feel the first impacts of Typhoon Goni, with at least one death attributed to high waves as the storm moves towards the mainland. According to NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation, a 66-year-old man drowned after falling from a fishing boat off of Miyazaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu.
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The Obama administration has granted Royal Dutch Shell final approval to resume drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean for the first time since 2012 despite widespread protests from environmental groups.
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Finance
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Wall Street is pulling out the big guns.
JPMorgan Chase named Raymond Odierno, a retired four-star general and the former chief of staff for the US Army, to advise CEO Jamie Dimon on cybersecurity and international risks.
Odierno, a Rockaway, NJ, native, spent 39 years in the military and more time in Iraq than any other general.
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With dozens of campuses destroyed, the government has launched an investigation into shady-seeming land grabs by real estate investors.
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He started off by noting that the general public likes to avoid discussing bitcoin. Although he believes there are various “informed concepts” about bitcoin, he does think “bitcoin by itself is flawed.” This may draw the ire of many diehard bitcoiners on the Internet.
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We all want peace, don’t we? Peaceful relationships and communities, an absence of violence and conflict, a world at peace.
This is surely everyone’s heartfelt desire. Without peace nothing can be achieved, none of the subtler essential needs of our time, such as feeding everyone and providing good quality health care and education to all – let alone the urgent need to save our planet, beautify the cities and develop sustainable alternative energy sources.
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Former Conservative MP Louise Mensch has faced widespread ridicule after accusing Jeremy Corbyn supporters of anti-Semitism – over Twitter searches that turned out be her own.
Ms Mensch posted a series of screenshots showing what she said were autocompleted twitter searches alongside the name of Mr Corbyn’s fellow Labour leadership contender, Liz Kendall.
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Former Tory MP Louise Mensch has come under fire after an embarrassing Twitter gaffe saw her appearing to accuse Jeremy Corbyn supporters of being anti-Semitic.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In the early 1980s suspicions that the Maltese group Front Freedom Fighters was being funded by anti-Communist entities close to the CIA were covertly communicated to the British Foreign Office, recently declassified documents reveal.
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Turkish media reports say Turkey has started to construct a 45 kilometer- (28 mile-) long concrete wall along a key stretch of its border with Syria.
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Thousands of articles have been published worldwide in recent weeks exposing Turkey’s strategic trickery — using the pretext of fighting ISIS to carry out a genocidal bombing campaign against the Kurds who have courageously countered ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12 that a senior US military official accused Turkey of deceiving the American government by allowing its use of Incirlik airbase to attack ISIS, as a cover for President Erdogan’s war on Kurdish fighters (PKK) in northern Iraq. So far, Turkey has carried out 300 air strikes against the PKK, and only three against ISIS! Erdogan’s intent in punishing the Kurds is to gain the sympathy of Turkish voters in the next parliamentary elections, enabling his party to win an outright majority and establish an autocratic presidential theocracy.
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The history of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—its coups, assassinations, “extraordinary rendition” kidnappings, use of torture, “black sites,” drone executions, dirty wars and sponsorship of dictatorial regimes [1]—not only underscores the bloody and reactionary role of American imperialism, but most especially the ruling elite’s mortal fear of the working class internationally.
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Here is another clue: ‘We’ll know our disinformation programme is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” CIA Director, 1981. It seems he got his wish.
Two weeks before the outbreak of WWII, a solemn British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain remarked, “History will judge the Press to have been the principle cause of war.”
Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador to Berlin echoed the premier’s words. France’s President Lebrun and Foreign Minister warned the Press ‘not to abuse their so-called Press freedom.’ In September 1941, U.S Senator Clark: ‘Half a dozen men controlling the film industry clamour for war.’
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Earlier this month I briefly wrote about how the incessant stream of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from all parts of the media, represented more than meets the eye. That it is a continuation of an undemocratic and sinister policy of subversion and undermining of any popular left wing movement or leader, that poses a threat to the capitalist system and military-industrial-complex.
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Fox & Friends joined The Daily Caller in an effort to make alleged terrorists Anwar al-Awlaki and Yaser Hamdi the face of birthright citizenship, falsely claiming the men were born in the U.S. to “illegal parents” and able to pursue terrorist activities without retaliation because their citizenship protected them.
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Socialism has had a rough few decades, but it’s enjoying a rare success. Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, is running for president, drawing big crowds and leading Hillary Clinton in one poll in New Hampshire. All this leads some people to a damning conclusion: Democrats love Sanders because Democrats are socialists.
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…Charlotte Wiedemann considers how press freedom and the media are tethered to Western geopolitics
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party in 1972, was serving as honorary president when he was suspended in May for saying he saw the Holocaust as a “detail of history.” He challenged the suspension in court, and in July a judge overturned it, saying proper procedure had not been followed.
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Censorship
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British artist and anti-surveillance activist James Bridle is illuminating Germany with artwork exploring the darkest state secrets, cover-ups and information blackouts.
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Privacy
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Amongst tech circles in the US Obama and his administration are generally viewed positively. His image amongst this group got a huge boost a few years ago when his administration came out against the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) because, amongst other things, it lacked sufficient limitations on the sharing of personally identifiable information between private entities.
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Impact Team, the now-infamous group of anonymous hackers behind the alleged theft of data from infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, explained in an interview with Motherboard that it staged this attack because it didn’t like how Avid Life Media, the site’s parent company, treated users.
“Avid Life Media is like a drug dealer abusing addicts,” says Impact Team.
So far, this week has seen Impact Team release three major data dumps of Ashley Madison data, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. In the interview, Impact Team says that it started collecting the data “a long time ago,” and Motherboard points out that it once claimed to have been at this for years.
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Last week’s revelations of the lengths Amazon goes to monitor staff come amid growing evidence that thousands of other companies are using technology to check on workers
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CIA director William Colby’s openness about more odious U.S. intelligence practices did not go over well with Henry Kissinger.
Speaking on the phone with McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Kissinger referred to Colby as a “psychopath.”
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Caspar Bowden made a career out of warning against government encroachment on individuals’ online privacy. His work, however, was not fully recognised until 2013 — the year that his contemporary, the former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee Edward Snowden, leaked thousands of documents originating from the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor known for doggedly investigating a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing, was targeted by invasive spy software downloaded onto his cellular phone shortly before his mysterious death. The software masqueraded as a confidential document and was intended to infect a Windows computer.
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In the database, there were 6,788 accounts connected to emails at army.mil; at navy.mil, 1,665; usmc.mil, 809; af.mil, 657; and mail.mil, 206. And there were a few other domains with national security implications: dhs.gov, 45; whitehouse.gov, 44; and fbi.gov, 5. (Here’s a list of all the individual .mil domains, and here are lists of the navy.mil and af.mil domains.)
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Opinion: Cheaters ousted, hearts broken, and a lesson learnt about individual privacy.
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Germany is charging one of its own intelligence agents with treason for covertly passing secret information to both the CIA and Russian agents.
Charges against the 32-year-old former agent with the BND intelligence service — who is being identified only as Markus R., due to German privacy law — come more than a year after his arrest last July, which at the time marked a new low in U.S.-German relations.
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Germany has charged a spy who allegedly acted as a double agent for the US and Russia with treason, breach of official secrecy and taking bribes.
The 32-year-old, identified only as Markus R due to privacy rules, is accused of offering his services to the CIA in early 2008 while working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND. Documents he gave the US spy agency would have revealed details of the BND’s work and personnel abroad, officials said.
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Civil Rights
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In early December 2014, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., released a summary of her staff’s five-year investigation of the CIA’s interrogation programs following 9/11.
Best known as the “Torture Report,” the document revealed searing details of ghastly abuses ranging from “rectal feedings” to “near drowning” on the waterboard.
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Below are some of the key findings of the Hoffman report, an independent review of the American Psychological Association’s ethics guidelines and allegations made against APA. The report concludes that APA failed to challenge and legitimized the “enhanced interrogation” techniques authorized used against terror suspects during the Bush administration. Gerald Koocher, DePaul’s current Dean of the College of Science and Health, served as president-elect of APA in 2005 and president in 2006, the time of these allegations.
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The APA got into this mess by holding tightly to a deeply flawed assumption: that psychology should embrace every opportunity to expand its sphere of influence.
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Throughout the Cold War, and doubtless right down to the present, professional people with skills relevant to “national security” have been secretly recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. Universities are among those particularly targeted. Scholars and campus research centers have received CIA and DoD funding for conferences and publications, for collecting intelligence while abroad, and even for spying, all under cloak of secrecy.
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The latest revelation concerning those who “consort with the devil” concerns psychologists in the American Psychological Association. In utter disregard for professional ethics, a number of prominent psychologists worked closely with the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s torture programs in Afghanistan. They not only condoned but personally profited from torture, all in the name of supporting the US war effort. It was a case of first-class collusion, abuse of authority, and conflict of interest—and it went largely unnoticed until recently.
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The resolution proper begins by adopting the international law definition of torture in the UN Convention Against Torture, which is at variance with US law. The resolution also acknowledges that some 3,400 psychologists work for the Department of Defense (mostly at VA hospitals) and commits the APA to supporting the ethical behavior of these psychologists in these and similar “organizational settings.” And the resolution commits the APA to notifying the President, Congress, and other officials of the core of its mandate:
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Koocher, in a statement on his website, said he and former APA President Ronald Levant insisted that they “never have supported the use of cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners or detainees.”
But the report, which was drafted at the APA’s request by former City of Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman and his colleagues at the firm Sidley Austin, saw the APA’s actions differently. The report concluded that the APA tried to curry favor with the U.S. Department of Defense, with which it had strong ties and is one of the largest employers of psychologists, by issuing loose ethical guidelines for psychologists involved in interrogations. These guidelines did not constrain the interrogations beyond the rules the government had already set for itself and allowed psychologists to remain involved.
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David Hoffman, former assistant US attorney, conducted a review of the APA’s extensive involvement and wrote in his subsequent report, ‘The evidence supports the conclusion that APA officials colluded the DoD officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain APA ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key DoD officials wanted’.
Hoffman also stated that the ‘APA chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping the DoD, managing PR, and maximising the growth of the profession’.
Prior to Hoffman’s investigation, the APA dismissed and denied allegations of their complicity. The report, however, brought the credibility of the association into question, and earlier this month a ban was approved. In an effort to salvage their reputation, they prohibited any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations – including noncoercive interrogations under the Obama administration.
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Some years ago, the psychologist Albert Bandura listed eight mental tricks people play to disengage their consciences so they can perform the acts of violence they would normally abhor.
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Moral Justification, Euphemistic Labeling, Advantageous Comparison, Displacement of Responsibility, Diffusion of Responsibility, Disregard or Distortion of Consequences, Dehumanization, Attribution of Blame
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A number of other psychologists have been, and continue to be, used in CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay, despite petitions to remove said psychologists.
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Not only did those who combed through six million pages of internal CIA documents expose the brutal tactics used by operatives, which included locking detainees in coffin-shaped box for hours or hanging them on a pole for days, they found the practices – which were eventually deemed by the US Supreme Court as outside the Geneva Convention for human rights – didn’t actually lead to the vital information they claimed.
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“I walked out of Zero Dark Thirty, candidly,” Dianne Feinstein, the former chairperson of the State Intelligence Committee told the Frontline program. “We were having a showing and I got into it 15 to 20 minutes and I left, I couldn’t handle it because it’s so false.”
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Over a 34 year career with the CIA, Rizzo made sweeping legal calls on virtually every major issue facing the spy agency, from rules governing waterboarding, “enhanced interrogation” and drones to answering for the Iran Contra scandal.
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The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.
They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.
I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.
It’s not necessarily news that these former CIA heavyweights believe in torture, even if they refuse to call it what it is. Many television news outlets still run clips of George Tenet’s 2007 appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which he repeats “We do not torture! We do not torture!” as though he were unhinged and living in a dream world.
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Since the 1990s there have been increasingly open (public) complaints from users about poor quality work from the U.S. Department of Defense intelligence agencies. This all began in the late 1940s when the CIA was established to coordinate all of the U.S.’s intelligence gathering activities. At that point there began a low level war between the CIA and the Department of Defense.
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PEN Center USA, one of two American branches of the international human rights organization, will honor the investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica and the former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who became an inadvertent whistleblower, on November 16 in a ceremony hosted by Aisha Tyler. Though more award winners are yet to be named, these two choices illustrate the wide range of pressures that news organizations currently face.
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Last Thursday, Jeb Bush declared to an Iowa audience that he wouldn’t rule out resuming torture practices by the United States government. “I don’t know,” he hedged. “I’m just saying if I’m going to be president of the United States, you take this threat [Islamic State group] seriously.”
Two Thursdays ago, during Fox’s highly watched GOP debate, Megyn Kelly asked presidential candidate Ben Carson whether he would bring back waterboarding. A retired neurosurgeon, Carson replied in the subjunctive, coyly saying that if he were to reinstate torture methods, he wouldn’t broadcast this and “tell everybody what we’re going to do.” As a doctor (think: first do no harm), Carson must have seen countless patients in pain over his career. Even for him to say he might torture is alarming. More appalling is that his polls have since surged, and as of this week, Carson has been statistically named the winner of the Fox debate.
A few days before this debate, Donald Trump told ABC that he thinks “waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.” This statement would shock us had Trump not already demonstrated his poor understanding of what torture entails, as evidenced by his disparaging remarks about John McCain’s status as a war hero.
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In 1967, in a campaign that helped change racial politics in the United States, Carl Stokes was elected to the first of two terms as Cleveland mayor. The next year, Louis Stokes, a lawyer who had brought several cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, won the congressional seat that he would hold until his retirement in 1998.
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A Travis County official declared the United States and Texas lag far behind other countries and states in voting.
On Aug. 5, 2015, Democrat Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector, was interviewed by Dick Ellis of the KOKE-FM Austin Radio Network about the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act.
Johnson, Elfant said, “would be very disappointed by the number of Americans who choose to use that right. The United States is about 100th in voter turnout among the industrialized nations and Texas is near the bottom in terms of voter registration and voter turnout,” he said.
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I am reading “Guantanamo Diary,” the appalling story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been unjustly imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base for 12 years.
How was Slahi ever arrested in the first place? Likely because he was an early member of Al-Qaida during the days we conveniently forget, when the CIA channeled funds to the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In other words, Mr. Slahi effectively fought as an ally of the U.S. in 1991-92, after which he left Afghanistan and broke off all relations with Al Qaida.
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The Justice Department has requested a federal appeals court revisit and reverse its decision to revive a lawsuit against former Justice Department officials, who allegedly violated the rights of Arab or Muslim immigrants when they were detained in the immediate months after the terrorist attacks.
Attorneys for the Justice Department argue, regardless of whether immigrants had their rights violated, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and former Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) James W. Ziglar adopted reasonable policies “in an effort to protect the nation during a turbulent time.” The former officials should not be liable for rights violations.
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“Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.
Like the current occupant of the White House, Jimmy Carter entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.
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…Department of Justice highlighted its attempts at forcing testimony from New York Times reporter James Risen.
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Recently Jeb Bush said he had a solution to defeat ISIS. He blamed troubles in the Middle East on presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
He didn’t say anything about his father or brother. These men were presidents and took us to war in the Middle East.
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Mr. Bush — or Jeb if you don’t mind — I was greatly disturbed to hear that if you became president you won’t rule out the resumption of the use of torture arguing that brutal questioning methods might be justifiable and necessary in some circumstances. Torture is never justifiable.
President Obama banned CIA torture by executive order in January 2009. I urge you to reconsider your statement concerning torture and agree to leave President Obama’s executive order in place. I don’t want a president who would use tortur
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Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the heroic WikiLeaks whistleblower and transgender activist currently jailed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, is now being threatened with “indefinite solitary confinement.”
While on active duty in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning released 700,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents. They revealed details about modern imperialist wars never before made public. This included the infamous “Collateral Murder” tape of a U.S. “Apache” attack helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad in 2007, killing 11 adults, including two Reuters journalists. Two children were seriously hurt. Manning also exposed previously hidden facts about the torture of U.S. detainees at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp.
A U.S. military judge sentenced Manning to 35 years on charges of “aiding the enemy” — a treasonable offense under the 1917 U.S. Espionage Act. Awaiting trial, she suffered torturous conditions, first held in a cage inside a tent in the Kuwaiti desert, threatened by guards with being “disappeared” to Guantánamo. Then Manning was held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Va., where she was under 24-hour guard and subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment.
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Two interesting stories appeared in the same edition of my local newspaper last week.
The first involves an awkward problem that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush faces: His brother, former president George W. Bush.
Many Republicans have managed to hold their noses when they consider George W. Bush’s administration, especially his unprovoked and ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Jeb Bush has stumbled over this issue several times, looking for ways to put the best face on a huge foreign policy error.
He has admitted that “mistakes were made” and relied on the dubious proposition that “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.” But this simplistic notion – Saddam Hussein is easy to demonize – depends on the electorate’s failure to notice the chaos that the Iraq War unleashed.
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Top Muslim clerics gathered in Egypt on Monday to address extremist religious edicts in the face of an unprecedented threat from Islamic State group jihadists who have declared a “caliphate”.
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The Army created the Human Terrain System — at the height of the counterinsurgency craze that dominated American strategic thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan late in the last decade, with much fanfare — to solve this problem. Cultural training and deep, nuanced understanding of Afghan politics and history were in short supply in the Army; without them, good intelligence was hard to come by, and effective policy making was nearly impossible. Human Terrain Teams, as Human Terrain System units were known, were supposed to include people with social-science backgrounds, language skills and an understanding of Afghan or Iraqi culture, as well as veterans and reservists who would help bind the civilians to their assigned military units.
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A ship with 1,308 refugees has left the Greek island of Kos bound for the port city of Thessaloniki, to process the asylum-seekers, the press office of the Greek Ministry of Shipping and the Aegean told Sputnik.
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A 90-mile walk to protest drones and racial profiling is scheduled to begin from the Dane County Jail on Tuesday and go through Baraboo on its way to Volk Field, organizers say.
The “Let It Shine!” walk will take place over the course of a week, ending Aug. 25 in the village of Camp Douglas. Volk Field is home to a shadow drone training program and has been the site of numerous protests, including one in 2014 in which a Diocese of Madison priest was arrested for distributing fliers critical of the military’s use of drones.
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Throughout the 15-minute conversation, Clinton disagreed with the three activists from Black Lives Matter who had planned to publicly press the 2016 candidate on issues on mass incarceration at an event earlier this month in Keene, New Hampshire.
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08.22.15
Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Headlines pretty much returned to normal today as LinuxCon concluded last night, but a few stories still trickled in. Elsewhere, Christine Hall pondered the future of new Bodhi desktop Moksha and Jack Wallen discussed the LibreOffice 5.0 interface. And finally, adventures in Antergos dominated my day.
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Desktop
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As school districts across the country increasingly invest in technology for their students, the volume of personal computers in the classroom is surging.
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It looks like Chromebooks are becoming the popular choice for the education sector, with a new report indicating that sales for Windows-based devices and Apple devices in the school sector are beginning to fall behind.
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If you’ve never installed Linux before and are just about dipping into the realm of free and open source software, go ahead and first read this primer to get acquainted. This done, it’s time to roll up those sleeves and jump right in: we’ll show you here how to install Linux on either a hard disk or straight to a USB drive where you needn’t disturb your current configuration–Linux is flexible that way.
For the purpose of this hands on, I’ve selected Linux Mint as our distribution of choice. Linux Mint is based on two other popular Linux distributions–Debian and Ubuntu–both of which are mature operating systems in their own right, and well-known for an extensive feature set and solid stability.
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“I’d like to give Linux a try, but I’m not sure how.”
I’ve heard that statement so many times over the years. During that period, my pat response has changed from something akin to “It’s worth the effort” to “It’s incredibly easy.” Linux is, actually, the single most easy operating system to “try out.” How is that possible? Two words… live booting.
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There hasn’t been a lot of good news on the stats-front this quarter but things are heating up in Finland. The spikes in utilization are back.
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Server
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As Red Hat homes in on VMware, investing development resources in container-related efforts will pay off far more than propping up OpenStack
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CoreOS is moving forward with its development of the Rocket (rkt) container technology, thanks to some help from Intel. The latest rkt 0.8 release became generally available on Aug. 19, integrating Intel’s Clear Containers technology, providing hardware-assisted container isolation and security.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, details the latest development in rkt security and why Docker will still be a key part of CoreOS for some time.
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Open source software is set to dominate the enterprise server market, says IBM.
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Kernel Space
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While the Linux 4.2 kernel hasn’t been officially released yet, Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in early his pull requests for the various subsystems he maintains for the Linux 4.3 merge window.
The pull requests sent in by Greg KH on Thursday include the Linux 4.3 merge window updates for the driver core, TTY/serial, USB driver, char/misc, and the staging area. These pull requests don’t offer any really shocking changes but mostly routine work on improvements / additions / bug-fixes. The staging area once again is heavy with various fixes and clean-ups but there’s also a new driver subsystem.
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An ex-Google engineer is developing a new file system for Linux, with the hopes that it can offer a speedier and more advanced way of storing data on servers.
After a number of years of development, the Bcache File System (Bcachefs) “is more or less feature complete — nothing critical should be missing,” wrote project head Kent Overstreet, in an e-mail to the Linux Kernel Mailing List late Thursday.
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The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Everything through an open source software project, continues to gain momentum. This week, the organization announced six new members have joined the initiative including Fortune 50 company Lowe’s, and technical support services provider, Radialpoint.
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Kent Overstreet, one of the maintainers of the bcache filesystem (also known as bcachefs), had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the project, which aims to be a general purpose POSIX file system.
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Graphics Stack
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Besides Rob Clark being busy implementing GLES/GL 3 in Freedreno Gallium3D, over in kernel-space he has a slew of new improvements to land in its MSM DRM driver for Linux 4.3.
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Benchmarks
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My benchmarking entertainment this weekend, besides getting to benchmark with a sledgehammer, was testing out Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 arrays across a set of four USB 3.0 flash drives.
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Applications
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David King announced the release of the first Beta build for the upcoming Cheese 3.18 open-source webcam viewer software for the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.
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The Dattobd driver was open-sourced earlier this month by Datto Inc. The Datto Block Driver is for taking block-level snapshots and incremental backups.
The Datto block driver was published earlier this month under the GNU GPLv2 license. This driver is designed just for taking snapshots and incremental backups at the block level. Datto Inc is a data protection/backup company
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Google has begun committing open-source code to the libvpx repository for supporting their next-generation VP10 video format.
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Andi Kleen of Intel announced today the release of Simple-PT, a simple Processor Trace implementation for Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The objective of the Great Command-Line Challenge was to create a single command-line program to count the number of emails from each IP address that attempted to access my hosts using SSH.
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Disabling PulseAudio often leads to more problems than it solves. A more effective solution is to tell PulseAudio to ignore a specific device using udev rules. udev is a device manager for Linux, and you can give udev instructions to apply custom configuration for specific devices.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine developers have just announced that a new version of the application has been released and is now available for download. This is the version that shows signs of DirectX 11 support, so it’s going to be an interesting one.
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Games
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For the first time in a long time, Linux gamers have a reason to smile. Gaming on the open-source operating system has long meant dabbling in Wine and arcane workarounds, but ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux a year-and-a-half ago the number of native Linux games has positively exploded.
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After a little miscommunication it turns out Celestian Tales: Old North did release as originally planned day-1 on Linux, and I managed to give it a go and write down some thoughts for you.
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In a very unsurprising move, new slides out of SIGGRAPH 2015 from Valve talk about Source 2 and Vulkan. The game featured is of course Dota 2 Reborn. Since it’s Valve’s most popular game, and their first game to use Source 2 it was to be expected.
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The Journey Down is a series of point-and-click adventure games developed by a studio named SkyGoblin. The original plan was to have three chapters for this game, but it looks like SkyGoblin will need your help to make the third chapter a reality.
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The latest installment in the cyberpunk RPG franchise has launched and is a day-1 release for Linux.
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Feral Interactive sure do know their stuff with their porting, so it’s time we took a proper look at Shadow of Mordor on Linux.
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Big Journey to Home, a 2D adventure game developed and published on Steam by The Light Sword Team, has been released on the Linux platform as well.
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Yesterday marked the release of DiRT Showdown for Linux as ported over by Virtual Programming using their eON technology. With being able to use it as an automated, reproducible benchmark, I spent most of the day and into the night working on some initial AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card benchmarks using this DiRT game that’s finally available to Linux/SteamOS gamers, three years after it was released for Windows. This initial comparison is a 14-way Linux gaming graphics card comparison.
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Vendetta Online is a space MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) developed and published by Guild Software Inc. and its makers are preparing for some important improvements to the economy system.
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The space shooters are making a comeback, but the Linux platform doesn’t seem to be of interest yet. The developers from ROCKFISH Games are now trying to release Everspace, a new single-player space shooter built on the Unreal Engine 4, and a Linux version is planned.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Sway is an open-source tiling window manager that supports Wayland and is fully-compatible with the i3 configuration files.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I already made Marble to recognize the current dpi resolution of the screen and to respond to it’s change(e. g. when printing). Next step will be to supply Marble with icons and bitmaps for different dpi resolutions (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi at least). I look forward to work on this in the next months, and if we achive a bigger progress, I’ll let you know in a next blogpost.
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Lately I have been asked a lot about using Vulkan in KWin: in fact almost every blog post in the last few months has questions about it and that seems to me there is something to write about it.
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KDE developer Martin Gräßlin explained today that he has no plans on making use of Vulkan within KDE’s compositor / window manager.
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Proceeding with the next story about the KDE Incubator with the story of GCompris.
GCompris is a high quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. It started in 2000 using the GTK+ toolkit and was part of the Gnome project. In order to address users willing to run GCompris on their tablets, a full rewrite has been initiated in 2014 using Qt Quick.
GCompris had the chance to be accepted by KDE and followed the incubation stage for about a year. It has now been accepted as an official KDE project in its extragear section.
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On X11 the (OpenGL) compositor renders into a single buffer through the overlay window. This is needed to get features like translucency, shadows, wobbled windows or a desktop cube as Xorg itself doesn’t have any support for such features. The disadvantage of this approach is that we basically always have to perform a “copy” of what needs to be rendered. Consider VLC is playing a fullscreen video the compositor needs to take VLC’s video pixmap and render it onto the overlay window. The compositor needs to run, evaluate the scene and then render the one window.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC is now over, we had a great time in Gothenburg (special thanks to the local organizers!) and got home in time to polish patches and merge branches, to publish the first beta of this cycle, GNOME 3.17.90.
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As part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment release, the GNOME developers pushed the second milestone towards the 1.6 branch of the Tracker open-source semantic data storage tool for desktop and mobile devices.
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In preparation for the GNOME 3.18 Beta 1 desktop environment, the GNOME developers have released the first Beta build of the powerful, next-generation GNOME Shell user interface used by default since the release of GNOME 3.
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing for the first Beta build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.
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The GNOME development team has announced that the first Beta update GNOME 3.18 is now out and ready for testing. There is still a long way to go until the stable version is released, but the project is now in software freeze.
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The GNOME 3.18 beta is now available ahead of the planned GNOME 3.18.0 release in late September.
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Polari now indicates the status of each connection next to the connection’s name in the sidebar. If Polari encounters an error, an error icon is displayed. Clicking on the connection in the sidebar, will show a popover with error details and an action which can possibly solve it.
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Yes, Nautilus now is able to display Other Locations view, and finally it caught up with Gtk+ file chooser! It’s already on master, so anyone can test it with jhbuild. Also, Nautilus 3.17.90 already includes it, so Fedora Rawhide users (and any other bleeding edge distro) will be able to test.
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Reviews
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From the most consumer focused distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or elementary OS to the more obscure, minimal and enterprise focused ones such as Slackware, Arch Linux or RHEL, I thought I’ve seen them all. Couldn’t have been any further from the truth. Linux eco-system is very diverse. There’s one for everyone. Let’s discuss the weird and wacky world of niche Linux distros that represents the true diversity of open platforms.
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Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela is a highly polished, refined, practical, effortless distro. It’s a genuine joy to use. Everything works as expected, and best of all, out of the box, by default. The new release brings in an avalanche of small, soft but most effective improvements, including system settings, themes, and software management.
On the bad sides, there are some tiny quirks. Having to leave your bubble of fun and wander around the Internet in search after some new icons or decorations lessens the impact of having a closed and tight ecosystem that can sustain itself. The Realtek bug is also rather annoying and maybe even alarming, and I do not know how to explain the power to brightness applet transformation. But it only happened once.
Overall though, the impression is very similar to Xubuntu Vivid. Slightly more restrained, because I’ve learned to accept the fact Mint is a top notch player, whereas Xubuntu used to be a black swan underdog and now it’s a majestic phoenix sweeping over the forests of distrolandia, and there’s more of a dramatic effect there. But then, tiny tiny glitches, the family woes, and a whole lot of goodness, elegance, great software, and not a single crash. My 10/10 wizard stick is out again, and it’s trickling faerie dust. 9.99999/10. Not perfect, because perfection means zero flaws. But you should be testing this one, right now. See you around.
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New Releases
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Point Linux is an ideal choice for users who do not want to spend a lot of time fussing with configurations and playing around with eye candy and desktop doodads. I have used it to introduce newcomers to computing in general, and to introduce avid Windows users to the Linux OS. Point Linux produced smiles and frustration-free experiences for them — and me.
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We reported a while ago the great team of developers behind the BackTrack Linux successor, Kali Linux, have released Docker images that allow users to run the most popular and powerful penetration testing distro on any platform.
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As you may know, Antergos is an Arch Linux-based, rolling release Linux system.
Recently, the developers have announced that the Cnchi installer has received important improvements, helping the regular users to install the system.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE, through Meike Chabowski, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of SUSE Manager, a piece of software that eases things for Linux users, making complex tasks simple, for IBM z Systems.
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Red Hat Family
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The developers of the Baruwa Enterprise Edition commercial operating system, which is also known as BaruwaOS, were proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of BaruwaOS 6.7.
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Entrepreneurs looking for $25,000 to help kick-start a business as well as joining the Citrix-Red Hat Innovators Program are running out of time to apply.
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Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6.1, Red Hat’s systems management solution for managing Red Hat infrastructure. New additions to the platform bring upgraded security enhancements, enhanced discovery and container management capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
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Wall street sell-side analysts have given shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as price target of $83.48. This is the one year target predicted by brokerage firms polled by Thomson Reuters. The same equity research firms are predicting earnings of $0.46 per share next quarter and $1.83 for the current year.
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Fedora
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The top story today seems to be the announcement from ex-Googlite Kent Overstreet of a new COW filesystem for Linux. In other news, Major Hayden explained why Ethernet devices have such weird names in Fedora and Manuel Jose covered the strangest Linux distributions. Elsewhere, Christine Hall posted her review of Bodhi 3.1.0 and Dedoimedo loved Mint 17.2. A review of LibreOffice 5 rounds out the day.
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Imagine hypothetically that Red Hat, a (mortal) company, were to fail. The community or another company could continue working on Fedora’s source code and get it (or a downstream distro) certified.
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Cool, right? That’s what I’ve been working on this whole week since Flock. All the bits are now basically in place such that, each night, openQA will run on the Branched and Rawhide nightly composes when they’re done, and when openQA is done, the compose reports will be mailed out.
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Debian Family
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I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I’m heading. This won’t work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don’t have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I’ll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later.
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And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it’s more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year’s FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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On August 20, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing Ubuntu Touch users and developer alike about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch devs for Canonical’s mobile operating system in preparation for the OTA-6 software update.
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Canonical has just upgraded the Firefox packages in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems after a regression has been identified. From the looks of it, the default search engine was set to Yahoo.
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Canonical has published details in a security notice about a few of OpenSSH vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
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Particularly if watching any videos from the web browser with an Ubuntu Phone or using WiFi, your phone’s battery can drain quite quickly while the device gets rather warm.
One of the newest discussions on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list is about overheating. The Ubuntu Phone user that started the thread warned, “my Nexus 4 (most recent stable version) gave me a burn that almost blistered after 15 minutes of YouTube (wifi), and went from 29% battery to 2% in that time.”
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Ubuntu has always been about developers. It has been about enabling the free software platform from where it is collaboratively built to be available at no cost to developers in the world, so they are limited only by their imagination—not by money, not by geography.
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Nekhelesh Ramananthan has posted some interesting information on his blog about the latest work done for the default Clock app of Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
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The indicator displays both international and domestic live cricket scores in the AppIndicator menu and allows you to set any match as the label (so the live score shows up directly on the panel).
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As you may know, we have previously written that Canonical has created a Film Scope to facilitate the users to watch movie trailers, discover film choices and read movie reviews.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Bodhi development folks have been busy bees since lead developer Jeff Hoogland returned to retake his place beneath the Bodhi tree. First, there was the release of version 3.0.0 back in February. Then, a couple of weeks ago came the release of 3.1.0. Although this might be supposed to be a “minor” point grade release, it’s a “big deal” according to the distro’s website. Why? Because it introduces a new desktop called Moksha.
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The emPC-A/RPI follows in a long line of emPC-branded industrial computers dating back to the Xenomai Linux supported emPC-M from 2008 when Germany-based Janztec went by the name Janz Automationssysteme AG. Janztec continues to sell products in the U.S. via Saelig, which is shipping the emPC-A/RPI for $309. The price goes to $364 if you add a microSD card loaded with Raspbian Linux for the computer’s quad-core, 900MHz Raspberry Pi 2 Model B mainboard.
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Lawn watering systems are notorious for sending money down the drain. When Robert Booth was looking to get started on a robotics project, it’s no surprise that a sprinkler system was at the top of his list. Booth will be presenting his “Strawberry Pi” system at Texas Linux Fest this year. We talked to him about it.
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RaspBSD has been released, being the first FreeBSD-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi ARM singleboard computer. For now, it is available only for the models B and B+, but the developers will also include support for the BeagleBone Black and the Banana Pi too.
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A Kickstarter campaign is seeking funds for developing “Mycroft,” an open source, Snappy Core Linux- and Raspberry Pi 2-based alternative to Amazon’s Echo.
The ambitious Mycroft Kickstarter campaign is now halfway to its $99,000 funding goal for developing what it calls “the world’s first open source, open hardware home A.I. platform.” Like Amazon’s groundbreaking Echo, the Mycroft device will be a speech-recognizing wireless hub that implements a combination of Internet access, media streaming, and home automation functions.
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Mycroft utilizes many open source hardware and software components for its artificial intelligence platform. At the heart of the device is Raspberry Pi 2, the powerful credit-card sized computer.
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Aaeon has launched a rugged, Android- and Linux-ready “ACP-1104″ panel PC with a 10.1-inch WXGA touchscreen, a quad-core Celeron, and dual GbE ports.
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JEHE’s Linux-ready “Giada MG-5200SL” Thin Mini-ITX SBC targets Ultra-HD resolution signage with a dual-core 5th Gen. Core CPU, SATA, mSATA, and mini-PCIe.
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Phones
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Android
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The photos and short video clips were posted by blogger Evan Blass, aka Evleaks, who got them from an unnamed source. They allegedly show a device to be released later this year as the BlackBerry Venice.
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How big is too big for a tablet? While most of the industry has converged around two sizes (one about 7 inches from corner to corner, the other roughly 10 inches across), Samsung apparently wants to push the boundaries. According to a report from SamMobile, the company is currently working on an Android tablet with an 18.4-inch display. The device is reportedly codenamed “Tahoe,” and although there are no details about when it might be unveiled, SamMobile claims it runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and features a TFT LCD display with a 1920 x 1080 resolution, a 1.6 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and rear and front cameras — 8 megapixels and 2.1 megapixels, respectively.
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LeapFrog has revealed its latest child-focused tablet, and its first to run on Android. The 7-inch Epic tablet is said to combine the parental control and kid-safe environment of previous LeapFrog tablets, with a selection of Android games and apps that children love. The Android-powered Epic tablet has also been designed to offer a customized experience which can grow with the child.
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The year is 2015 and we still don’t have a perfect smartphone. I’d argue that there isn’t even a phone that is all that close to being perfect. I’m not saying that all of today’s phones are bad, because most are very, very good and you will probably be satisfied with whatever you choose. But every single one of them includes a big “but.” Hear me out.
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If you never use Google Play Games, Google Play Books, Google+ or Google Newsstand, than good news: none of them will be installed on your next Android phone. The suite of apps used to be mandatory for any manufacturer that wanted to sell a device with essential apps like Google Play and Gmail, but new partner guidelines have taken them off of the required pre-install list. Put simply, this means there will be just a little more free space on the next Android smartphone you buy. And if you do use those apps? They’re still available — you’ll just have to download them from the Google Play store to use them.
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Did you follow along last week’s Android customization post to figure out the details of screen pinning in Android Lollipop? I know, you likely already knew what it was all about. This week we’re diving into YouTube – specifically, using your Android phone to remotely control YouTube. This includes the Chromecast, sure, but also an old, little known and often forgotten feature of the streaming service, YouTube TV.
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The Qt Company, through Eike Ziller, had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, August 20, the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of Qt Creator 3.5.0.
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As a company, OnePlus’ most distinctive quality has always been its aggressive marketing strategy. Despite only selling about a million phones so far, the company’s slow drip of launch info and any-press-is-good-press mentality keeps it in the news almost as much as companies that sell 100x more units. OnePlus has made a name for itself by aggressively targeting enthusiasts with a “flagship” level device priced at less-than-flagship prices. Its software strategy fully embraces the modding community.
The OnePlus One, like several of Google’s Nexus phones before it, did a great job of being cheap without feeling cheap. Google has a ton of money to burn with a pricing scheme like that, but things appear different for OnePlus. It seems like reality has kicked in with the company’s second phone, and you can really feel the cost cutting issues with the OnePlus 2.
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Google has announced that its next mobile operating system update will be called Andorid 6.0 Marshmallow.
As is tradition, Google will release new Nexus devices with the latest OS preloaded, first. These are expected to arrive in the forms of new Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 replacements, currently expected from LG and Huawei respectively.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Jolla has opened pre-orders on Jolla Tablets starting at $300. The 7.9-inch 2048 x 1536 tablet runs the Linux-based Sailfish OS 2.0 on a quad-core Atom.
The Jolla Tablet has been a long time coming for Indiegogo backers, but the participants will finally receive their tablets in September, says Finland-based Jolla. Now anyone can order the tablets, with shipments due to start in late October. Quantities are said to be limited.
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The open source community has been at the forefront of this new trend, creating software and hardware designs that enable nearly anyone to experiment with IoT devices and applications. And the number of open source projects dedicated to IoT has been growing rapidly. Last year, we put together a list of 35 open source IoT projects, and this year, we’ve extended it to 51 tools.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox that require some foundational changes to support:
Taking advantage of new technologies like Electrolysis and Servo
Protecting users from spyware and adware
Shortening the time it takes to review add-ons
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Back in July, Mozilla disclosed plans to modernize its Firefox browser. Today, the organization made those plans more concrete, with a tentative timeline for introducing long-desired improvements such as the creation of a process per tab—and with it, a timeline for the end of support for traditional Firefox add-ons.
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SaaS/Big Data
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There are a lot of open source projects out there, and keeping track of them all is next to impossible. Here are five important ones in the Big Data space that you may not know about.
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MapR Technologies gives enterprises another alternative channel for its Hadoop distribution with placement in the AWS Marketplace.
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Among the offerings is Discovery Peak, analytics software that is underpinning a cloud platform created to facilitate collaborative cancer research.
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LibreOffice
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Jack Wallen believes the latest release from LibreOffice might be the best yet… even with an aging UI. Do you think this flagship office suite is ready for the masses?
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It’s free! It’s open! But does LibreOffice deliver on its promise of a powerful office suite for normal users?
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Prominent GNOME and Fedora developer Christian Schaller has published an open letter to the Apache Software Foundation and Apache OpenOffice teams asking them to redirect OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice web-site.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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In case there were any doubt, it’s becoming clearer every day that it’s no joke: That old, staid telecom giant known as AT&T (NYSE: T) is actually turning its engineering ship around in a big, big way, and it’s not your grandfather’s or grandmother’s network anymore.
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“Clouds” don’t just free IT from having to buy, provision and manage hardware, they can be used as an “elastic” infrastructure, where apps can request resources as needed. Apps that can do this are, unsurprisingly, called “cloud-native apps.”
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Facebook has open-sourced its library for automatically generating Hack code. Hack is a more scalable version of PHP, developed at Facebook.
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Dropbox acquired Hackpad in April 2014. About a year later the team behind Hackpad informed users that the code would become available under an open-source license “in the next few weeks.” When that didn’t happen right away, some people got frustrated and took to GitHub to vent.
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BSD
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The latest version of the desktop-focused PC-BSD operating system is now available.
PC-BSD 10.2 is, of course, based off the brand new FreeBSD 10.2 that was released last week.
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While not a GNU/Linux distribution, PC-BSD is an important piece of software for the open-source ecosystem, a BSD operating system tweaked and optimized for desktop computers, based on FreeBSD.
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Two important events of the OpenBSD 5.8 release cycle happened today:
On the Orders page, pre-orders for the new release have been enabled
On the Lyrics page, the OpenBSD 5.8 release song has been published, with links to OGG and MP3 formats available.
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Project Releases
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For users of Kodi 15 “Isengard”, it’s now time to upgrade to the 15.1 maintenance release.
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Public Services/Government
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Recently, the Sunlight Foundation, the Congressional Data Coalition and the OpenGovFoundation announced that constituents of the U.S. House of Representatives can now choose open source software over proprietary software to better suit their technology requirements and projects.
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Openness/Sharing
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Intel hopes to take an employee’s painful personal healthcare journey, combine this knowledge with its advanced scale computing and partnerships with medical leaders, and transform treatment for the 1 million Americans who get cancer each year by leveraging big data to make personalized medicine a reality.
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Intel Corp. and Oregon Health & Science University’s Collaborative Cancer Cloud cleared a major hurdle and will scale to two other major cancer centers in the first quarter of 2016.
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Open Hardware
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Adarsh Simon is an aspiring product designer with a keen eye for detail, and he also enjoys hacking electronics. Now his interests have led him to research additive manufacturing techniques, and that research has resulted in the BOLT MINI, an all-metal, open source 3D printer.
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Focal Camera have begun bringing their open source modular camera prototyping system to the consumer, allowing any budding designers to try their hand at creating their very own SLRS, stereo and panoramic cameras with a system that while a little daunting, allows users to get to grips with the technology behind their photographs and create a functioning device that is entirely of their own device.
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Programming
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Code hosting website, GitHub, has published a graph which shows just how popular different programming languages are on the site since its launch in 2008. The results revealed some interesting trends and how different languages have picked up momentum in recent years.
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Since 2009, Google has been overseeing the community-led development of Go – a programming language aimed at helping web developers build apps at Google’s scale and Google’s speed.
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GitHub is the web’s number-one place for developers all over the world to swap and share code.
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IncrediBuild uses a ‘Docker-like’ proprietary distributed container technology to enable fast processing of development tasks in parallel, allowing developers to turn their computer into a virtual supercomputer by harnessing idle cores from remote machines across the network and in the cloud, increasing performance, speeding build time, and improving developer productivity.
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On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver took on the fraudulent behind-the-scenes (and occasionally, not so behind-the-scenes) practices of America’s mega-televangelist ministries — specifically, those that have exploited people’s faith for monetary gain with the promise that “donations will result in wealth coming back to you.” It’s called “The Prosperity Gospel,” and is built on the idea that every donation a congregant gives its pastor is a “seed” that will one day be harvested. “Wealth is a sign of God’s favor,” after all.
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Hardware
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Everyone likes buying stuff with a bunch of built-in restrictions, right? The things we “own” often remain the property of the manufacturers, at least in part. That’s the trade-off we never asked for — one pushed on us by everyone from movie studios to makers of high-end cat litter boxes and coffee brewers. DRM prevents backup copies. Proprietary packets brick functions until manufacturer-approved refills are in place.
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Security
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Amid this week’s LinuxCon in Seattle, SecurityWeek reported that the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), which funds open source projects, will give the badge to those that meet a set of standard criteria. This includes an established bug reporting process, an automated test suite, vulnerability response processes and patching processes. A self-assessment will determine whether the project owners merit the badge.
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HTTPS protects both website owners and users from interference by network operators. It provides three protections: data authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. HTTPS makes sure that the website you loaded was sent by the real owner of that website, that nothing was injected or censored on the website, and that no one else is able to read the contents of the data being transmitted. We are seeing more and more evidence of manipulation of websites to inject things that the website owners and users didn’t intend. Additionally, browsers are starting to deprecate HTTP as non-secure, so in the coming years non-HTTPS websites will start throwing warnings by both Chrome and Firefox.
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The new embargo target allows vendors to test the automatic update functionality using a secret vendor-specific URL set in /etc/fwupd.conf without releasing it to the general public until the hardware has been announced.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The specter of war in American foreign policy discourse has thus produced a rather troubling framework: Advocates of diplomacy with Iran cite war as the inevitable alternative, while critics of diplomacy cite war as its inevitable outcome. No matter which side you choose, it seems, you are choosing war.
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Jeremy Corbyn will apologise on behalf of Labour for the Iraq War if he wins the leadership next month.
The left-wing frontrunner said Labour must finally say sorry for the “deception” which took Britain to war in 2003.
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So many North Korean officials have reportedly been put to death this year that it’s hard to keep track of them. In most cases, we lack even names.
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No casualties were immediately reported from the exchange of fire that took place across one of the world’s most heavily armed borders on Thursday. But tensions remained high on Friday, as Mr. Kim ordered his front-line units to be prepared to attack South Korean loudspeakers along the border unless they stopped blaring propaganda broadcasts by Saturday evening.
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People have taken to Twitter to mock the bearded MP and Labour leadership favourite, after he vowed to apologise for the Iraq war
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While the “pro-Israel community” is not further defined–it’s a broad category, given that 70 percent of Americans describe themselves as having a favorable view of Israel (Gallup, 2/8-11/15)–the implication is that the Jewish constituents of these congressmembers are overwhelmingly opposed to the Iran deal. But such a generalization about Jewish American opinion is contradicted by polls.
One survey, by the LA Jewish Journal (7/23/15), found 49 percent of US Jews favoring the agreement, with 31 percent opposed. Another poll, conducted for J Street (7/28/15), a progressive pro-Israel organization that supports the deal, found a similar margin, with 60 percent of Jewish Americans pro and 40 percent con.
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Israeli leaders planned to attack military targets in Iran in recent years, but they were held back due to the opinions of other government leaders and military leaders, according to an audio recording leaked to an Israeli television broadcaster.
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Ehud Barak, the former defense minister, said that a plan to launch an attack against Iran was sabotaged by the hesitancy of fellow cabinet ministers Yuval Steinitz and the man who would replace him at the Kirya Defense Ministry compound, Moshe Ya’alon.
The bombshell revelations were made in a tape recording obtained by Channel 2. The clip was aired on its flagship Friday news magazine.
Barak said that the attack plans against Iran were drawn up and approved by him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometime between 2009 and 2010.
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In new book, former defense minister says he, Netanyahu and Lieberman sought to strike Tehran’s nuclear facilities between 2010-2012, but that attempts were blocked by former IDF chief Ashkenazi and ministers Ya’alon, Steinitz.
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Likud MK Yoav Kish on Saturday lambasted former defense minister Ehud Barak for making recordings in which he details Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unsuccessful attempts to win approval for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
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Transparency Reporting
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October 23 1945, John Edgar Hoover: “RUMORS HITLER MAY BE IN ARGENTINA […] transmitted primarily for your info
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Report recognises that electricity market reform was necessary, but urges strong commitment to regain investor confidence
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The last two weeks have seen record increases in gas prices thanks to an unexpected major outage at BP’s Whiting, Indiana refinery, but in a new development, sources are now saying that BP has made temporary repairs to its refinery while parts for a permanent fix are fabricated.
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Unlike other predators, humans kill adults and predators, skewing populations.
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Finance
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With each city Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visits, the number of supporters he draws to his rallies keeps growing. Since June 1, Sanders has spoken to 100,000 people across seven events.
In Phoenix, Arizona, on July 18, he drew 11,000 people, setting a new record for 2016 presidential candidates. His record continued in Seattle with 15,000 supporters, and then in Portland with 28,000 supporters. In Los Angeles on August 10, Sanders drew about 27,500 supporters, according to the Sanders campaign.
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Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders recently convened a panel of economists in Washington to discuss the debt crisis in Greece and throughout the world. In his opening statement, Sanders talked about the debt crisis in Greece as well as in Puerto Rico. “It is time for creditors to sit down with the governments of Greece and Puerto Rico and work out a debt repayment plan that is fair to both sides,” Sanders said. “The people of Greece and the children of Puerto Rico deserve nothing less.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The two big surprises of the 2016 presidential race so far are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Two dark horse candidates opposed by party insiders, each began a substantial surge in campaign polls around the beginning of July. In Real Clear Politics‘ average of polls, Sanders has gone from 12.7 percent to 25.0 percent since July 1, while Trump has gone from 6 percent to 22 percent.
Yet corporate media show a fascination with just one of these characters. Is it the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, who has focused his campaign on combating the US’s rising inequality? Or is it the billionaire real-estate developer who blames America’s economic troubles on foreigners and calls for massive deportations?
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Mensch was unbowed by the criticism and continued to post examples of abuse she said had come from Corbyn supporters. She did not respond to a request for comment.
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Users of the micro-blogging site were quick to point out the mistake, mocking the former MP for her monstrous faux-pas.
While anti-Semitism is rife on social media, and Mensch and others has raised concerns regarding Corbyn’s alleged links to high-profile anti-Semites, the gaffe itself was widely appreciated.
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Censorship
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After promising a strong response to piracy for several years, Indonesia has finally taken action against The Pirate Bay. Along with fellow torrent index IsoHunt.to, the site is among almost two dozen others now ordered by the Ministry of Communications to be blocked at the ISP level.
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Google has been ordered by the Information Commissioner’s office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.
The search engine had previously removed links relating to a 10 year-old criminal offence by an individual after requests made under the right to be forgotten ruling. Removal of those links from Google’s search results for the claimant’s name spurred new news posts detailing the removals, which were then indexed by Google’s search engine.
Google refused to remove links to these later news posts, which included details of the original criminal offence, despite them forming part of search results for the claimant’s name, arguing that they are an essential part of a recent news story and in the public interest.
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The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered Google to remove links from its search results that point to news stories reporting on earlier removals of links from its search results. The nine further results that must be removed point to Web pages with details about the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned. The Web pages involved in the latest ICO order repeated details of the original criminal offence, which were then included in the results displayed when searching for the complainant’s name on Google.
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A planned ‘Draw Mohamed’ exhibition has been cancelled in London after counter-terrorism police warned that people could be killed if it went ahead.
Organiser Anne Marie Waters, Sharia Watch director and former UKIP candidate, revealed that security services had reason to believe the event might be attacked, with a “very real possibility that people could be hurt or killed – before, during and after”.
Organisers asked more than 200 galleries to host the exhibition but their requests were almost universally refused, with even the gallery that eventually agreed later pulling out.
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Since its launch two years ago, the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has requested domain name registrars to suspend 317 pirate sites. A lot of requests were denied, but police say they don’t know how many. The numbers were made available in response to a Freedom of Information request by TF, which also reveals more interesting details.
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It’s amazing the kind of trouble that Carl Malamud ends up in thanks to people not understanding copyright law. The latest is that he was alerted to the fact that YouTube had taken down a video that he had uploaded, due to a copyright claim from WGBH, a public television station in Boston. The video had nothing to do with WGBH at all. It’s called “Energy — The American Experience” and was created by the US Dept. of Energy in 1974 and is quite clearly in the public domain as a government creation (and in case you’re doubting it, the federal government itself lists the video as “cleared for TV.”
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‘A powerful declaration of the primacy of freedom of expression, not always the most fashionable view at a liberal arts festival.’ It’s lines like this that prove we live in strange times. This caught my eye in a review of character comic Sarah Franken’s new Fringe show Who Keeps Making All These People?, a searing satire of the Islamic State, political correctness and the gutlessness of modern Western culture. I wonder if the reviewer recognised the irony.
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If the strangeness of opening a burlesque club in China had not occurred to Amelia Kallman and Norman Gosney as a Buddhist cleansing ceremony took place in their future venue, it certainly did when they found themselves submitting Frank Sinatra lyrics to be vetted by the local cultural department.
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As Tianjin residents struggle to find answers, China has imposed heavy restrictions on independent media trying to cover the deadly explosions that rocked the port city. DW spoke to China expert Isabel Hilton.
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It has now been more than a week since the explosions in Tianjin occurred. Discussions on online social networks such as Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) show Chinese netizens are angry. The incident has been Weibo’s top trending topic for a week, with combined posts gaining more than 3 billion views.
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The Film and Publication Board (FPB) will not publish public comment on its Draft Online Regulation Policy, which has been heavily criticised as Internet censorship legislation.
This after the Right2Know Campaign called for records of the FPB’s public hearings and written submissions to do with the controversial draft policy to be made public.
“We believe the record of public comment will confirm that the majority of South Africans want a free Internet,” says R2K in a statement.
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As predicted, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had absolutely no intention of abiding by the results of the June 7, 2015 when, for the first time in more than 12 years, his Justice and Development lost its majority in parliament. Joining a coalition means compromising with opposition parties rather than continuing his own tyranny of the plurality.
Hence, Erdoğan has called snap-elections for November 1. Erdoğan is no gambler, however, and he will not trust his fate to the voters determining their party pick on an even playing field.
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A black curtain has been preventing the public from receiving news since certain media outlets’ websites have had all access to their sites from within Turkey blocked since July 25, just as the cease-fire between Turkey and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ended and the country enters a war against radical terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
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Demanding an end to “censorship by the bullet” in Mexico, more than 500 international writers and intellectuals called on President Enrique Peña Nieto to do more to prevent the murder of journalists in a country they say has “no safe haven for the profession”.
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It’s hard to know which is worse: the deadly conditions that threaten critical journalists in Mexico or the government’s feeble response to recent deadly attacks. The intolerable situation has produced a letter from 500 global writers and thinkers to Mexico’s president urging him to address his country’s terrible record on protecting news professionals. Among the signers: novelists Salman Rushdie, Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood and news figures Christiane Amanpour and Tom Brokaw.
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American Web users’ access to Internet content may soon be limited, thanks to a recent decision by French regulators. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (known by its French acronym CNIL) ordered Google to apply the European Union’s bizarre “right-to-be-forgotten” rules on a global basis in a June ruling. The search engine announced at the end of July that it would refuse to comply. If it is nevertheless forced to do so, the result could be unprecedented censorship of Internet content, as well as a dangerous expansion of foreign Web restrictions on Americans.
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Since his election in May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has trumpeted India’s open society and vibrant democracy when he speaks to foreign heads of state and business leaders. But, at home, his government is seeking to restrict freedom of expression, including recent attempts to limit access to the Internet and the freedom of Indian television networks to report the news.
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Videos made in the UK by artists signed to major labels will be classified before release, in measures meant to protect children from unsuitable online content
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Does Mark Latham’s parting of ways with the Australian Financial Review amount to censorship? Has political correctness gone mad? Are commentators not allowed to be provocative? Should we not tolerate a wide array of views – popular or not? Do ‘frightbat’ feminists on Twitter have too much power?
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Second, parents should insist on workable procedures for students to report instances of bigotry (and also for allegations that faculty members are failing in their duty to evaluate student work based on its quality, rather than a divergent political view).
Third, they should ask the regents to ensure that each campus has a plan so that when a significant instance of bigotry occurs, there are clear and immediate communications from the chancellor, campus police and campus administrators.
Fourth, parents should ask the regents to stress a core principle without which the university cannot function: that attempts to outlaw or chill speech are more dangerous than hateful speech itself. Unless the speech is illegal, such as threats against a person or a group coupled with a clear call for immediate unlawful action, it must be answered with other speech that argues why what was advocated or articulated was not only wrong, but also bigoted. This, not censorship or “trigger warnings,” will tell the students that people of goodwill are speaking out with and for them.
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Bloggers need to exercise ethical self-censorship, one of the organizers of NeForum for Bloggers 2015, LiveJournal head marketing officer Ivan Kalyuzhny told reporters.
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The “right to be forgotten” has always been a double whammy of a disaster: an awful policy based on terrible ideas. Under the right, implemented in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, private citizens can petition search engines to hide results that pertain to their pasts. As a policy, the right to be forgotten is bad because companies like Google have legitimate free speech interests in presenting their results as they see fit. As an idea, it’s bad because it bars search engines from publishing truthful information about matters of public concern—a troubling precedent which, taken to its logical end, could lead to serious censorship.
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On Thursday, a UK court ordered Google to remove links to some stories about the right to be forgotten.
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When ISPs and social media platforms are held legally responsible for all content passing through them, we all lose out.
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The Ecuadorean authorities have imposed “preventive censorship” on all media coverage of Cotopaxi, a volcano 50 km south of the capital that became active again on 14 August after 73 years of inactivity. The government’s communiqués are now the only permitted source of information on the subject.
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The new language of campus censorship cuts out the middleman and claims that merely hearing wrong, unpleasant or offensive ideas is so dangerous to the mental health of the listener that people need to be protected from the experience.
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Look at a move back in 2014 with proposed legislation that would give more powers to a government regulatory body to say what they want taken offline – all in the name of ‘protecting children.’
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The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) backs the protest of journalists working in central Somalia due to increasing pressure, intimidations and censorship by armed religious group.
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The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.
I recently published a social history of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US.
I found that military and civilian officials in the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding of radiation from the bombings.
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The recent show-cause notice by the government to three television channels on Yakub Memon’s hanging, and its temporary ban on 857 porn sites, have rekindled apprehensions about overt and covert censorship, and of the kind of coercive constraints on free and fearless expression that is a fundamental right guaranteed to every Indian.
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Computer scientists have developed a novel method for providing concrete proof to internet users that their information did not cross through certain undesired geographic areas.
The new system, called “Alibi Routing”, offers advantages over existing systems as it is immediately deployable and does not require knowledge of the internet’s routing hardware or policies.
Recent events such as censorship of internet traffic, suspicious “boomerang routing” where data leaves a region only to come back again, and monitoring of users’ data have alerted the researchers.
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Censorship, lying by omission and lying by commission will doom the planet.
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Chiming in with the outraged individual who wrote to the Fringe, Gideon Falter, chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said in a statement that Chabloz’s presence should be ‘of grave concern’ to Fringe organisers and urged Scottish premier Nicola Sturgeon to step up and enforce her pledged ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on anti-Semitism.
Related categories
Free speech
But as dodgy, detestable and potentially anti-Semitic as Chabloz may be, the ease with which people are trying to run her out of the festival, and, potentially, out of the country, is a complete disgrace. In a free society, we must all be free to speak, discuss and salute however we like.
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Currently a controversy is brewing over at Github, which can be described as “the facebook of programmers”. That’s one heck of an elevator pitch, and made Github the darling of VC-funders and happy users alike. It’s a web-based Git repository hosting service, where you can upload your projects and if anyone takes a liking to your repo they can fork it and work on it too.
Git in this context is a free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking capabilities. A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project, and the original project doesn’t affect yours. Just making that clear so that Adria Richards doesn’t come around in case I make any forking-jokes.
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Privacy
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Jeb Bush, one of the leading Republican presidential candidates, told a national security forum that Washington, DC needs a stronger link to Silicon Valley.
“There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job,” Bush said Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. “I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way.”
Further Reading
Watchdog report offers harshest critique of NSA metadata program to date
Group fights gov’t claim that “essentially all telephone records are relevant.”
The former Florida governor’s statement puts him not only at odds with rival Republican candidates like Rand Paul, but also against a number of government committees and federal judges.
“If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job—while protecting civil liberties—to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst,” Bush said in South Carolina at an event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, according to The Intercept.
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Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to track down “evildoers” — and called for a “much better, more cooperative relationship” with Apple, Google, and other tech companies that are building uncrackable private communication apps into their new products.
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People are the worst. An unknown number of assholes are threatening to expose Ashley Madison users, presumably ruining their marriages. The hacking victims must pay the extortionists “exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins” or the spouse gets notified.
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In the last 48 hours we went under the ‘psychological’ threshold of 1000 Exit Relays in the consensus.
Right now, Thu Aug 20 23:57:02 UTC 2015, we have:
6234 Running relays
954 Exit relays
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How much of your public cloud do you need to log? According to enterprise managers, everything. And why not? They have access to virtually unlimited processing and storage resources, so they turn on all logs.
Logging comes in different flavors. You can log the use of storage systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ S3, log the use of databases, log the use of server instances, log the network, log security, and log governance.
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New terms and conditions popping up on Spotify users screens give the music-streaming company sweeping new rights.
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Updated privacy policy also reveals who Spotify is sharing personal data with, including advertisers, generating social media backlash
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…youth board member Matthew Brown explores mass surveillance in the UK.
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Specifically, a quantum computer using something called Shor’s algorithm can efficiently factor numbers, breaking RSA. A variant can break Diffie-Hellman and other discrete log–based cryptosystems, including those that use elliptic curves. This could potentially render all modern public-key algorithms insecure. Before you panic, note that the largest number to date that has been factored by a quantum computer is 143. (That computation also accidentally “factored much larger numbers such as 3599, 11663, and 56153, without the awareness of the authors of that work,” which shows how weird this all is.) So while a practical quantum computer is still science fiction, it’s not stupid science fiction.
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New disclosures about the National Security Agency’s partnership with AT&T could reignite constitutional challenges to the spy agency’s efforts to wiretap the Internet.
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Sonic CEO Dane Jasper responds to revelations of NSA and AT&T’s coziness
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Yesterday, U.N. spokeswoman Vannina Maestracci said that the world diplomatic organization would discuss the spying issue with AT&T “over the coming months.” Also, the U.N. said that in the next few months, it will start accepting bids for new communications contracts.
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The combined spying capabilities of the U.S. government and some private companies threaten civil liberties, according to a formal employee of AT&T.
On Saturday, The New York Times published a story confirming that U.S. telecom giant AT&T had helped the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast swaths of Internet traffic.
“This threatens civil liberties, as individuals have little power against such combinations. It’s intimidating,” former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein told Russian news agency Sputnik.
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The convergence of power against the ordinary citizen, here via the interpenetration of government and the telecommunications industry, a collapsing of the public and private spheres of authority (it doesn’t matter which of the two seizes the initiative, for what amounts to the privatization of repression under the aegis of the State), eviscerates/invalidates the existence of a democratic social order. The American Imperium wears no clothes, a condition at least a century in the making. The present, however, is perhaps worse than ever, from the standpoint of freedom of thought and expression, as witness, in passing, the clear rightward shift of the political spectrum in which both major parties field candidates stopping just this side of outright fascism.
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The United Nations has said it expects member states to respect its right to privacy and is assessing how to respond to a report that telecommunications company AT&T Inc helped the US National Security Agency spy on the world body’s communications.
The company gave technical assistance to the NSA in carrying out a secret court order allowing wiretapping of all internet communications at the headquarters of the United Nations, an AT&T customer, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
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The former mayor of Salt Lake City is suing former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Agency for spying on the city during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.
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“This is the first time anyone knows of that a surveillance cone has been placed over a specific geographical area in the United States,” Anderson told The Register. “What was so alarming was that they were reading the contents of the text messages and emails.”
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The government seems to have lost interest in finding anyone to hang for Snowden’s all-access tour of the NSA’s internal servers — access that greatly aided in his absconding with a number of documents revealing the surprising extent of the agency’s surveillance programs. It certainly still wants to hang Snowden — literally, if some legislators get their way.
It has, however, decided to nail one handy scapegoat to the wall. This would be the contractor who allowed Snowden to get in the door in the first place. The Register’s Shaun Nichols reports that the DOJ is fining US Investigative Services (USIS) $30 million for generally being completely terrible at the one thing it’s supposed to be doing: vetting applicants for sensitive government jobs.
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Snowden-inspired crypto-email service Lavaboom has apparently gone titsup, according to several net sources.
Rumours that the German encrypted mail service was no more surfaced through an ex contractor Piotr on the blog of rival ProtonMail, before getting picked up and discussed on Reddit.
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Last week, however, during a hearing in US District Court in Washington, DC, a government attorney revealed for the first time that it found three emails Snowden said he sent to the NSA’s Oversight and Compliance office, one of the offices that would have handled his complaints.
However, those emails did not raise any questions or concerns about NSA surveillance, according to Justice Department attorney Steve Bressler.
“They concerned him doing his job of providing tech support to them, not raising concerns about NSA programs,” Bressler told US District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The court hearing was held in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the NSA that VICE News filed a year ago in which we sought all of the emails Snowden said he sent to agency officials that “raised concerns” about NSA surveillance.
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Because intelligence officials often claim that these programs are directed only at foreigners abroad (as though mass surveillance of the rest of the world is justified), many Americans believe that they aren’t vulnerable to the NSA’s dragnet spying. But the reality is far different.
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In an interview with Nexgov about the report, ODNI’s director of science and technology David Honey spoke openly about working with techcompanies like Uber—to better emulate the way they track and predict customer (and driver) actions. “If we can leverage those kinds of tools,” Honey told Nexgov, “maybe we gotta adapt them a little bit, but that certainly beats having to go and pay for those things from scratch.”
One portion of the report, a flow chart titled “Enhanced Processing and Management of Data From Disparate Sources,” lists every logistical and analytical problem intelligence agencies hope the private sector can help them with. They range from the completely understandable (“geospatial analytics,” “data structures for optimized searching”) to the somewhat ludicrous (“photonic computing,” “immersive virtual world user experience”).
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Translated, this means that bureaucrats decided they wanted to snoop into phone calls and went ahead and did so without getting a warrant from a court.
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After the US security agency NSA identified a massive hacking attack from Chinese sources, other G8 countries have followed their lead. Australia is tightening its telecommunications policies, and it is shutting out Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
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Civil Rights
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Ted Nugent called a black man a “mongrelboy” during an exchange on Facebook in just the latest example of the National Rifle Association board member’s use of the social media platform as a launch pad for racial attacks.
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It’s not just Donald Trump and Scott Walker that have declared children born on American soil should no longer be considered citizens: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC,” made the same claim in 2008.
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A coalition of environmental and human rights organisations from the UK, Romania and Canada have called on prime minister David Cameron to intervene in an international case which is pitting a Canadian mining company against the government of Romania. The group argues that under new trade agreements like TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) such cases will radically expand, targeting the British and other European governments.
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The presumed illegality of filming police is a law enforcement mental disorder. Far too many officers believe they have the right to perform their public service unobserved. Officers continue to take cameras from bystanders who happen to catch them behaving badly. Abby Phillip at the Washington Post details another apparent act of police misconduct that resulted in more misconduct as officers attempted to shut the recording down.
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Just after 4 p.m. Thursday, a woman stood a few feet away from several Miami Police Department patrol cars with her cellphone camera recording. After a few seconds, an officer entered the frame, escorting a handcuffed young black man to the back of a police car.
Suddenly, the officer put his head inside the car door and appeared to punch the suspect.
“Oh!” a woman exclaimed on the recording, reacting to what was unfolding before her. The woman, who the Associated Press identified as Shenitria Blocker, moved closer, and the officer climbed into the back seat of the car. Moments later, the camera shook and the video ended.
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The National Rifle Association’s magazine America’s 1st Freedom attacks Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley on its first cover focused on the 2016 presidential race. The issue’s feature article outlandishly accuses the former Maryland governor of offering “hope and change to convicted killers and criminals,” but the organization’s overheated rhetoric is based on unfounded attacks on O’Malley’s record.
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It will soon be the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a devastating event that killed at least 1,800 people across the Gulf Coast region and displaced as many as half a million, followed by rebuilding efforts that were bungling and divisive.
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Sky has reported that UK police are using body worn cameras from the company Evidence.com, which automatically uploads the footage online. This company is a subsidiary of TASER, makers of the well known electric shock devices. Their piece says that questions have been raised about the safety and security of the footage, with shadow Labour minister for policing, Jack Dromey, asking for reassurances from the Home Secretary.
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The noisy garbage trucks that lumber down San Jose streets every week could soon pick up more than just trash — they might also scan your license plate and all your neighbors’ tags, too, in a proposed city-wide sweep for stolen vehicles that has civil libertarians crying foul.
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What remains – I guess I would be a horrible performer at Amazon, and I am proud of it.
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The page does not mention that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 terrorist attack architect, lied to CIA officers about a Montana recruitment plot while being water-boarded.
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The revelations of U.S. spying on Japan have been an unpleasant surprise for the Japanese public.
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In 1967, amid civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, U.S. Army Gen. William P. Yarborough, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, initiated unprecedented extensive domestic surveillance involving Army Intelligence and the CIA as well as the NSA.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Google joined hands with Facebook to try and prevent the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents some of the largest Internet companies in India, from taking a stand that counters Zero Rating. According to emails exchanged between IAMAI’s Government Relations committee members, of which MediaNama has copies, Vineeta Dixit, a member of Google’s Public Policy and and Government Relations team, strongly pushed for the removal of any mention of Zero Rating from the IAMAI’s submission, as a response to the Department of Telecom’s report on Net Neutrality. Please note that Google hasn’t responded to our queries, despite multiple reminders.
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Last week, I came across two separate speeches that were given recently about the future of the internet — both with very different takes and points, but both that really struck a chord with me. And the two seem to fit together nicely, so I’m combining both of them into one post. The first speech is Jennifer Granick’s recent keynote at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. You can see the video here or read a modified version of the speech entitled, “The End of the Internet Dream.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Three years ago now, EFF’s client Kyle Goodwin, a sports videographer, asked the court to allow him to retrieve the files he stored in an account on the cloud storage site Megaupload. When the government seized Megaupload’s assets and servers in January 2012, Mr. Goodwin lost access to video files containing months of his professional work. Today, EFF filed a brief on behalf of Mr. Goodwin asking, once again, for the return of the files.
We originally asked the court for help back in 2012. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia took briefing, and even held a hearing. Unfortunately, since that time not much has happened. The U.S. government has continued pursuing a criminal case and a civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and its owners, but the data stored by millions of Megaupload customers, including material like Mr. Goodwin’s sports videos that had nothing to do with the alleged copyright infringement that Megaupload is accused of, languished in a warehouse on hundreds of servers owned by Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload’s former contractor.
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A Minnesota court has ordered Paul Hansmeier, one of two lawyers considered the creators of the Prenda Law copyright-trolling scheme, to pay sanctions in a case where he and his colleague John Steele were accused of trying to collude with a defendant.
An order published Monday by a Minnesota appeals court describes how Hansmeier tried to dodge a $64,000 judicial sanction in the Guava LLC v. Spencer Merkel case by moving money out of his Alpha Law Firm then dissolving it. A district court previously found that Hansmeier’s actions and inconsistent explanations warranted a piercing of the “corporate veil,” and that court ruled that Hansmeier should be held personally responsible for the debt. Now, an appeals court has agreed (PDF) with that conclusion.
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08.21.15
Posted in America, Law, Patents at 4:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
One important case has put potentially hundreds of thousands of software patents in a mass grave
Summary: Patent scope in the United States continues to be narrowed down as more software patents get their wings clipped
“US Pat 6,326,978, Display for selectively rotating windows,” wrote Patent Buddy was “Killed by CAFC” (using Alice as precedent).
This is consistent with the outcome of Alice (Alice v. CLS Bank at SCOTUS level) as we have covered it in the past few months [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Despite all this, patent lawyers say that “US software patent suits being filed at higher rate than in 2013″. To quote their sources: “An analysis of patent litigation by Managing IP using the Docket Navigator database has revealed that software patent lawsuit filing is not only up on 2014, but has rebounded to exceed the levels in 2013.
“When Managing IP last carried out this analysis in December 2014, the figures revealed a plunge in software lawsuit filing. This was attributed to the Supreme Court’s Alice v CLS Bank ruling on June 19, which held that merely claiming an abstract idea is insufficient to establish patent eligibility.”
Irrespective of the number of lawsuits, many of them are lost (legal toll becoming a burden to the plaintiff) because of Alice; that is very important. Patent lawyers are trying to convince their existing and prospective clients to keep patenting software, so they only tell part of the whole story.
“Patent scope is clearly a key problem.”It is clear that swpats (software patents’ shorthand) continue to collapse in the United States and this month is no exception. Examples continue to be covered, just not by media of patent lawyers (they lie by omission, as we have explained before).
“CAFC Refused to Re-Hear Case,” wrote Patent Buddy, “First Patent Kill by Alice” (the latest such example).
Here is some analysis which says: “In its first substantive application of Alice v. CLS Bank in 2015, the Federal Circuit has once again shot down claims for not meeting the patent-eligibility requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 101.”
When it comes to the USPTO, which adapts to these developments slowly but surely, a patent lawyer in London says that the judicial exceptions are now very broad.
Patent scope is clearly a key problem. It’s not about patent trolls, however they’re defined. Some sites continue to focus on “Companies Sued The Most Over Patents In 2015″ (without scaling for the size of companies, hence serving as propaganda that frames large corporations as the biggest victims), but we all know that the patents themselves, not the users thereof or the target of lawsuits, open the door to misuse, abuse, and anti-competitive behaviour, as our previous post demonstrated (Apple versus Android). █
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Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Why would anyone still support a bully like Apple?
Summary: Apple’s attacks on Android (using bogus patents) may be soon be escalated to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS)
PATENTS are the long-term foe of Free software because as long as there are software patents (even in just a few countries) import of devices with Linux or Android or whatever other Free software inside them can be banned, barred, blocked at the border. It’s a massive injustice.
The other day we saw the law firm Fox Rothschild LLP (prolific when it comes to pro-patent-maximising opinions) spreading FUD against Free software licences and promoting software patents. These are the sorts of parasites that continue to stand in the way of a Free software-run world — one in which transparency and participation are part of the social contract. Suffice to say, transparency and participation reduce corruption and empower peace, whereas the opposite creates suspicion, hostility, betrayal, and conflict.
Florian Müller has spent a number of years attacking Android, sometimes as part of the contracts he was paid for, e.g. by Microsoft. He recently wrote about how Apple lost a key design patent. It’s one which we covered before. It’s laughable.
Sarah Burstein says that “SCOTUS hasn’t heard an issue of substantive design patent law for over 100 years.” She cites Howard Mintz who wrote that “Federal Circuit refuses to rehear Samsung appeal of verdict in patent trial against Apple. Scotus or bust” (i.e. last resort).
The SCOTUS has thus far been the best weapon against ridiculous patents (more on that in our next post) and Müller says that Samsung will appeal to it, answering questions from Apple propaganda sites (see questions like “will Samsung ask SCOTUS?” regarding this article from Mac Rumors).
“These are the sorts of parasites that continue to stand in the way of a Free software-run world — one in which transparency and participation are part of the social contract.”This development has been covered a lot by corporate media in the US and it hardly shocks us that a US court ruled in favour of a US company, not a Korean company. We wrote about such biases many times before (the ITC is a good example of that) and since the corrupt CAFC is involved, it makes this anything but shocking, just expected.
There is no CAFC hearing for Samsung, say lawyers from London. Someone “wrote in to say that the method by which the figure was arrived at would, if unchallenged, lead to “absurd results” on the basis that three design patents could not encompass the entire value of a smartphone which has hundreds (if not thousands) of IP-protected features.”
The bottom line is, Apple’s patent war on Android has turned 5 (it started against HTC and then Samsung was added). HTC is still suffering and Apple hopes to destroy Samsung not by innovating but by litigating. By extension, Apple attacks the whole Android world, including Linux. We can’t let Apple get its way. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Helping US patenting standards go international
Summary: How the European Patent Office (EPO) not only turns a blind eye to European law while patenting or granting patents on software but also openly advocates this now
THE EPO has been under fire here for nearly 8 years. The original reason, well before sheer corruption became evident at numerous levels, was patent scope. We had written a great deal about software patents in Europe and the “EPO [is] still pushing for patents on software and business methods,” according to the FFII’s President who now points right into the EPO’s own site.
Well, none of these domains should be patentable in Europe. Anything else would be Battistelli breaking the law yet again, this time in order to artificially increase the number of granted patents, the overall revenue, etc. (making himself look good at the expense of the public to whom he does a huge disservice).
“Democracy in Europe is gradually being crushed under the auspices of “unity” and patents are just one aspect among several (see so-called ‘trade’ deals for more).”Here is the EPO writing “Big data, linked data, linking data: what’s the difference & what role do patents play in them?”
This is promotion of this conference, which seemingly strives to expand the scope of patents.
Jesper Lund, who has been active in this area, says that the “EPO is actively advising people on circumventing the ban on patenting sw [software] and business methods as such (“if claimed as such”).”
The FFII’s President adds that it’s done “With the blessing of the Danish Patent Office DKPTO!” Remember that a Dane, Jesper Kongstad, is Battistelli’s number one minion (or one among several), which is why protests by EPO staff targeted the Danish Consulate earlier this year [1, 2, 3, 4]. Also recall what the Danish Presidency did 3 years ago to further empower the EPO's grip and potentially bring patent trolls to Europe. According to two new reports from IP Kat [1, 2], Europe takes further steps towards this. This issue wasn’t voted on, there was no referendum, and it’s clearly against the interests of ordinary Europeans. Democracy in Europe is gradually being crushed under the auspices of “unity” and patents are just one aspect among several (see so-called ‘trade’ deals for more).
For the EPO it would make perfect sense to eventually patent methods of breaking the laws (abusing staff, patent scope and so on), then evading justice, as was previously done in the Dutch courts system, with help from a corrupt official. █
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Posted in Patents at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to claims that the patent problem is being tackled by focusing on patent trolls and their favourite courts in the Eastern District of Texas
TECHRIGHTS has consistently (over the course of several years) opposed the obsession with “patent trolls”. The de facto usage of the term implies small firms without products, but in reality a lot of the same tactics are used by multinational companies such as Microsoft. The only difference is the number of products advertised on their sites (if any exist at all).
The other day the EFF said that “[w]e Need Venue Reform to Restore Fairness to Patent Litigation”, citing a TV programme about the issue of patent trolls, not patent scope or anything like that. To quote the EFF: “Back in 2011, This American Life toured an office building in Marshall, Texas, and found eerie hallways of empty offices that serve as the ‘headquarters’ of patent trolls. For many, that was the first introduction to the strange world of the Eastern District of Texas, its outsized role in patent litigation and especially its effective support of the patent troll business model. Trolls love the Eastern District for its plaintiff-friendly rules, so they set up paper corporations in the district as an excuse to file suit there. Meanwhile, defendants find themselves dragged to a distant, inconvenient, and expensive forum that often has little or no connection to the dispute.
“The remote district’s role has only increased since 2011 The latest data reveals that the Eastern District of Texas is headed to a record year. An astonishing 1,387 patent cases were filed there in the first half of 2015. This was 44.4% of all patent cases nationwide. And almost all of this growth is fueled by patent trolls.”
But that’s far from the only issue.
An article by Joe Mullin, who specialises in patent trolls, says that “changes to patent law have made it easier to beat patent trolls, but it hasn’t made the patent hotspot of East Texas any quieter. In fact, it’s been in the news more. Massive numbers of patent troll suits continue to be filed there, and the judge who hears most of them has erected barriers to defendants seeking to have their cases disposed of early.”
So it’s obviously not working out. This whole kind of activism (or corporate lobbying) does nothing to eliminate the core issues, mostly addressed by SCOTUS for the time being (more on that in a later post).
Xerox, itself a patent troll by extension, is claimed to have just beaten a patent troll, MPHJ [1, 2, 3, 4]. To quote a lawyers’ site, “Xerox Corp., Lexmark Corp. and Ricoh Americas Corp. won their bid to undo a so-called patent troll’s patent for document scanning Wednesday when the Patent Trial and Appeals Board ruled eight of the invention’s claims unpatentable.
“Nonpracticing entity MPHJ Technology Investments LLC, once called a “patent troll” by Vermont’s attorney general, was unable to persuade the board that the claims in its patent didn’t just combine decades-old prior art, according to a decision handed down by PTAB.”
It is so strange to see Xerox among the defendants here because Xerox itself has become a troll. ~100 Novell employees ended up working for Xerox after Fuji Xerox signed an early patent deal with Microsoft (involving Linux). Xerox now uses proxies to act as its own private patent trolls. Remember when the Microsoft-connected Acacia attacked Linux using Xerox patents (5,276,785 and 5,675,819)?
If spurious litigation (not just “patent trolls”) is what we’re seeking to combat, then we ought to look beyond the scope defined by large conglomerates with an army of lobbyists. Contrary to common belief, Xerox is not a dead company as it still enjoys an annual revenue of $26.58 billion. █
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08.20.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Chromebooks have proven to be extremely popular devices, with many getting rave reviews on Amazon from very satisfied customers.
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US Business-to-business (B2B) sales* of notebooks running Google’s Chrome OS passed 50% between June and early July 2015, with overall education season sales up almost 40% over the same period last year.
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Desktop
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Like it or not, email isn’t dead yet. And for Linux power users who live and die by the command line, leaving the shell to use a traditional desktop or web based email client just doesn’t cut it. After all, if there’s one thing that the command line excels at, it’s letting you process files, and especially text, with uninterrupted efficiency.
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Chromebooks have been burning up the sales charts at Amazon for a long time now, but it can be difficult for newcomers to figure out which model to buy. Paste Magazine has a helpful list of the ten best Chromebooks you can buy right now.
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The new Dell Chromebook 13 is a well-equipped machine aimed at business users who want all-day battery life and high performance.
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Chromebook isn’t for everyone, particularly those people who need to use legacy applications. For the rest, if whatever you need works in the browser, you’re set for Chrome OS. Perhaps Acer’s hunk, or something smaller.
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Chromebook sales have been red hot on Amazon, with various models regularly getting great reviews and comments from Amazon customers. But not everybody is in love with Chrome OS. Some folks prefer to run Linux and Expert Reviews has a helpful how-to that will guide you through the install process.
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Hulu is an American streaming service that provides users with a selection of TV shows, movies, and pretty much anything in between. The online company was using Flash for the service, but now they have added a new layer of DRM and Linux users are no longer able to use it.
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Server
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For the moment the Linux-only abilities of StorPool are something to which the company is cutting its cloth to suit. And so the bulk of its target customers are service providers which already run a lot of Linux – among whom it claims deployments of up to several hundred TB – although it also aims at devops use cases in wider verticals.
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…high performance and tightly integrated Cray Linux…
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Kernel Space
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Torvalds replied, “I don’t think I’m all that powerful, but I’m glad to get all the credit for open source.” For someone who’s arguably been more influential on technology than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Larry Ellison, Torvalds remains amusingly modest. That’s probably one reason Torvalds, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, remains the unchallenged leader of Linux.
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“The only real solution to security is to admit that bugs happen,” Torvalds said, “and then mitigate them by having multiple layers, so if you have a hole in one component, the next layer will catch the issue.”
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Once upon a time open source was the mortal enemy of the providers of IT products and, by extension, their channel partners. But over the last couple of months it’s become evident that IT vendors have begun to co-opt the open source movement.
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Immediately after announcing the release of the Linux kernel 4.1.6 LTS and Linux kernel 3.10.87 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the fifty-one maintenance release of the Linux 3.14 LTS kernel.
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In a morning keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Michael Miller (Vice President of Global Alliances, Marketing and Product Management for SUSE), described himself as just a guy who likes technology. He’s also a guy who reads Scientific American and who thought that by 2015 we would all be flying jet packs to work.
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NTP is essential to the internet. Without it, servers and PCs wouldn’t know what time it is. That, in turn, would mean backups would fail, financial transactions would go awry, and many fundamental network services wouldn’t work. The primary time-keepers of the net are stratum-0 devices, i.e. atomic clocks. These are connected to other devices with NTP, which in turn set the time for everything online.
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In an entertaining afternoon talk at LinuxCon North America, titled “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Rock Star Developers,” Rikki Endsley (Community Evangelist, Red Hat) discussed why the “rock star developer” label has outlived its usefulness and how Willie Nelson can be seen as a model for open source development.
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Today, Jim Zemlin (Executive Director at The Linux Foundation) opened LinuxCon North America in Seattle with a welcoming keynote. Here is a quick summary of this morning’s keynote addresses.
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The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is reaching out to the community to help determine which open-source projects practice good security methods.
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LinuxCon was the talk of the town this week with their announcements dominating the headlines. In other news, Ian Murdock blogged about how he came to Linux with a big thanks to Linus himself. Speaking of Linus, he made several headlines with his Q&A at LinuxCon this morning. Antergos got an update today, after my not having much luck with the last release last night. Dedoimedo said the Cinnamon desktop isn’t “all sugar and spice” and Matthew Garrett didn’t get a satisfying answer on intellectual property from Shuttleworth at LinuxCon.
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How does anyone know if any given open-source project is following security best practices? That’s a question that the Linux Foundation is now trying to answer with a new program announced at the LinuxCon conference here.
Emily Ratliff, senior director of infrastructure security at the Linux Foundation, announced the new badging effort in a press conference with media and analysts. She said the program is akin to the badges used on the popular Github code-development and -sharing site.
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As part of the kickoff for the Linuxcon Containercon conference here there was An Evening with Containers on August 16. Seven speakers in total each delivered 5 minute lightning talks about different topics related to containers.
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Just noticed this short video and I thought it might interest some. I already have a “career in Linux” myself. How about you?
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The project is designed to create a collaborative environment among top industry leaders and academic institutions to drive both improvements and enterprise innovation on the mainframe. The project will initially focus on reinforcing four key areas: scalability, availability, performance and security.
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On the final day of LinuxCon North America 2015, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin welcomed a “surprise” guest, Linus Torvalds, to the stage for a brief Q&A session. Zemlin read quotes from a recent article about Torvalds, The creator of Linux on the future without him, which said, “Torvalds may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years.” Torvalds jokingly responded, “I love open source and how all the credit goes to me,” but then he explained that the power he has over the Linux kernel is just the power to say no—he doesn’t actually write the code anymore.
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Applications
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The APT (Advanced Package Tool) is getting ready to receive some pretty important new features and developers are saying that this is probably the best version to be released. It’s still under production, but we can only hope that it will arrive much faster than the previous 1.0 branch.
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Moritz Bunkus announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third point release of his ever popular MKVToolNix 8 open-source software for manipulating Matroska (MKV) files under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows OSes.
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Shotcut is an impressive video editor that runs on multiple platforms and which also happens to be open source. Its makers usually push a new update out the door each week and now it’s time for another one.
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APT (Advanced Package Tool) is the default package manager of Debian, Ubuntu and their derivative systems.
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The developers of the open-source Rygel software, a Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) media server distributed as part of the GNOME Project, have released a new milestone towards version 0.28 of the application.
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The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of 4.2. This is primarily a bug fix release, but the list of fixes is long, and we’ve also replaced the audio/MIDI IO backend for Windows with completely new code which we think will address some of the issues faced on that platform. This release also sees the return of downloads for Apple PowerPC platforms.
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The Ardour software has been updated recently to version 4.2, a release that brings a huge number of new features covering almost all of the application’s core functionality. Ardour 4.2 has been released for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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It has never even been a serious contender in the race. In my opinion, most TTS applications in Linux have remained in hobbyist mode since inception. And I’m sure that statement will chap the ass of many, but a simple comparison between all of the Linux programs using TTS vs. Mac, Windows, and even the mobile market will bear me out. Hopefully we can raise enough awareness to at least see some forward movement on TTS in Linux. Hopefully.
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Yarock 1.1.3 was released recently with a new radio service: Radionomy (which has replaced Shoutcast), support for importing APE files in the playqueue, MP4 audio tag reading and more.
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Proprietary
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Accusoft has added Linux support in its release of Barcode Xpress. The company says that Linux support provides even greater versatility to Barcode Xpress and equips developers with a fast, accurate and easy-to-use SDK that simplifies adding barcode reading and writing into Web and mobile applications. Besides Linux, Barcode Xpress currently supports Windows, Android or iOS operating systems and .NET, JAVA and C/C++.
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Vivaldi, a new web browser built by one of the Opera founders and his team, has brought a number of new features including a web panel and lots of other improvements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Orion Trail, a new single-player adventure developed and published by Schell Games on Steam, has been released on the Linux platform as well.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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When Bodhi Linux came out with version 3.1.0 a week or so ago, the distro’s founder and lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, made it clear on the Bodhi website that this was a milestone release.
“This release is a bigger deal for the Bodhi team than our previous update releases have been in the past,” he wrote. “The reason for this is because this release is the first to use the Moksha Desktop which we have forked from E17. Because it is built on the rock solid foundation that E17 provides, even this first release of the Moksha Desktop is stable and is something I feel comfortable using in a production environment.”
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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August 19, 2015. Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08.
With this release a total of 107 applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5. The team is striving to bring the best quality to your desktop and these applications. So we’re counting on you to send your feedback.
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Linux Mint 17.2 KDE felt solid and responsive to me, apart from one occurrence that I mentioned above.
It is based on a solid distribution and adds some useful features like necessary codecs.
KDE always had its fans for the convenience, high level of integration and the ease of navigation. On the flipside, KDE is usually considered a Desktop Environment for high-performance hardware.
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Weeeee! KDE is sponsoring Randa Meetings again, this time with touch. And you can help making KDE technologies even better! This exciting story in the Dot this week, https://dot.kde.org/2015/08/16/you-can-help-making-kde-technologies-even-better caught not only my attention, but my pocketbook as well.
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Finally it is ready: Kdenlive 15.08 is an important accomplishment!
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As we all know we have our final evaluation of our GSOC project next week. I have completed my project and would like to display how the integration between Cantor and LabPlot works.
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KDE Connect is nowadays on a sweet moment where many things can happen. This is an interesting moment to sprint, because it will allow all of us to work together on interesting features that can then be merged at once with greater impact.
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In Qt we have the Platform Abstraction (QPA) which allows to better interact with the used windowing system through a plugin. In case of KWin we use the “xcb” plugin on X11 and on Wayland we used to use the “wayland” plugin provided by QtWayland. For quite some time I had been thinking about migrating away from those and use an own KWin-specific plugin at least for Wayland.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 3.5.0.
The most apparent new feature in this version is probably the highlighting that we added to the editors’ vertical scroll bars. You can now easily see where
bookmarks, breakpoints, warnings, errors and search results are located in the open document.
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These are but a few things the KDE contributors are going to focus on in Randa. All in all there should be something for everyone to get behind and support.
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Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08, the collection of more than 150 applications. This release features the Kontact Suite and Dolphin ported to KDE Frameworks 5.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The developers of the famous GTK+ GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit are hard at work these days preparing for the final release of the GTK+ 3.18 software, which will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.
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The development team behind the GNOME Project is hard at work these days preparing to release the first Beta build of the upcoming GNOME Control Center app, an essential component of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.
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The first Beta build of the upcoming Orca 3.18 open-source screen reader and magnifier software, which is used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions by default, has been made available for download and testing.
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Thanks to recent investigating by NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner and GNOME’s Rui Matos, the NVIDIA screen update/flickering problems should be solved. Aaron earlier this month posted a patch for fixing a GL_EXT_x11_sync_object race condition within GNOME Mutter’s compositor. Fixing that code in the compositor plus other work by Rui should fix things up for affected binary NVIDIA users.
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GUADEC 2015 was a lot of fun, from preparation till the conference happening. I gave a lightning talk on my work on Polari, a talk on GNOME’s release videos and a talk at FOSSGBG on my experience getting started in GNOME.
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GUADEC is the GNOME project’s primary annual event, held every year in a different European city. This year, it was the turn of Gothenburg, Sweden. The conference brought together contributors, enthusiasts and partners from around the world for three days of talks, followed by three days of workshops (called “Birds of a Feather” sessions). It ran between the 6th and 12th of August.
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New Releases
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Kali is the successor to BackTrack, and is a Debian-based Linux distribution that includes hundreds of penetration-testing tools pre-installed and ready to go. Just boot it from a USB drive or live DVD and you’ll have a penetration-testing—or “hacking”—environment with all the tools you might want just waiting for you to fire them up.
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Steven Shiau published a new development version of his popular Clonezilla Live project, version 2.4.2-41, which incorporates multiple new features, updated components, and various bugfixes.
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of Cnchi v0.10 as the new stable version of our installer. As always, we put great effort into squashing bugs and improving code quality. One other area of focus during this development cycle was making Cnchi more reliable. To that end, Cnchi’s download module received what basically amounts to a total rewrite.
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Antergos is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that follows the same rolling release model. Its developers have just released a new version of the Cnchi installer, which has made some great progress.
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The IPFire development team, through Michael Tremer, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Core Update 93 for the open-source IPFire 2.17 firewall software.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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Manjaro developers have released a version of their distro powered by the latest KDE Plasma 5.4, which is still in development stages. The results are very interesting and offer a polished and very different desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s work in the project included integration support of Huawei’s FusionServer E9000, CloudEdge platform, virtualized evolved packet core and virtualized Multi-Service Engine with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6. Red Hat also provided MANO support.
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In June, author and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst appeared on an episode of theCUBE, where he shared his thoughts on leading an open organization and the future of organizational decision making. Below is a video of that appearance—on Wednesday, June 24, 2015—along with a transcript of the conversation for the first six and a half minutes. This is a transcription.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Server folks want to stop producing i686 installation media for Fedora Server beginning with Fedora 24. “The Fedora Server SIG has determined that we no longer feel that i686 install media is critical to our success. Since delivering and maintaining each install medium requires significant effort, the Server SIG has decided to stop shipping i686 media. This includes both the Server Install DVD and the Server Network Install ISO…This will reduce the maintenance burden on Fedora QA, reduce the compose time for rel-eng and reduce user confusion as to which version of Fedora Server to install,” reads this Fedora change proposal.
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Good progress for GNOME/Fedora om Wayland is being made, but the default transition will not happen for this fall’s release of Fedora 23. Developers want one feature-complete release before switching the default, and they’re hoping with GNOME 3.18 in Fedora 23 will be that milestone. Thus the target is on making the switch happen for Fedora 24 early next year.
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As you may already know, the Red Hat developers are working hard at Wayland, a next generation display server that will slowing get adopted in RHEL, CentOS and Fedora systems.
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At flock, mattdm, I and others were discussing the need to replace the message about Rawhide that it kills babies, eats kittens, etc.
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So I realized I hadn’t posted a Wayland update in a while. So we are still making good progress on Wayland, but the old saying that the last 10% is 90% of the work is definitely true here. So there was a Wayland BOF at GUADEC this year which tried to create a TODO list for major items remaining before Wayland is ready to replace X.
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This blog post looks at the final part of creating secure software: shipping it to users in a safe way. It explains how to use transport security and package signatures to achieve this goal.
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A few days ago, the touchpad on my HP 2000 Notebook PC began acting up. It would jitter around a lot and insert phantom mouse clicks. My desktop ended up with approximately Avogadro’s number of Notes widgets. At first, I thought the touchpad was going bad. I resigned myself to a life of using a USB mouse, at least until I could buy a replacement.
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There are a few fedora packages that rely on jemalloc. If you have a chance to help testing, please recompile and test the package against the updated version. You can leave comments here, or send me a mail.
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Google Summer of Code 2015 has come to an end. And yes I am satisfactory to a certain level that I have produced something tangible and all of you are able to access it which is deployed in Openshift. And here is the link: http://askbotfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com. The github repository which contains the code is here: https://github.com/anuradha1992/askbotfedoratest. We are planning to merge the code with the repo at https://github.com/fedoradesign/askbot-test so that others can also use it and build upon it.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project has announced that it has joined forces with Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that acts as a home for open-source and free software projects, to create the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project.
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I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I was a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawakened by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall semester (we were given the choice between COBOL and FORTRAN—which even in 1992 seemed highly dated—and I had picked COBOL because it seemed the more “business” of the two).
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Every package maintainer should remove one of their packages from the archive.
It’s dead simple. It is acceptable to adopt a package to replace the one that has been removed, or to add a new one to the archive.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s IP policy seems to remain a hot topic to this day, especially for developers. A conversation between Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, and Matthew Garrett, a prominent Linux developer and one of the opponents of Canonical’s IP policy, revealed some interesting information.
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The Ubuntu 15.04, 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been updated in order to fix an important Django vulnerability that has been identified.
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Canonical’s Michi Henning wrote a very interesting article on his blog, where he explains in detail how he, James Henstridge and Xavi Garcia Mena managed to implement a fast and scalable thumbnailing services for both Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Touch operating systems.
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Linux users don’t really get to see a lot of concepts for desktops, but from time to time we get to experience some pretty interesting designs. The same can be said about the Ubuntu 16.04 Stupendously Hot Charmander concept, which looks superb.
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The famous “almost invisible and difficult to make appear when you need them most” scrollbars in Unity 7 are going away, and they are being replaced by the upstream version from GNOME.
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The new OTA update for Ubuntu Touch is in the works, and it looks like it’s entering its last stages. It’s in the hand of the QA team, and it should be out in the next couple of weeks.
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Many of us are familiar with Android and iOS devices but those interested in an alternative operating system may be pleased that two Ubuntu-running smartphones are now arriving for India. The BQ Aquaris E5 HD and Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition phones have been priced at the India launch and will be available from Snapdeal by the end of this month.
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Canonical has just announced that Aquaris E4.5 and E5 Ubuntu Editions will launch in India through Snapdeal, which is the biggest online marketplace in that country.
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With Ubuntu 15.10 (currently in development, to be released on October 22), Unity will stop using its original overlay scrollbars for GTK3 apps and switch to Gnome’s scrollbars instead.
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Android, iOS and Windows Phone are usual culprits within the mobile space in India but over the years we have seen options like Firefox, Tizen and Sailfish trying their luck. And now, there’s a new entrant into the market and the geeks might be familiar with this name i.e. Ubuntu.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf has finally managed to make the transition to GCC 5.x, the same change being already implemented on Ubuntu Touch.
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As you may know, Canonical’s end game is to make Ubuntu the first mobile-desktop convergent system available on the OS market. In order to achieve that, they are working at a new display server called Mir, porting the Unity 8 interface, currently available on Ubuntu Touch, to Ubuntu desktop and created the snappy packages, which are enhanced click packages.
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We reported two weeks ago that Canonical launched a new contest for Ubuntu fans who want to win an Ubuntu phone device and many other goodies, which should have been ended on August 17, 2015.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently, I have installed and tested Linux Mint 17.2, and found it quite adorable. One of the major improvements the distribution brings to the proverbial Penguin table is a set of stylistic and functional changes to its settings menu, including the way you manage themes, icons, extensions, and the rest of the desktop bits and pieces. All of that, in a review, coming soon. But that’s only one side of the story.
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According to a Launchpad bug report, a new application, called Xfce Panel Switch, should be included by default with Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf. The package is currently in the Wily new queue.
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As you may know, CinnXP is a theme for Cinnamon that makes the system look like Windows XP. Despite the fact that Windows XP is dead, it is still used on old systems and a lot of Linux distributions try to mimic its design.
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A US company has created a modular embedded Linux board which it hopes will be used across the entire product development cycle from evaluation, development, prototyping to finish product.
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Axiomtek’s “MANO842″ Mini-ITX board runs Linux on a quad-core Bay Trail Celeron, and offers PCIe, mini-PCIe, SATA, and a choice of ATX 12V or 12V DC power.
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ADI has taken the opportunity this month to unveil a new addition to their range of MinnowBoard development boards during the IDF event this week.
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Clever Year 7 students at Thirsk School have devised an amazing tracking system for the International Space Station and have become Astro Pi competition winners. We speak to their teacher, Dan Aldred, to find out more…
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung has already teased us about their upcoming Next Gear Smartwatch, the Gear S2, and now that teased video from Samsung Unpacked 2015 Episode 2 can be seen in its full glory. We will see the launch of the new circular watch faced Smartwatch next month on September 03 in Berlin at IFA 2015.
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Belvek, a company known for their Gear watch faces, have released “The Piston Watch”, which is a “carefully crafted watch face that is beautiful work of art with smoothly animated gears and engine piston”. It has an Interesting Piston running in the background with some rotating cogs.
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Android
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Intel at its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco showcased new products that the company has been working on. At the event, Intel in collaboration with Google announced the Project Tango Developer Kit for smartphones using its RealSense technology.
The company stressed that this will provide opportunity for developers to create new depth-sensing software for Android smartphone developer kit. Intel confirmed that the developer kit is targeted for release to select Android developers by the end of this year.
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Google’s Android One initiative, which launched last year with the aim of standardizing low-cost smartphones in developing markets, is expanding into six countries in Africa. Google is launching a new Android One smartphone built by Hong Kong manufacturer Infinix in Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Morocco, offering free software updates for the Android 5.1 device (including the upcoming OS Android M) in partnership with South African mobile service provider MTN. Google says it’s also working on extending its offline functionality for YouTube to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Egypt in the “coming months,” making it possible for users to store videos locally for up to 48 hours
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Ahead of Google’s major reset of Android One, the company has launched its first device in the category in Africa.
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Damn it, Google. Every time you announce a new major Android release, I end up throwing away hours of hard gym work and stuffing pounds of sugary sweets into my grinning cake-hole. And now you’ve just done it again.
Oh, who am I kidding? I’d be eating the sweet stuff either way. But Google’s habit of naming Android releases after desserts (or “tasty treats,” if you want to get technical about it) sure doesn’t help.
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The standout feature of the global edition of MIUI 7 — which launches in beta on August 24 and still looks a lot like Apple’s iOS — is probably a partnership with Opera which, the companies claim, will compress mobile data usage in browsers and other apps by as much as 50 percent. The feature makes use of Opera’s Max technology — which now works with YouTube and Netflix videos — and is baked into MIUI 7 under the ‘Data Saver’ feature. Also filed under performance, Xiaomi claimed that the newest version of its software can help apps run up to 30 percent faster, while consuming 10 less battery life.
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Blass also tweeted images that appeared to show another BlackBerry device running Android. The second device doesn’t have a slider, looking instead like the company’s Passport, a big and square smartphone that would — if the leaks are accurate — now run Google’s operating system.
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Meet the FrankenBlackBerry. Is it an Android phone? Is it a BlackBerry? No, it’s the new BlackBerry Android phone! If you ever wondered what would happen if you slapped a BlackBerry keyboard onto an average Android phone, look no further. BlackBerry has this device for you.
Notorious leaker Evan Blass shared a rendering of the new device on Twitter. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamed, and probably even a bit more. As you can see on the picture, it runs stock Android. BlackBerry opted for a more traditional 16:9 display instead of its tiny square-ish displays as well.
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Obviously, only selected Xperia mobile devices will be upgraded to Android M, but the question is: which one will get to the list? If you have an Xperia Z device, you’ll be curious to know if you’ll receive the official software upgrade, so we’ll tell you which models are eligible to get the technical preview.
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Earlier this month, Google launched Android Experiments, a site showcasing mobile apps, similar to the Chrome Experiments site. “We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code,” Google team members posted. A few weeks into the Android experiment it is indeed starting to yield interesting ideas and some new aesthetics surrounding mobile apps.
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Given that users are operating heavy machinery, tweaking a car system interface is a delicate act. As such, Google has made some subtle changes to the Android Auto home screen in the latest update to show “ongoing activities like music and navigation at a glance.” You can now access music playback controls directly from the homescreen — before, you could see which song was playing but needed to go to another screen to pause it. Navigation is also expanded on the home screen to show turning directions without forcing users over to the main app.
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Yet another potentially serious security flaw has been revealed in Android.
This time the problem involves the mobile operating system’s ability to run more than one app at once – rather than the handling of multimedia messages, which was the crux of a cyber of recent vulnerabilities*.
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BlackBerry’s upcoming device is rumored to use Google’s Android operating system (OS), in what could be the Canadian company’s “last chance” to win in the smartphone market.
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Google, earlier this week revealed the Android 6.0 ‘Marshmallow’ name and released the Android M Developer Preview 3 images for Nexus devices. Until now, Nexus users were the only ones who could experience the new Google Now launcher that ships with latest preview of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Now, non-Nexus users can now also experience the new Google Now launcher on their devices as its apk file has reached the Web.
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After the guessing game that went on for months, Google has finally announced its next Android iteration will be named after the sweet treat Marshmallow. So, now M is for Marshmallow.
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Intel’s RealSense technology is finally ready for prime time after Intel’s Haifa-based Israel team integrated the 3D tech with Google’s Project Tango.
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That guy is a Chicagoan named Kevin Barry. Barry got started doing indie-level Android development while still working for someone else as a software developer during the day. He eventually started making more money with his early Android efforts than he was making with his “real” job — and thus, TeslaCoil Software was born. (Little known fact: TeslaCoil is named after Barry’s cat, Tesla — who was named after a certain Nikola who also bore that name.)
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Google’s making it possible for Android Wear developers to do way more with watch faces starting today. “We’re launching interactive watch faces, making it easier (and more fun) to stay connected, right from your wrist,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Now, with just a tap, your watch face can change its design, reveal more information, or even launch a specific app.” Watch faces can now move back and forth between several screens of data, making them far more useful and lessening the need to enter a watch app. Under Armour’s watch face is already taking advantage of the new functionality; tapping on the screen cycles between your fitness stats (steps, calories burned, etc.) Google has set up a separate section for interactive watch faces within Google Play.
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Mike Hearn is one of the primary engineers behind bitcoin, the digital currency that aims to remake our financial system. Or at least he used to be. Over the weekend, Hearn told the world that he and a group of other coders were forking the bitcoin project, creating an alternate version of the software that underpins the digital currency.
“I feel sad that it’s come to this, but there is no other way,” Hearn wrote in an email to others working on the project. “The Bitcoin Core project has drifted so far from the principles myself and many others feel are important that a fork is the only way to fix things.”
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We had the chance to interview Lance Albertson, the director of Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University (OSU), who is at LinuxCon this year to speak about what they do to help their students bridge this skill gap and how they work with open source projects to train the next generation of people who will keep the Internet running.
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Recognizing the growth of open source software within higher education, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently expanded their Affiliate Membership Program to include colleges and universities. Today the OSI announced The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has been approved as the international non-profit’s first Higher Education Affiliate Member. OSI General Manager Patrick Masson said of the news, “The OSI Board of Directors is thrilled USQ stepped forward so quickly upon learning of the Affiliate Program’s expansion to institutions of higher education, and we’re excited to welcome our first univesity.” USQ’s mission, “to enable broad participation in higher education and make significant contributions to research and community development,” not only highlights its ongoing commitment to openness and inclusion, but also aligns with the OSI’s goals in open source awareness, adoption and community development.
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Major Hayden is a man of considerable skill. In addition to his job at Rackspace, he spends time developing open source projects, maintaining packages for Fedora, and making sure icanhazip.com is up and running. He has a stack of certifications and has even gone so far as presenting his resume as a man page. Yet for all his undeniable credentials, he sometimes struggles with a feeling of I don’t belong here.
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Always on the lookout for open source alternatives to pricey commercial offerings, we wondered if open source reporting tools could hold a candle to the established commercial products. For this review we selected the community/open source versions of three commonly used reporting tools, Eclipse BIRT, JasperReports and Pentaho. Our focus was on usability, data access, platform support, report creation and web publishing.
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In fact, despite the ubiquity of open source, most organisations lack knowledge of what open source code they are using, where it is located in their code base, or if it has any known security vulnerabilities. To complicate matters further, there are preconceived notions and differences of opinion between software developers and security professionals about whether open source software is more or less secure than closed-source, or proprietary, alternatives.
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Robin ChaseZipcar co-founder Robin Chase is worried about climate change. If countries don’t strictly follow climate-friendly initiatives, we could see the average temperature rise 7 degrees Celsius by 2060. And today’s solutions may not be enough.
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Events
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This week, we kick off the 8th KVM Forum in Seatttle, Washington. With the exception of 2009, KVM Forum has been held every year since 2007, and it’s about more than just KVM — the open source hypervisor that is most often used together with oVirt or the OpenStack cloud computing platform. The conference covers KVM and QEMU (which provides hardware emulation to virtual machines), but it’s also open to talks about all layers in the open source virtualization stack. In particular, this year’s talks will also cover libvirt (virtual machine lifecycle management and a lot more), oVirt (datacenter virtualization), and OpenStack.
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We’d like to remind you that the systemd.conf 2015 Call for Presentations ends on August 31st! Please submit your presentation proposals before that data on our website.
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While the rest of FOSS Nation oooohs and ahhhhs with all the developments currently coming out of LinuxCon in Seattle, the end of the week’s attention — and attendance — shifts to San Marcos, Texas.
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I ended up using FLOSS heavily throughout my web development career, though I have only recently been able to start contributing back to the community. I made my my first commit in 2013 in the form of a Drupal module, after my freelance and startup career came to an unceremonious end.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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As you may know, Virtualbox is the most popular, free, cross-platform virtualization software.
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Business
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Day one in a new office suite overlooking Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and open-source IT automation startup Ansible has some empty desks.
While its 50-person local headcount had barely squeezed into its office at the other end of American Tobacco Campus, this new space is three times the size at about 10,000 square feet.
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Semi-Open Source
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The hack is revealed in three ways: on Twitter, in a video and on GitHub. It is what it is, and it will let people customise the out-of-the-box watch face.
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Released on GitHub for the open-source community to use and dwell upon, the code uses Dropbox’s Carousel application to load the customised code. Supported faces are hardcoded, and so the Carousel application uses the SupportingHooks script to load Apple Watch faces.
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Funding
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BSD
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NetBSD, a free, fast, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like open source OS that is able to run on a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices, has been upgraded to version 7.0 RC3.
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RaspBSD debuts, promises ports to more ARM devices real soon now
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We have just activated pre-orders for openbsd 5.8. The release date is oct 18, which seems a long time from now. This is being stretched out to ensure the CD2 production problems happen again.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Guix is the package manager based on Nix and designed exclusively for free software and powering the GNU System. This summer via Google Summer of Code, Guix was ported to GNU Hurd. Guix on Hurd can now build a native final toolchain, build packages natively using the toolchain, and there’s support for cross-building packages for the Hurd.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Collaboration holds the key to adoption of open source technology in the public sector.
The ‘age of austerity’ resulting from the recession of the late 00’s has brought cost-cutting to the fore for many companies and institutions in the UK.
As a result, the IT department has become one of the key aspects of an organisation now under close scrutiny. This effort to save money while improving services has led many authorities in the public sector to make the transition to open source.
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Openness/Sharing
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Lytro is making access to its products available to developers and going open source with what it is calling “Lytro Power Tools.” Lytro says the platform was developed to give programmers, researchers and artists complete control at every step – from capture on the camera to post-processing light field data. Initially announced as an Alpha program only available in the United States, LPT Beta is now available to anyone who’s interested.
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Now that eGovernment services are quickly becoming the default way to communicate between public agencies and citizens, citizen participation and engagement are lagging. This is often blamed on the so-called digital divide, i.e. a lack of skills, trust and confidence. The Slovenian Housing Fund, however, found that they could greatly improve the citizen engagement by actively searching for internal rather than external factors and mitigating these.
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Open Data
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It’s not a given that an open data initiative will become successful. Only a limited number of datasets are actually used, user support is limited, and the generation of value is seldom demonstrated. A group of researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece and Austria have identified 64 critical success factors for the publication and use of open data. They found, however, that the criticality of these factors depends considerably on the context of the initiative.
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Open Hardware
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Open-source furniture company Opendesk has created customised workspace fittings for self-build computer brand Kano…
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A development kit for designing a virtual reality headset for game-players from 0pen-source software has been introduced by the Open-Source Virtual Reality Consortium.
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Chances are pretty good you’ve had a glowing probe clipped to your fingertip or earlobe in some clinic or doctor’s office. If you have, then you’re familiar with pulse oximetry, a cheap and non-invasive test that’s intended to measure how much oxygen your blood is carrying, with the bonus of an accurate count of your pulse rate. You can run down to the local drug store or big box and get a fingertip pulse oximeter for about $25USD, but if you want to learn more about photoplethysmography (PPG), [Rajendra Bhatt]’s open-source pulse oximeter might be a better choice.
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Lytro, the name behind light field photography, has just generously dished out all its tech to everyone, by becoming open source.
This means anyone can now use the Illum camera and first-gen camera smarts to create anything their imaginations allow. This includes virtual reality capture for 3D viewing on the likes of Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR headsets.
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Programming
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Django Girls is a rapidly growing initiative that aims to bring more women into world of programming. It started a year ago at EuroPython 2014, and since then Django Girls workshops have been held all over the world. In just a year, more than 1,600 women learned about Python and Django during the workshops and many, many more did it at home by reading their open source Django tutorial.
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One of the things that makes Python so powerful is that you can find a module for almost anything. In this article, I cover Astropy, which was originally developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute for doing astronomy calculations like image processing and observatory calculations. Because this is a Python program, you can install it with either pip or easy_install. Your Linux distribution already should have a package included.
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One of my teacher colleagues recently shared his strategies for using Turtle graphics with Python. This piqued my interest (due to my earlier experiences). Since Python is included with most Linux distributions, I was eager to meet my old friend the Turtle.
To begin, I needed to install Python’s graphical interface, Tkinter. Once I accomplished that, I was ready to begin. I opened a terminal, typed “python,” and pressed Enter.
At the Python prompt, I typed “import turtle”—and was ready to begin. At the prompt, I typed, “turtle.forward(100)” and pressed Enter. The graphical interface appeared, and the turtle moved 100 turtle steps forward.
You can use many commands to turn, change the pen color, pick up the pen, change the background color, and more. The Python documentation is very good.
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On Wednesday, Github published a graph tracking the popularity of various programming languages on its eponymous internet service, a tool that lets anyone store, edit, and collaborate on software code. In recent years, Github.com has become the primary means of housing open source software—code that’s freely available to the world at large; an increasing number of businesses are using the service for private code, as well. A look at how the languages that predominate on Github have changed over time is a look at how the software game is evolving.
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Netflix previously released Janitor Monkey and Chaos Monkey as open source, which are cloud tools. The company has also released an open internal tool it built to manage a flood of security alerts and incidents that arrive in tandem. Called FIDO (Fully Integrated Defense Operation), the tool is targeted to triage and categorize threats, as it helps preserve logically ordered incident management.
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A development team is somewhat like a sports team. It’s members each have their own strengths and weaknesses that you have to know and use.
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In response to the New York Times much-read takedown of Amazon’s harsh workplace culture, CEO Jeff Bezos asked employees for stories that might reflect the alleged abusive practices — and one person has taken up his offer.
Beth Anderson, a spouse of a former Amazon AMZN staff member who worked at the company from 2007 to 2013, wrote a public letter on Quartz, and unfortunately for Bezos, Anderson agrees with much of the details in the NYT story: “Many scenarios and anecdotes detailed in the article hit very close to home,” she wrote.
Specifically, Anderson takes issue with the constant need for her husband to be at the beck and call of the company. Working in a team that manages shipping warehouse software, Anderson’s husband was expected to respond to his pager within 15 minutes, or face repercussions from his manager: “If something came directly from you, Jeff, it was all hands on deck until that problem got figured out. No matter the emotional or physical toll,” Anderson wrote.
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Science
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College was never much of an option for most students in this tiny town of 1,200 located in the woods of the Manistee National Forest. Only 12 of the 32 kids who graduated high school in 2005 enrolled in college. Only two of those have gotten their bachelor’s degree.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Cleveland Clinic health center will be getting rid of a McDonald’s franchise after nearly a decade of trying to push the fast-food giant out of its hospital, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
The renowned US hospital said the move is part of a series of reforms aimed at helping its 44,000 workers and millions of patients make healthier choices.
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Security
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Docker developers take the stage at Containercon and discuss their work on future container innovations for security and live migration.
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If you’re using OS X Yosemite, watch out for malware exploiting a new way to take complete control of your Mac.
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Security guru Bruce Schneier says there’s a kind of cold war now being waged in cyberspace, only the trouble is we don’t always know who we’re waging it against.
Schneier appeared onscreen via Google Hangouts at the LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon conference in Seattle on Tuesday to warn attendees that the modern security landscape is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.
“We know, on the internet today, that attackers have the advantage,” Schneier said. “A sufficiently funded, skilled, motivated adversary will get in. And we have to figure out how to deal with that.”
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True, “on the Internet today, attackers have the advantage and a motivated attacker will get in, said Schneier. But “Sony had some pretty bad security … I won’t go into details, but they’re embarrassing.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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South Korean military shelled the North’s border area in response to an apparent earlier shelling from the North.
South Korean military fired dozens of artillery shells across the border on Thursday, the Yonhap news agency reported. The attack came in response to apparent shelling of the southern part of the border area by the North’s military.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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At the height of summer, in this part of North Carolina, the heat can be suffocating. It swells with the humidity, sticks your shirt to your back in seconds. When you lie belly-down on the dry land, every scratch and flicker of grass is a reminder of the life crawling beneath your body: the grasshoppers and mayflies, the ticks and bark lice. She can’t move.
[...]
The flytrap only grows wild in one location: a 100-mile range surrounding Wilmington, a city of about 111,000 people, 10 miles from the North Carolina coast.
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Finance
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historically, one of the best performers in the stock market over the last decade. But 11 years ago to this day, Google’s IPO was considered a disappointment.
On August 19, 2004, Google went public with a price of $85 for its roughly 19.6 million shares, which as CNBC’s Bob Pisani noted, was at the low end of expectations. The reason was manifold, starting with Google’s choice to sell their shares through a Dutch auction, where buyers went online to indicate the price and amount of shares they wanted until Google determined a fair price for their shares. As USA Today recounts, this didn’t please those who wanted the option of offering first dips at these shares to their interested clients.
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Wall Street executive Steve Rattner had a column (8/14/15) in the New York Times in which he derided Donald Trump’s economics by minimizing the impact of trade on the labor market. While much of Trump’s economics undoubtedly deserve derision, Rattner is wrong in minimizing the impact that trade has had on the plight of workers.
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GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has announced his resignation and called for snap elections, as he went on the offensive to defend the country’s massive bailout after it triggered a rebellion within his own party.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Influential Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson — whose show is a frequent destination for Republican presidential candidates — is standing by his plan to make undocumented immigrants “property of the state” if they refuse to leave the country after an allotted period of time. In comments to Media Matters, Mickelson described his plan as “constitutionally defensible, legally defensible, morally defensible, biblically defensible and historically defensible.”
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One hallmark of this year’s political “discourse” (to abuse a term) has been the number of astonishingly angry and ill-informed accusations made by some candidates against their opponents (and others). Nothing unusual about that, sad to say. But what is different is the degree of acceptance, and even approval, exhibited by many voters that in earlier years might have rejected these candidates as well as their statements.
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Labour have been accused of ‘purging’ critical voices from the party after a Labour-supporting blogger was banned from voting in the leadership race, after criticising his local council.
Lambeth Councillor Alex Bigham sent a dossier to his party recommending that website editor Jason Cobb, be excluded from voting, due to “possible entryism”
The document, seen by Politics.co.uk, included a series of screen-grabbed tweets in which Cobb accused some Labour councils of “social cleansing” in London as well as a link to a 2010 article he wrote for the Guardian in which he criticised Lambeth council.
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Censorship
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Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
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Sprint is getting rid of two-year smartphone contracts, following a move made previously by T-Mobile US and Verizon Wireless.
“By the end of the year, customers of the No. 4 wireless company will have to pay the full price for their phones or spread the payments out by leasing the device, an option that started last year,” CNBC reported.
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure explained the move in an interview with CNBC. Buying a new phone at the subsidized rate of $199 is “a thing of the past, the industry has changed,” he said.
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Interestingly, when zero-rating is squashed, the opposite happens. When the government forbade zero rating in the Netherlands, its largest provider KPN responded by doubling their users’ data caps without a price hike.
Thus, my suggestion to the Brazil government would be: work with providers to get indiscriminate data bundles to more users, rather than empowering providers to control their users’ Internet usage.
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DRM
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Just over half the people who sampled Apple Music have stuck around to use the service regularly, a study by music industry analytics firm MusicWatch has found. Apple recently took a victory lap for hitting the 11 million user mark among people who had sampled its new service, which is meant to compete with similar offerings from Spotify and Pandora. But 48% of those users aren’t there any more.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Rightscorp’s efforts to unmask file-sharers using the DMCA has crashed and burned. After a federal judge ruled in favor of ISP Birch Communications and quashed the anti-piracy firm’s subpoena, Rightscorp appealed the decision. Now the company has backed down, handing the ISP and privacy a big win.
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Posted in Australia, Deception, Law, Patents at 8:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
More protectionism for more large companies, even those coming from outside of New Zealand
Summary: Corporate conquest or takeover of New Zealand culminates in empty promises from government officials and blackmail against citizens of New Zealand, especially the country’s dairy industry
THE DEBATE about software patents in New Zealand is very important because it set the tone for similar debates in Europe and Anglo-Saxon-dominated countries such as Australia and Canada. It usually revolves around lobbying from US giants against local companies in New Zealand. The lobbying is done through law firms and front groups, but sometimes it’s done more directly (risking backlash and brand erosion for the likes of Microsoft and IBM).
The fight is back in a big way and there are many articles in the local media, as well as the international media. The Institute of IT Professionals has just had the corporate media in New Zealand lobbying for TPP, as expected, despite it being an evil secretive deal, enabling more systemic looting by the world’s super-rich. Some myths and classic nonsense get propagated, but there is also criticism of the secrecy, for instance: “Despite some of the potentially positive matters outlined below, we still hold concerns about the detail – or rather, lack of it. As the negotiations are being held in private, the actual wording being negotiated is restricted to negotiators and other government officials only. This means we and others can’t undertake independent analysis of the impact of what is being agreed until negotiations are complete.”
Rob O’Neill, who has used his role at the CBS-owned ZDNet to fight back against software patents in his country, now explains “How New Zealand’s software patent ban can survive the TPP”.
“Officials give assurances there will be no changes to software patents, ISP liability and parallel importation,” he wrote the other day. Does he really trust these officials given their terrible track record on other secrets? Remember how John Key repeatedly lied about surveillance. It was only when leaks came out (undoing the secrecy) that he had to respond like an angry brat, shooting the messengers rather than admit that he had lied.
It may sometimes seem like the corporate press helps raise scrutiny rather than help the corporations that own the media. Despite that, on the very same day IDG hosted (at ComputerWorld) a notable lobbyist these days for software patents (Martin Goetz). He is now treated as a guest author in this nonsensical piece denying the existence of patents on software, even if he’s just reposting there (plus some “NZ” added) what he very recently wrote for lobbyists of software patents in IP Watchdog (patent lawyers with an exceptionally big mouth). How dumb does he think the readers are?
The people who want software patents in New Zealand are basically blackmailing for changed laws, using sanctions in reverse. As Clare Curran (MP) put it the other day, “Will Groser trade NZ innovation 4 dairy? Software sector raises concern over patents 2 secure access 4 dairy products”
See this Australian article which supports what she wrote and take note of this article from New Zealand:
While not unanimous, there is strong consensus from the industry against software patents. “In a 2013 poll of over 1,000 New Zealand IT Professionals across the sector, around 94% of those with a view wanted to see software patents gone,” Taylor says.
“Following significant work by IITP and others, the Government agreed and modified the Patents Act to protect New Zealand technology firms from software patents in their home market.”
“The patent system doesn’t work for software. Research shows it’s near impossible for software to be developed without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents awarded around the world, often for ‘obvious’ work.
The government is of course lying and misrepresenting the opposition. It just wants this deal sealed and done for the plutocrats, some of whom are not even based in New Zealand at all. As one author put it the other day, alluding to Groser: “The government is also running the line that those same hard core anti-TPP protesters have opposed every single trade deal that New Zealand has entered. This is willfully deceptive in that it assumes the TPP is a free trade deal – when in reality, several of its most noxious provisions are anti-trade in that they entrench existing corporate advantage.
“Also, regular protest is necessary because successive “trade” pacts have included the same objectionable elements for well over 20 years. Almost identical investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms (which enable corporations to sue sovereign governments when they pass laws that infringe on profit expectations) have cropped up in mooted trade deals ever since the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Trade) proposals in the 1990s. Eventually, the MAI was defeated by a mass mobilization around the world very similar to the anti-TPP protests today. It can be done.”
New Zealand is under attack. It’s not just affecting software professionals but also countries outside of New Zealand, which is why we hope that citizens of New Zealand will get involved and help crush TPP. The assurances given by government officials are just lies and a shallow form of deception whose purpose it to sell the deal. Once it’s signed there’s no going back. █
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