06.14.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
An institution full of abuse at many levels and multiple departments
Summary: The blackhat methods of the EPO (e.g. keyloggers) were approved internally by the so-called data protection officer of the EPO, according to new leaks
THE EPO spying scandal is merely the latest among many scandals (we were among the first to report these). It’s the result of the EPO’s desperate attempts to muzzle critics. According to newly-leaked documents from Germany, “the so-called data protection officer of the EPO signed off on keylogging, hidden cameras” (blatant violations of European privacy laws), which means that he is very much like Microsoft's so-called (bogus) privacy chiefs, not the ones Microsoft fired for actually trying to ensure privacy (i.e. doing their job).
“On Friday,” says the bearer of the leaked document, “the data protection officer of the state of Bavaria (whose capital is Munich, where the EPO is headquartered) was quoted by a newspaper (English translation here) with the suggestion “that an external data protection supervisor be assigned to the EPO because the internal inspectors are not independent enough and in the absence of any action matters are likely to get out of hand.” It has become known that the EPO used keyloggers and hidden cameras in its internal investigations of what may actually just have been the exercise of one or more people’s freedom of speech with respect to the EPO’s Jack Warner, vice president Željko Topić. After Mr. Topić lost a court ruling in his country of origin (Croatia), can be accused of pretty bad stuff. The Bavarian data privacy commissioner was spot-on: while the EPO does have a “data protection officer,” that person is just a dictator’s minion with no say over anything important.”
“It’s the result of the EPO’s desperate attempts to muzzle critics.”For an institution that goes as far as keyloggers, with approval from high-level officials, it may not seem radical to hire Control Risks, mercenaries of the British government (with special spy connections). “Control Risks” is of course a very nice euphemism, which one of our readers initially described as the “private security company hired by EPO” (that was before much was known about it).
Control Risks is of course unlikely to find out much of use by reading this site. What they are after must be identities of sources and at no point will they succeed, unless they think that the reporters and sources are very dumb (the same poor assumption police often makes about felons). We know that they even spy on our IRC channels, which is rather pathetic use of their time (and European taxpayers’ money). As counter-intuitive as it may first seem, the transparency of the channels is what makes them useless for blackmail or exploitation by spies. In other words, knowing that everything there is visible (not just to moles/intruders and leakers) discourages bad behaviour or self-incriminating communication therein. There are no secrets there and people in the channels don’t have an illusion of privacy. Now, compare that to what Wikileaks had done before an FBI mole from Iceland leaked the logs. We advise Control Risks to step back and we wish to tell EPO (in the Netherlands) that we are seeing (and banning) its IP addresses that have been hammering on this site. We know what you are up to.
In order to secure future reference of the leaked material we are adding it below as JPEG (just large enough to be legible). It is possible that the Sepp Blatter equivalent at the EPO is actually Željko Topić, not King Battistelli. What the EPO needs is a sacrificial lamb, not more coverup. The longer it goes on for, the more embarrassing it will become. Keyloggers and hidden cameras should be installed on (or pointed at) Topić’s PC, not everyone who works at the EPO. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 6:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at lesser-explored aspects of the so-called OPN hack [sic], especially the systems involved
IN AN EFFORT to understand what repeatedly happened in the undoubtedly significant Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach/es [2-8], leaving aside the lack of concrete evidence of Chinese role [1], we tried to understand which platform was to blame. In the case of Sony it was reportedly a Microsoft Windows machine acting as the culprit or attack vector, just like Stuxnet in Iran with similar attempts against North Korea (there are still more articles about it).
“Hundreds of millions of credit card numbers got snatched from Windows.”NSA leaks were due to Microsoft SharePoint (Snowden gained access to the so-called ‘crown jewels’). As we last noted in an article about words from Kaspersky (still in headlines for it [9-12]), Windows is inherently not secure. Commercial targets of data breached that we wrote about before serve to show this. We gave readers a lot of examples over the years. Hundreds of millions of credit card numbers got snatched from Windows. the cost was enormous, but the role of Windows wasn’t ever emphasised in the corporate press.
Rebecca Abrahams published an article co-authored by Dr. Stephen Bryen, Founder & CTO of FortressFone Technologies. Unlike many other articles which point a finger at China (with little to actually back this accusation with), Abrahams does call out Windows and sheds light on what OPM uses:
Second, the government is very slow to improve security on its computers and networks. Many of the computers the government is using are antique. For example OPM still has 12-year old Windows XT as an operating system for its computers. Microsoft no longer supports XT and any vulnerability that develops is the problem of the user, not of the supplier. But even if the old stuff was upgraded it won’t help much because the systems are really clumsy amalgams of disparate parts which as a “system,” have never been properly vetted for security.
So there we go. Windows. We’re hardly surprised to say the least. The author probably means NT or XP (14 years old, not 12, unlike Server 2003), but does it matter much? Any version of Windows, no matter how old, is not secure. It’s not even designed to be secure. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Out of ulterior motives, some US media and politicians have developed a habit of scapegoating China for any alleged cyber attack on the United States. Such groundless accusations would surely harm mutual trust between the two big powers of today’s world.
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Last week, the human resources arm of the US government, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted that it had been victim of a massive data breach, where hackers stole personal data belonging to as many as 4 million government workers.
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We already described how the recent hack into the US federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) appears to be much more serious than was initially reported. The hack, likely by Chinese state hackers, appear to have obtained basically detailed personal info on all current and many former federal government employees.
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China-linked hackers appear to have gained access to sensitive background information submitted by US intelligence and military personnel for security clearances that could potentially expose them to blackmail, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
In a report citing several US officials, the news agency said that data on nearly all of the millions of US security-clearance holders, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and military special operations personnel, were potentially exposed in the attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
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And yet… this is the same federal government telling us that it wants more access to everyone else’s data to “protect” us from “cybersecurity threats” — and that encryption is bad? Yikes.
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A second data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management has compromised even more sensitive information about government employees than the first breach that was revealed earlier this week, sources claim. It’s possible at least 14 million Americans have chapter and verse on their lives leaked, we’re told.
The Associated Press reports that hackers with close ties to China are believed to have obtained extensive background information on intelligence-linked government staffers – from CIA agents and NSA spies to military special ops – who have applied for security clearances.
Among the records believed to have leaked from a compromised database are copies of Standard Form 86 [PDF], a questionnaire that is given to anyone who applies for a national security position, and is typically verified via interviews and background checks.
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Earlier this week, we noted that Senator Mitch McConnell, hot off of his huge flop in trying to preserve the NSA’s surveillance powers, had promised to insert the dangerous “cybersecurity” bill CISA directly into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As we discussed, while many have long suspected that CISA (and CISPA before it) were surveillance bills draped in “cybersecurity” clothing, the recent Snowden revelations that the NSA is using Section 702 “upstream” collection for “cybersecurity” issues revealed how CISA would massively expand the NSA’s ability to warrantlessly wiretap Americans’ communications.
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Moscow-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, famous for uncovering state-sponsored cyberattacks, today dropped its biggest bombshell yet: Its own computer networks were hit by state-sponsored hackers, probably working for Israeli intelligence or the U.S. National Security Agency. The same malware also attacked hotels that hosted ongoing top-level negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
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When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.’”
Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Treating ‘Open Source’ like a trash can or a wastebasket
Summary: Microsoft is hoping to achieve/get some positive karma (the openwashing effect) by putting a Windows tool that has essentially been abandoned (or made obsolete) in the ‘Open Source’ domain
Using “Abandoned Software” (AS) to label Microsoft “Open Source” (OS) isn’t a novel concept. It has been done by Microsoft before, even if the “OS” part too was altogether bogus (look but do not touch).
Microsoft appears to be pulling that card again, labelling Windows Live Writer (yes, remember “Live”? And it’s a Windows-only tool!) “Open Source”. As one site put it: “It is not updated regularly; the last update we ever saw for the device was back in 2012. Microsoft has not updated it since. Although there are users you [sic] are loyal and used the app religiously. Last month the live posts to Google’s Blogger platform stopped and it was then that it became vocal.”
Here is how IDG put it:
Microsoft will breathe life into Windows Live Writer by open sourcing the eight-year-old blog-publishing tool, a company manager said earlier this week.
What next? Making “KIN” and/or “Zune” something open-ish? If that’s the best Microsoft can do, then it is clearly too stubborn to ever leave the proprietary addiction. More openwashing of Microsoft this month is part of a familiar PR recipe… █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The story of Nokia’s Moonraker, the baby which got knifed before birth, reportedly because of Microsoft’s pressure
WHEN Nokia was killed by Microsoft it wasn’t a slow death. A lot of Nokia’s products got killed almost immediately, especially anything which involved Linux. Yes, because “Microsoft loves Linux,” according to Microsoft’s CEO. Whenever Nokia tried new initiatives involving Linux at their core (there were several such initiatives) these quickly got shot at the back of the neck. Some staff left or was pushed out (see Jolla for example), leaving in Nokia only those loyal enough to Microsoft. According to a couple of new reports, one of which from a Microsoft booster and another from a Microsoft-sympathetic site, Microsoft killed a non-Windows smartwatch from Nokia. To quote the Microsoft booster:
The Verge reports that, according to its sources, Microsoft killed off the Moonraker watch when it bought Nokia, as Band had more sensors. While Moonraker could do things such as turn on the screen when you raise your arm and turn it off when you lower it, this apparently didn’t compare with the breadth of sensors found in the Band.
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While Google and Apple smartwatches both run operating systems that are closely related to their phone platforms, Band is believed to run software that’s substantially lighter weight. While this allows Band to be smaller than full smartwatches, it also limits its utility as an app platform. Similar to the Apple Watch’s WatchKit (but unlike the forthcoming native SDK), Band apps run on the paired phone, using the Band itself only as a display device.
Nokia could have beat the rest of the market to it, but since Windows is laughably bloated and unsuitable for any watch-sized device, Microsoft could just not let it be. █
“A lot of people make that analogy that competing with Bill Gates is like playing hardball. I’d say it’s more like a knife fight.”
–Gary Clow, famous Microsoft victim
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06.13.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Worried about the vulnerability of workstations used by several thousand IBM system administrators who had access to clients’ production systems, about four years ago the company took away their Windows computers and put them all on Linux PCs.
Those who needed Windows could run it in a KVN virtual environment. In addition, the admins were told no personal browsing or email could be done on the Linux platform.
It was, admitted IBM CISO Koos Lodewijkx, “very unpopular” decision but it “significantly reduced malware infection rates” on those users’ machines.
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Pluribus joins such vendors as Cumulus, Midokura and Big Switch Networks in porting their software to Dell’s “brite-box” hardware.
Dell is adding Pluribus Networks’ new Linux-based network operating system to the growing list of third-party software that can run on its portfolio of open network switches.
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Desktop
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The Cirrus7 Nimbini mini PC is probably one of the most beautiful and powerful mini-PCs available right now that ship with Ubuntu. The German company that builds them has shown us how that amazing aluminium case looks on the inside.
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Eurocom makes some of the beefiest, most bad ass notebooks around, and I wouldn’t blame you if you thought it was impossible for the company to produce something a bit more modest. Well, it can, and today we see an example of that with the M4 ultraportable notebook, one that happens to support Linux.
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Eurocom, one of the oldest hardware company specialized in completely upgradable notebooks, as well as high-performance mobile servers and workstations, announced the immediate availability of the EUROCOM M4 Ultraportable laptop powered by Ubuntu Linux.
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Server
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Canonical, through Carsten Duch, reports that the teuto.net German IT company, which specializes in offering various Linux-based hosting and cloud services, has announced that it has built a new service called teutoStack Public Cloud.
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A Trojan designed for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) functionality and aimed at Linux systems has increased its activity during the month of May, researchers warn.
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Nutanix on Wednesday announced its Xtreme Computing Platform, challenging VMware’s virtual machine software dominance.
Nutanix’s XCP comes about one year after VMware introduced its own hyperconverged storage software, which offered customers an alternative to Nutanix’s offering at the time.
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Kernel Space
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In 1997, I was part of a team that was looking at new technologies that we might want to incorporate into our datacenter. One of the technologies I chose to look at was Linux. So, I loaded up Red Hat 3.0.3 (IIRC) and started learning. The more I studied it, the more I realized that Linux could replace many of the custom operating systems (OS) that we used in our products, in addition to its usefulness in the datacenter.
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Allwinner Technology is the Chinese company producing a range of low-end SoCs for Android tablets and other devices. Allwinner hardware is popular with many in the open-source community due to their SoCs appearing in lower-cost hardware and the thriving Linux-SunXi community. Unfortunately, Allwinner as a company is still “learning” to be open-source friendly and to not violate the GPL and other licenses.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Allwinner Technology, Datto, LINBIT, and Nutanix are joining the organization.
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Chinese chip maker Allwinner has joined the Linux Foundation as part of an effort to improve its relationship with the open source community.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has acquired the Graphics and Portability Group (GPG) of TransGaming, the company formerly responsible for the Wine-based Cedega software along with Cedar and other porting technologies.
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Bryce Harrington released Wayland 1.8.1 today as a fix that just addresses problems with the Wayland 1.8.0 distribution tarball. Some files in the Wayland 1.8.0 package were marked read-only and today’s 1.8.1 update just fixes that issue.
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Benchmarks
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Ubuntu 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, and 15.04 were tested on this laptop using clean installs each time and the Linux OS each time was left in its default configuration/state. The final run was done on Ubuntu 15.04 when upgrading to the Linux 4.1 development kernel and Mesa 10.7-dev Git.
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Applications
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I’m announcing availability of GNU Screen v.4.3.0
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The 2015 edition of the TeX Live software distribution, the “easy way to get up and running with the TeX document production system,” has been released.
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After long time of waiting we finally released TeX Live 2015. Get some champagne, and ready to party!
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Last month, we reported on the release of the Avidemux 2.6.9 open-source and cross-platform video editor for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, but today we see the release of Avidemux 2.6.10.
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After having announced the release of the ownCloud 8.0.4 self-hosting cloud server software, ownCloud Inc. has had the pleasure of informing its users about the immediate availability for download of ownCloud Client 1.8.2.
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LibreSSL 2.2.0 presents support for AIX and Cygwin as new platforms, improved build macros, various bug-fixes, and several security fixes.
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Proprietary
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The Chromium-based Vivaldi Web Browser developed by one of the former Opera founders has been updated once more, and some new features have been integrated.
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Google developers have been quick to remedy a regression in Google Chrome that messed up with the way the zoom function worked. Only the Linux platform received this update, and it seems that none of the other supported OS had this problem.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Ansible is one of the most popular automation and configuration management tool available to anybody with computer systems to manage and automate. In this article, you’ll learn the simple task of installing it on CentOS 7.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine developers have announced that a new version of the application has been made available, and it comes with some DirectWrite changes, a few other features, and some various bug fixes.
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Games
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For those that haven’t heard yet, Valve has begun their annual Steam Summer Sale with a variety of Linux games.
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Valve has just launched a new Steam Monster Summer Sale, and it’s full of Linux games. Given the fact that one in five games on Steam has Linux support, it’s not really a surprise that this is probably the best Steam Summer Sale for Linux users until now.
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Chicken Invaders 3, a famous game that was all the rage a decade ago, has been released on Steam for Linux and is now available for purchase with a 10% discount.
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Team Fortress 2, an online team multiplayer game developed by Valve, has been updated once more by its developer. Furthermore, a separate summer sale is also running as we speak, specifically for this game.
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This week I started Linux testing of the AMD A10-7870K “Godavari” APU with Radeon R7 Graphics. I delivered some preview graphics numbers for this high-end APU yesterday, but for those wanting tests from Steam Linux games, here’s some numbers covering that aspect of Linux gaming.
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Tribute Games’ unique Breakout-style JRPG Wizorb has received the flibit-treatment and is now available to us on Steam for the first time. The MonoGame port available through a Humble Widget on the Wizorb website has also been replaced with the FNA re-port.
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The new week-long Humble Indie Bundle contains a good mix of previously bundled Linux games. If you missed out on these modern indie classics in the past, this is a good chance to stock up your game library while supporting the developers and charity. This bundle supports Watsi, which funds life-saving medical care around the world, and the Child’s Play Charity, which aims to bring some joy into the lives of children in hospitals.
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We’ve known the Source 2 version of Dota 2 was imminent and now Valve has confirmed that by the end of next week they’ll be rolling out the open beta for this update being referred to as Dota 2 Reborn.
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The Linux manual for the Shadow of Mordor port has been spotted in the wild, and it looks like it may be a sore spot for AMD gamers.
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ARK: Survival Evolved has now set an official date as the 25th of June for the release of the Linux (and Mac) versions.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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June 12, 2015. KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.11.0.
KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
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Exactly five years I came to Salvador to attend my first KDE event. It was the debut of Akademy-BR and my debut as a community contributor. At the time, I was already using KDE for 3 years but I had not contributed to the community of software that I always liked. It was the perfect time to start!
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The KDE community has announced the release of KDE Frameworks 5.11, the newest version of their add-on libraries to Qt.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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While the last point release of the current stable version of the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment was released a while ago, developers are still updating some of the project’s core components.
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As mentioned in a recent article related to the core components of the GNOME desktop environment, the last point release of GNOME 3.16 has been released a while ago but the GNOME developers are hard at work publishing maintenance releases for some of the major apps of the acclaimed project.
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As reported earlier, the GNOME developers are hard at work these days releasing new maintenance versions for some of the most important core components of the stable GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, despite the fact that the last point release was announced a while ago.
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When I first started contributing to OpenStack, it briefly looked like I would need to make some Ubuntu packaging updates in order to get a Nova patch landed. At the Essex design summit a few weeks later, I raged at Monty Taylor how ridiculous it would be to require a Fedora packager to fix Ubuntu packaging in order to contribute a patch. I was making the point that upstream projects should leave packaging to the downstream packaging maintainers. Upstream CI quickly moved away from using packages after that summit, and I’ve heard Monty cite that conversation several times as why upstream should not get into packaging.
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For me, what’s hugely exciting about all of this is the future prospect of the package maintainers for different platforms adopting a “continuous packaging” workflow and working closely with project developers, to the extent that packaging changes could even be coordinated with code changes. With its amazing infrastructure, OpenStack has broken new ground for how open-source projects can operate. This could be yet another breakthrough, this time demonstrating how a project’s infrastructure can be used to enable an entirely new level of collaboration between package maintainers and project developers.
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I’m writing about the work that I’ve done so far. I worked on redesigning of “World” module of gnome-clocks. The current application shows the location in square tiles form. To delete any location user has to select the location and then click on the delete button. The below screenshots shows the current gnome-clocks “world” module design.
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Back in mid-January of this year, I wrote about The most affordable FreeBSD-supported Cloud/VPS hosting providers. Since then, I’ve come across a few others that offer their own unique features.
An example is Vultr, a cloud hosting provider that offers a KVM-based platform on SSD storage. And it’s even cheaper than many of those listed in that article.
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Reviews
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This evening I decided to install Calculate Linux, so I threw in the LiveDVD and rebooted. The installer was interesting, easy to use, but I wonder why it asked which I/O scheduler I wished to use. Okay, I get asking the filesystem choice, but the last I even thought about I/O schedulers I was building a kernel – and I don’t recall when exactly that was but I think it started with a 2.4. I tried to select default (one of the choices that sounded safe) but it kept going back to BFQ. The remaining steps proceeded fine until time to install GRUB. That failed with the error couldn’t find update-grub.new. Hmm. So, next reboot I get dropped to a grub terminal. Yippie.
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New Releases
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Anke Boersma had the great pleasure of informing us earlier today about the immediate availability for download of the KaOS 2015.06 Linux distribution based on the latest and greatest KDE technologies.
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The IPFire development team published details about a new update for their open-source and independent firewall distribution based on the Linux kernel, IPFire 2.17 Core Update 91, urging users to update as soon as possible.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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A few hours ago, OpenMandriva dropped a tweet on their official Twitter account asking users their opinion on the matter of maintaining the i586 (32-bit) builds of the distribution or not, which was discussed a while ago.
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro developers announced recently that the Blue Systems and Calamares teams are proud to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 1.1 RC1, a distribution-independent installer framework.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Most openSUSE users are desktop users and sysadmin. If, as I conclude from the latest oSC15 videos and factory mailing list discussions, sysadmins are the chosen target, It would be great to see SUSE/openSUSE challenging the assumption that, through a continuous delivery process, you cannot release a stable and high quality (for the target) distribution. That stability is only achievable through a waterfall like model. I would choose CoreOS as reference. It is a project that, based on different questions, is providing innovative answers to new challenges.
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Red Hat Family
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A Red Hat General Manager has called into question the levels of sufficient and qualified support for OpenStack infrastructures.
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Fedora
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Vince Pooley, the founder of the Chapeau project, had the great pleasure of announcing today, June 13, the immediate availability for download of the final release of the Chapeau 22 Linux operating system.
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After publishing details about the “Frappe Web Framework” and “System Firmware Update” proposals, Jan Kurik announced today a new system-wide change proposal for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, SELinux policy store migration.
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The last article in our Fedora 22 screenshot tour series is for the Xfce Spin, which is built around the latest Xfce 4.12 desktop environment and offers a lightweight system for low-end machines and computers with old or semi-old hardware components.
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The new release brings fixes of the most occurred errors in Fedora 22. Moreover adds SSL support in repository configuration and random sleep dnf-automatic feature. Read more in 1.0.1 release notes on DNF documentation page.
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A FAD is a Fedora Activity Day — a planned event where we bring contributors together to hack on specific goals tied to the Fedora mission and our objectives. Last week, we had a big one, the 2015 Release Tools and Infrastructure FAD.
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With the release of Fedora 22, it’s about time I published the contributor stats for Fedora 22! We’ll be taking a look at 3 aspects of the efforts of the QA team for Alpha, Beta and Final: Updates Testing, Validation Tests and Bug Reports. These aren’t complete stats for everything QA does, just three facets that are easy to measure.
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Every year, Fedora users and developers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region meet up at the annual FUDCon (Fedora Users & Developers Conference) to learn how to do get more out of Fedora, and plan the future of our OS. This year, the APAC FUDCon is being held in the city of Pune, India from June 26 to June 28 2015, and everyone is invited to attend this free event.
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Debian Family
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The Linux AIO team was more than happy to announce us today about the immediate availability for download of an updated Linux AIO Debian Live DVD, now based on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.1 (Jessie) operating system.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Busy day today. The final OTA-4 candidate is almost ready. We built 2 snapshot-images today – first one didn’t include one fix due to a missing package copy, second one with everything ready is now being tested by QA. All in all, once OTA tests are finished, we’ll hand it over to BQ and release. Hopefully the final OTA-4 release should happen on Monday. But thanks to all of that we included another MMS related fix to the whole batch.
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Canonical has released several patches addressing flaws in the Linux kernel and OpenSSL that left Ubuntu users open to escalation of privilege and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The most serious of the fixes covers a variety of flaws that could be used to gain elevated or administrative privileges on the victim machine.
“A memory corruption issue was discovered in AES decryption when using the Intel AES-NI accelerated code path. A remote attacker could exploit this flaw to cause a DoS (system crash) or potentially escalate privileges on Intel-based machines,” read the Ubuntu security advisory.
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Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, operating systems have been updated to fix a couple of CUPS vulnerabilities that have been found.
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Ubuntu, has been expanding its horizons with Ubuntu Mobiles and the recently scrapped Ubuntu for Android, it still remains one of the most preferred Linux Operating System all over the Globe with its easy installation, User Friendly Interface and the ease with which it can be customized. For more information on this wonderful Operating system stay tuned.
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Ubuntu developers are preparing to release a new update for the Ubuntu Touch platform, but they are also thinking about the update that will come after this one, and it looks like full shell rotation is finally coming.
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Dell launched just a few days ago an IoT Gateway powered by Ubuntu Core, and it looks like it’s already being tested to demonstrate how it can be used to run the smart buildings of the future.
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After announcing last week that both the next-generation Unity 8 user interface and Mir display server of the Ubuntu Linux operating system received a massive update with numerous new features, Kevin Gunn dropped an email on June 12 informing us about an exciting new update for said technologies.
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Spanish smartphone company BQ recently launched its latest smartphone, the Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, to the European market. The new smartphone is now available for pre-order at the company’s official website and costs only €199.90.
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Chinese electronics company Meizu Technology Co., Ltd. is reportedly planning to launch the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone device to the European market by this month.
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Canonical noted that Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems had been patched against numerous OpenSSL vulnerabilities.
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We’ve reported a lot of news related to the launch of the OTA-4 update for Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, which powers smartphones like BQ Aquaris E4.5 or Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, in the last couple of weeks.
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Flavours and Variants
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After 15 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.10. We would like to thank every MATE contributor and user.
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Linux Mint is a special kind of Linux distribution—one that has gone a very long way to hold true to the form, function, and spirit that has guided Linux for a very long time. While other distributions march into the shiny, touch-friendly world that is the future, Mint remains grounded in what has worked for decades. With just the slightest of tweaks, Mint has gone boldly into that good night while keeping a foot deeply planted in the familiar.
With it’s latest release, 17.1 “Rebecca”, Linux Mint retains all of that which is familiar and beloved by its long time followers and adds enough polish to help attract new users.
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Speaking of Mint 17.1, Jack Wallen said to new Mint users, “Linux Mint 17.1 is that it is an ideal platform for any user.” He said that while other distributions run to the latest “shiny, touch-friendly” gizmos, Mint has remained true to its roots. “With just the slightest of tweaks, Mint has gone boldly into that good night while keeping a foot deeply planted in the familiar.” From there Wallen demonstrated why Mint is a good choice for desktop users and concluded, “If you’re looking for a new operating system, one that you can depend on and get up to speed with quickly, you’d be remiss not to give Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” a glance before any other distribution.”
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Martin Wimpress, the lead developer of the Ubuntu MATE operating system, has had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today that the highly anticipated MATE 1.10 desktop environment has been officially released.
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Logic Supply unveiled three fanless industrial PCs, including two using Intel 4th Gen Core processors and one with a quad- or octa-core Atom “Avoton” SoC.
Logic Supply’s Linux-ready ML600 Series computers represent the next generation in the company’s ML series after last year’s ML400 Series. The systems are available pre-loaded with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, but are likely to be compatible with most current Linux distributions.
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MYIR’s new sandwich-style dev board mixes a Linux-ready, Zynq-based COM with 4GB eMMC with a carrier board that has USB, GbE, HDMI, PMOD, and FMC I/O.
Like MYIR’s Z-Turn Board SBC, the MYC-C7Z010/20 computer-on-module, which plugs into a MYD-C7Z010/20 baseboard to form a sandwich-style SBC, runs Linux on a Xilinx Zynq system-on-chip. You can choose between two COM SKUs, including one with the Zynq-7010 found on the Z-Turn, and another with a Zynq-7020, which has a higher end FPGA with 85K logic cells. All the Zynq SoCs run Linux on dual 667MHz to 866MHz Cortex-A9 cores.
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Parrot revealed 13 new Linux-based mini-drones including new jumping and airborne models with headlights, an airborne cargo quadcopter, and a hydrofoil.
Parrot’s 13 new mini-drones expand upon last year’s similarly toy-like Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo. The products are all selling for 199 Euros ($220) or less in France. By comparison, Parrot’s higher end AR.Drone 2.0 sells for $300, and its more advanced Bebop Drone goes for $500 and up. The new products will go on sale in the U.K. and perhaps globally in early July, according to the Engadget story that alerted us to the announcement.
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The Linux Foundation has issued a call for papers for Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which this year joins LinuxCon + CloudOpen in Dublin from Oct. 5-7.
Like last year, the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon Europe show is being co-located with CloudOpen Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe, with a single registration. This year the show moves from Düsseldorf to Dublin where it will run at the Convention Centre Dublin from Oct. 5-7. Registration is open, as well, and if you register before July 11, you can save $300 or more. There’s no keynote list yet, but last year the event featured speakers including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Jono Bacon (XPRIZE), and Joanna Rutkowska (Invisible Things Lab), among others.
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Phones
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Tizen
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According to industry sources Samsung Electronics is looking to further expand the Tizen ecosystem. The Samsung Z1 was released in India on 14 January and has sold over 500,000 units. Soon after the Z1 was released in Bangladesh and made up 23.4 percent of the smartphone market.
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Android
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It may not be necessary, but it’s still a very good idea. There’s definitely Android malware out there. While the level of the threat may be exaggerated, it’s really a matter of being better safe than sorry.
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The assumption is that the ‘slider phone’ revealed in Barcelona at MWC 2015 will be the device running the operating system championed by Google. There’s no word if BlackBerry would go for the full Google Play enabled version of Android with support for all of Google’s apps, or whether it will use the Android Open Source Project as a base and create its own Android fork (as Nokia did, and Amazon continues to do).
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BlackBerry (BB.TO) is considering equipping an upcoming smartphone with Google Inc.’s (GOOGL.O) Android software for the first time, an acknowledgement that its revamped line of devices has failed to win mass appeal, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
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Samsung has already rolled out an Android 5.0 update for the Galaxy Note 4, but it shows no intention of stopping.
This is because, according to Sam Mobile, the South Korean tech giant is getting ready to roll out another update to Android 5.1.1, the latest version of the Lollipop mobile operating system.
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The HTC One M7 is one of the best smartphones out there, even though it is a rather outdated flagship that was launched two years ago. Since the HTC One M7 launch, HTC has been busy launching new Desire phones, the One M8 and of course, the One M9 and its various variants. But there are still thousands out there that own the HTC One M7 and are wondering whether it will be getting the Android 5.1 Lollipop update anytime soon. Those of you who were hoping to get the HTC One M7 update to the latest version of Lollipop might be disappointed.
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Last September, Google inaugurated Android One, a cheap smartphone line for emerging markets, with typical Google audacity: It was billed as the fix “for the next five billion” soon to come online.
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Samsung released the Galaxy S6 just a few months ago to almost universal praise. Sure, it doesn’t have a removable battery or a microSD card slot, but the design, camera, and screen are all fantastic. However, maybe the Galaxy S6’s time on the Android throne is already at an end. The LG G4 has launched with an impressive spec sheet and several features Samsung dropped this year. Let’s see how these devices stack up.
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Apple did not trumpet it earlier this week during the keynote address kicking off its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but the company will release an Android-to-iOS migration app alongside iOS 9 this fall.
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Medium has brought its publishing* platform to Android, after the company announced the launch of a beta version for Android.
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A new version of Google’s Slides presentation app on Android includes support for the company’s Chromecast TV dongle, allowing presenters to ditch those old-school clickers and use their phone as a remote.
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Motorola is rolling out Google Android 5.1 Lollipop updates for its first- and second-generation Moto X and Moto G smartphones. The firmware update is also available for Moto E (Gen 2) 4G.
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With each passing day, we get closer and closer to the release of Samsung’s next big Lollipop update. That update is expected to be Android 5.1.1, Google’s newest version of Lollipop. This week we’ve seen several new details emerge and today we take a look at what you need to know right now about the Samsung Android 5.1.1 release.
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Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit includes Samsung’s confirmation of the Galaxy S6 Active, BlackBerry’s potential switch to Android, Samsung’s definition of insanity, Xiaomi’s Mi+ plans, Google’s ‘Which Phone’ tool, the new family-friendly section of the Google Play Store, HMRC choosing Google over Microsoft, and Larry Page’s nomination as CEO of the year.
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The Shield Pro, Nvidia’s gaming console and 4K streaming box, is now shipping. If you want to be an early adopter of the nascent Android TV platform, this is one of your only options, and it’s certainly one of the cheapest. Sharp and Sony currently have the only Android TV-powered sets on store shelves, and while you can get it on Google’s $79 Nexus Player set-top box, that device doesn’t support 4K.
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One of the issues with last year’s update of Android Lollipop, also known as Android 5.0 or Android L, was that it was very slow to roll out to even some of the newest Android devices. During the fall and holiday season last year, everyone was quick to ask: “where’s my Lollipop Android 5.0 update?” Now it appears that with Android 5.1 getting a slow rollout, everyone is asking for that, specifically for LG smartphones. Here is an Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the LG G4, the LG G3, and the LG G2 along with their respective release dates for carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
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Gina Trapani’s worn lots of different hats over the years. She founded Lifehacker and served as its inaugural editor. She hosted two different shows on the TWiT podcast network, including the informative and entertaining All About Android. And she created and continues to develop ThinkUp, a social media analysis service, along with a multiplatform to-do list app and a new service called Makerbase that promises to connect people who make cool things.
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BlackBerry is considering equipping an upcoming smartphone with Google’s Android software for the first time, an acknowledgement that its revamped line of devices has failed to win mass appeal, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
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The Shield Pro, Nvidia’s gaming console and 4K streaming box, is now shipping. If you want to be an early adopter of the nascent Android TV platform, this is one of your only options, and it’s certainly one of the cheapest. Sharp and Sony currently have the only Android TV-powered sets on store shelves, and while you can get it on Google’s $79 Nexus Player set-top box, that device doesn’t support 4K.
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Sellers of Android boxes loaded with software enabling the free viewing of movies, TV shows and live sports have been raided this week by UK authorities. Trading Standards officers, police and representatives from Sky TV carried out raids in several locations, causing other sellers to quickly reconsider the tone of their marketing efforts.
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While there are some tests for desktop version of KDE Connect, Android version had no tests at all. Also, I had never realized how UI applications can be tested or how unit tests are going to work if all classes are linked with each other. I had no idea how to isolate a class for unit test.
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One of the benefits of Android’s openness is that many of its parts can be replaced by third party apps and services. One of those parts is the homescree and app launcher, the very first piece of software the user meets when using their smartphone. After the lock screen, of course. You might have heard of launchers like Nova, Apex, Go, or even Google’s own Google Now, but here are five more that you won’t usually read about in the news unless they have a major update or release.
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For those that want to see some of what’s new in Google’s recently announced Android M software you can see the changes in our M vs Android 5.1 Lollipop walkthrough below. This is a comparison of Android 5.1 Lollipop vs the Android M beta preview on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 5.
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There are multiple operating systems powering our mobile devices today. For both indie developers and large companies, there is a critical question that needs to be answered before development begins: what platform should be targeted first? For larger companies, with more resources, development can be done simultaneously for different platforms, while for smaller shops, it is a very critical question, which could determine the success or failure of the business.
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Apple announced iOS 9 on Monday, and while watching the keynote, I had just a little bit of déjà vu. Most of iOS 9′s new features seem to be squarely aimed at Apple’s biggest rival in mobile: Android. Specifically, they were about catching up to Android.
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At this point, it’s kind of unclear who’s stealing what between Apple and Google. Android has implemented plenty of features over the years that the iPhone has since adopted, but as PhoneArena elucidates in a comparison piece, Android M appears to have taken some inspiration from iOS as well.
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Buying an Android phone can be intimidating, what with all the options out there. Google has a new tool that might help you narrow things down a little, and it’s right there on the main Android phone homepage under “Find the Android phone for you.” Just answer some question and the Google machine spits out some suggestions.
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Ever wondered which Android phone may be right for you? With so many to choose from, knowing which suits your needs can be tricky.
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Google has quietly launched a new suggestion tool on the Android website at android.com/phones/whichphone. Which Phone, first spotted by XDA, asks you a few simple questions about your smartphone usage and then offers a few Android suggestions that might work for you.
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Choosing an open source messaging server can save you money and admin time without losing out on features. Take a look at what our favorite alternatives to Microsoft Exchange have to offer.
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Open source software is not a trend; it is here to stay. Debating the value of open source software (OSS) on technical considerations is a moving target. Determining the costs of implementing and using open source makes for a more stable argument. The initial software may be free, but learning, implementing, improving, connecting to, and operating it is not free. When you acquire OSS you will have more responsibilities than if you acquired closed product software from a vendor.
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One question increasingly raised throughout the SDN/NFV community is, “Why are there so many groups associated with NFV/SDN?” While the answer is subject to debate, no one should be surprised that NFV and SDN are far too pervasive for any single organization and/or industry body to control.
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ETSI was the birthplace of the NFV concept in 2012, and OPNFV was launched just two years later with many of the same members to help bring NFV from specs to reality using open source methodologies. Marc Cohn, who is an active participant in many open communities including OPNFV, OpenDaylight and the Open Networking Foundation, recently published an article for SDxCentral about how OPNFV and ETSI continue to work in tandem to accelerate NFV adoption.
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When it comes to new open source tools that can make a difference, it’s wise to look to some of the tech companies that regularly open source their own in-house platforms and tools. Just witness Netflix, which has open sourced troves of useful cloud utilities. Facebook and Google have release a lot of useful tools as well.
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Los Angeles County is home to a burgeoning technology industry. It boasts a roster of high-profile companies including Hulu, Snapchat, and Tinder. As of 2013, it offered more high-tech jobs than other major markets in the country, including Silicon Valley and New York City. Come election time, however, its residents cast their votes by marking inkblots on ballots that resemble Scantron forms.
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Events
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Linux and FOSS make cameo appearances throughout the TV and film world, and lately we’ve been treated to the GNOME vs. KDE tête-à-tête in the USA Network’s pilot of a show called “Mr. Robot.” This scene piqued my interest enough to watch the pilot, which was a mix of downright scary and mildly interesting portrayals of tech types at various levels in the overt and covert tech-company hierarchy, wrapped in painfully mediocre dialog (why can’t Aaron Sorkin just write everything? Is that too much to ask?). SPOILER ALERT: The subtext of a psychologically wrecked, socially castrated hacker protagonist — the one using GNOME — is grating enough, but this stereotype is far and away eclipsed by the world domination seemingly at the fingertips of the suit using KDE, which he displayed at the end of the pilot. And we though it was Redmond seeking to take over the world when it’s really…KDE?
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Right away I ran across Brian Proffitt, whom many of you will remember from his days covering Linux and FOSS for news sites or from the time he spent at Linux Today. These days he’s all but given up journalism for real work, at Red Hat. However, the presentation he’s giving on Sunday here at SELF has a writerly ring to the title: “It’s Metaphors All the Way Down.”
I also had a chance to talk with Deb Nicholson with the Open Invention Network, who’ll be giving a talk on Saturday about software patent litigation. Funny thing, patents were hardly mentioned in our conversation. Mainly we talked about tech corporations under the headings: the good, the bad and the pure evil. If anyone sees Clint Eastwood, tell him I have a movie idea…
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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I recently decided to stop using Firefox as my main Browser. I’m not alone there. While browser statistics are notoriously difficult to track and hotly debated, all sources seem to point toward a downward trend for Firefox. At LQ, they actually aren’t doing too badly. In 2010 Firefox had a roughly 57% market share and so far this year they’re at 37%. LQ is a highly technical site, however, and the broader numbers don’t look quite so good. Over a similar period, for example, Wikipedia has Firefox dropping from over 30% to just over 15%. At the current rate NetMarketShare is tracking, Firefox will be in the single digits some time this year. You get the idea. So what’s going on , and what does that mean for Mozilla? And why did I choose now to make a switch personally?
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Mozilla have decided to shake up the way they make payments with regard to bug squashing, in the statement they said “The bounty for valid potentially exploitable critical and high security rated client security vulnerabilities will be between $3000 and $7500 (USD) cash reward. The bounty program encourages the earliest possible reporting of these potentially exploitable bugs. A bounty may be paid for some moderate rated client security bugs at the discretion of the Bug Bounty Committee. If a bounty is paid for a moderate rated security issue, the amount will be between $500 and $2000 (US), depending on the severity of impact for the issue as determined by Bug Bounty Committee.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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From the very beginning ownCloud has had bigger ambitions then just being a file sync and share tool. This is apparent from the name ownCloud. Today, we have more than our documents and photos online. Our social networks and shared thoughts, our appointments and shopping lists, audio and video conversations all happen and are stored somehwere ‘in the cloud’, all connected. You can comment on a song you like for others to see or share an appointment with co workers. ownCloud means to give you a chance to bring all that back under your control!
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Databases
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While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, “They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation published recently details about the immediate availability for download and testing of the third Beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0 open-source office suite for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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BSD
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I’m going to talk today about signify, a tool I wrote for the OpenBSD project that cryptographically signs and verifies. This allows us to ensure that the releases we ship arrive on your computer in their original, intended form, without tampering.
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This past February, Monowall announced the end of development as one of the most popular FreeBSD-based network/firewall focused distributions. For those still searching for a new replacement, Smallwall 1.8.2 has been released as the successor to Monowall 1.8.1.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’re that kind of development monster, you can now find the source code for the cloud client here on GitHub.
This cloud client already sports support for the majority of desktop 3D printers, and through the GNU Affero General Public License, it’s being shared.
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While the uses for additive manufacturing at home seem to be increasing on a seemingly daily basis, there are still some items in the home that haven’t been able to be created due to the lack of suitable technologies. Among others is the ability to fabricate soft objects using digital fabrication tools.
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Open Data
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The United Nations has proactively researched and promoted open government data across the globe for close to five years now. The Open Data Institute maintains that open data can help “unlock supply, generate demand, and create and disseminate knowledge to address local and global issues.” McKinsey & Company report that “seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data.”
There is no doubt that open data is an important public policy area—one that is here to stay. Yet, for all the grand promises, scratch beneath the surface and one finds a remarkable paucity of hard empirical facts about what is and isn’t happening on the ground—in the real world of cities where most of us increasingly live and work.
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The Dutch government has prepared a new Trade Register Law that will effectively forbid free re-use of the register data of its Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel, KvK). In response to an internet consultation, Stefan de Konink, open data proponent and founder of the OpenGeo Foundation, wrote an open letter to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Security and Justice, asking the Dutch government to reconsider its new policy.
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Programming
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Folks in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. We’ve covered Spark before, including the momentum surrounding it and backing for it from players like Cloudera.
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RPM of PHP version 5.6.10 are available in remi repository for Fedora ≥ 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ≤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
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Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is to step down after coming under pressure following lacklustre results.
Mr Costolo will remain on the social network’s board after the move on July 1, the company said on Thursday night.
Twitter’s shares jumped 7.8pc in after-hours trading following the announcement, after closing flat at $35.84 during the day.
Mr Costolo will be replaced in the interim by co-founder Jack Dorsey, chairman of Twitter and chief executive of Square, the mobile payments company he founded in 2009. He will also continue in both those roles.
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Investors applauded Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s resignation. But did they jump the gun?
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Health/Nutrition
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After a study of GMOs over a four-year plus period, India’s multi-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended a ban on GM food crops stating they had no role in a country of small farmers. The Supreme Court appointed a technical expert committee (TEC), which recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. As yet, no such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead. GMO crops approved for field trials include rice, maize, chickpea, sugarcane, and brinjal.
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Security
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UK domain registry Nominet has shown off a striking new visualisation tool called ‘turing’ that large organisations can use to peer into their DNS traffic to trace latency issues and spot previously invisible botnets and malware.
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Moscow-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, famous for uncovering state-sponsored cyberattacks, today dropped its biggest bombshell yet: Its own computer networks were hit by state-sponsored hackers, probably working for Israeli intelligence or the U.S. National Security Agency. The same malware also attacked hotels that hosted ongoing top-level negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
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Last week, the human resources arm of the US government, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted that it had been victim of a massive data breach, where hackers stole personal data belonging to as many as 4 million government workers.
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We already described how the recent hack into the US federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) appears to be much more serious than was initially reported. The hack, likely by Chinese state hackers, appear to have obtained basically detailed personal info on all current and many former federal government employees.
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China-linked hackers appear to have gained access to sensitive background information submitted by US intelligence and military personnel for security clearances that could potentially expose them to blackmail, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
In a report citing several US officials, the news agency said that data on nearly all of the millions of US security-clearance holders, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and military special operations personnel, were potentially exposed in the attack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
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And yet… this is the same federal government telling us that it wants more access to everyone else’s data to “protect” us from “cybersecurity threats” — and that encryption is bad? Yikes.
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A second data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management has compromised even more sensitive information about government employees than the first breach that was revealed earlier this week, sources claim. It’s possible at least 14 million Americans have chapter and verse on their lives leaked, we’re told.
The Associated Press reports that hackers with close ties to China are believed to have obtained extensive background information on intelligence-linked government staffers – from CIA agents and NSA spies to military special ops – who have applied for security clearances.
Among the records believed to have leaked from a compromised database are copies of Standard Form 86 [PDF], a questionnaire that is given to anyone who applies for a national security position, and is typically verified via interviews and background checks.
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Earlier this week, we noted that Senator Mitch McConnell, hot off of his huge flop in trying to preserve the NSA’s surveillance powers, had promised to insert the dangerous “cybersecurity” bill CISA directly into the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As we discussed, while many have long suspected that CISA (and CISPA before it) were surveillance bills draped in “cybersecurity” clothing, the recent Snowden revelations that the NSA is using Section 702 “upstream” collection for “cybersecurity” issues revealed how CISA would massively expand the NSA’s ability to warrantlessly wiretap Americans’ communications.
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When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday afternoon, he boasted about Israel’s “robust hi-tech and cyber industries.” According to The Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu also noted that ‘Israel was making great efforts to diversify the markets with which it is trading in the technological field.’”
Just how diversified and developed Israeli hi-tech innovation has become was revealed the very next morning, when the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs, which claims more than 400 million users internationally, announced that sophisticated spyware with the hallmarks of Israeli origin (although no country was explicitly identified) had targeted three European hotels that had been venues for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, one of the first news sources to break the story, reported that Kaspersky itself had been hacked by malware whose code was remarkably similar to that of a virus attributed to Israel. Code-named “Duqu” because it used the letters DQ in the names of the files it created, the malware had first been detected in 2011. On Thursday, Symantec, another cyber-security firm, announced it too had discovered Duqu 2 on its global network, striking undisclosed telecommunication sites in Europe, North Africa, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. It said that Duqu 2 is much more difficult to detect that its predecessor because it lives exclusively in the memory of the computers it infects, rather than writing files to a drive or disk.
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Out of ulterior motives, some US media and politicians have developed a habit of scapegoating China for any alleged cyber attack on the United States. Such groundless accusations would surely harm mutual trust between the two big powers of today’s world.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a column headlined “The most interesting presidential candidate you’re not paying any attention to,” Cillizza bemoans the fact that “Graham is an asterisk—or close to it—in polling in every early state (except for his home state of South Carolina) and nationally.” Graham, he writes, is “generally regarded as a cause candidate, with that cause being to represent the most hawkish views on foreign policy and national security against attacks by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.”
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Jeb Bush, kicking off a six-day European tour, will pay tribute on Tuesday to America’s alliance with Western Europe, calling it “as relevant as the day it was founded” and arguing that our long-time allies want a more engaged United States.
Only here in Germany, that is not exactly so.
Germans are conflicted about the Bush brand. While Jeb’s father is still lionized for helping to unify the country after the Cold War, his brother remains tremendously unpopular due to the Iraq War, viewed by most here as a singly American disaster.
But more than that, Germany is increasingly indifferent to the United States as a whole; uncertain whether these two world powers have much in common any more or even still really need one another.
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Relations between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been increasingly chilly, with Netanyahu appearing in March before Congress in Washington D.C. to denounce U.S. negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In some places, notably Ohio and Oklahoma, the injection of used fracking fluid in deep disposal wells appears to have produced a significant uptick in earthquake activity. The earthquakes are mostly much too small to be felt at the surface, but a magnitude 5.6 quake in Oklahoma was large enough to cause some damage in 2011.
This has made lots of news because of its scale, but it’s not our first experience with injection-triggered earthquakes. It’s a concern for geothermal power designs that inject water to depths where it can turn to turbine-driving steam, for example. And in the future, it could be a concern for efforts to store carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs.
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California state regulators have ordered farmers and others to reduce their water consumption, with the largest cuts in the state’s history.
The State Water Resources Control Board ordered over 100 water rights holders to stop all pumping from three major waterways in one of the country’s prime farm regions.
Economists and agriculture experts say that the cuts are expected to have little immediate impact on food prices, with the growing of some crops to shift to regions with more water in the short-term.
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Finance
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The political battle over the enormous, twelve-nation trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership keeps getting stranger. President Obama has made the completion of the deal the number-one legislative priority of his second term. Indeed, Republican opponents of the T.P.P., in an effort to rally the red-state troops, have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are not Republicans; they’re Democrats.
Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. The vote may come as soon as Friday. The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”
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On Wednesday, a few pages from the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement were published by Wikileaks and reported on by the New York Times. They seemed to indicate changes that go against the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry, eliminating language that sought to guarantee drug companies “competitive market-derived prices” when they sell overseas.
But the pharmaceutical industry has been lobbying lawmakers on the TPP since the beginning, and shaping far more than this one section of the agreement, according to Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America foundation and author of “The Business of America Is Lobbying.”
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The scale of Tony Blair’s globe-trotting is exposed for the first time in secret documents that suggest the taxpayer is paying up to £16,000 a week to help the former prime minister build his business empire.
Documents seen by The Telegraph contain details of Mr Blair’s travels around the world, accompanied by a squad of police bodyguards, flying on private jets and staying in five-star hotels.
The files suggest Mr Blair has used identical trips to carry out both private business meetings and talks in his capacity as Quartet Representative to the Middle East – leaving him open to accusations of a potential conflict of interest.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In announcing that his sons James and Lachlan will be largely taking control of his sprawling media company, press baron Rupert Murdoch did what observers always knew he wanted to do: pass on to his children the worldwide conglomerate that he’s built over the last five decades. In the United Sates, of course, that means handing over to his sons one of most important and influential voices in right-wing media and far-right politics, Fox News.
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Censorship
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Reddit organizers have gotten it badly wrong, demonstrating their abject failure to understand the social platform with which they were entrusted to oversee.
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The Government plans to implement some kind of censorship of the Internet based on the provision of the current laws, said Communication and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Shabery Cheek.
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Google has failed in its efforts to overturn a worldwide site-blocking order handed down by a Canadian court in 2014. The British Columbia Court of Appeal found that despite not being a party to the case, Google must block a range of websites from its worldwide search results due to its business presence in the country.
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In recent months copyright lobby groups have pressured the domain name system oversight body ICANN to take action against pirate sites. The organization is not happy with these calls and wants them to stop, making it crystal clear that they are not the Internet’s piracy police.
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In the good old days those who wanted to restrict freedom of expression, whether they were campus Trots, neo-feminists or Christian conservatives a la Mary Whitehouse, used to wear their hearts on their sleeves. They proudly proclaimed their inherent authoritarianism, and articulated clear reasons as to why they wanted to limit the range of ideas and images circulating in society.
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Ever since the early silent films in the late 19th century, Egyptians have grown a special fondness for films and cinema. By the time national television was created in the 1960s, Egypt was already a notable nation on the international artistic map.
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Clay was charged with disorderly conduct after he was arrested at a Feb. 3 board meeting. Clay was at the meeting to voice his concerns that board members were holding workshops at odd hours, something he believed violated the state’s right-to-know law.
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Two of the biggest names in the venture capital world announced today that they’re getting behind a libertarian-themed tech project—a vote of confidence for an experimental enterprise that aims to facilitate free and “censorship resistant” trade.
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Universities should be places where discoveries are made, not where debate and free thought is shut down. Editor Rachael Jolley explains why the latest Index on Censorship magazine is focusing on academic freedom, with a look at current threats from around the worldwide, from Ukraine to the US
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Russia’s media watchdog has written to Google, Twitter and Facebook warning them against violating Russian Internet laws and a spokesman said on May 21 they risk being blocked if they do not comply with the rules.
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The Film and Publications Board’s (FPB) Draft Online Regulation Policy has been called “Africa’s worst new Internet censorship law”. Condemnation for the policy has been swift, damning, and widespread, and an online petition against the policy quickly gathered thousands of signatures. Many decry the policy as an attempt to censor the Internet in South Africa.
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Join stand-up star Al Murray the Pub Landlord and outspoken friends for a top night of comedy in support of international freedom of expression charity Index on Censorship.
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On Wednesday, the online forum announced that it has banned five of its online groups, also known as subreddits, which are dedicated to ridiculing gays, the obese, and blacks, among others. The move is the website’s first attempt to crack down on abuse on its pages.
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Reddit, the so-called “front page” of the Internet that 172 million people use monthly, has developed a reputation for allowing pretty much anything.
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After a photograph of the display had surfaced on social media, a backlash ensued — primarily from members of local law enforcement agencies and Police Benevolent Association Local 122 — who condemned the piece, believing it portrayed law enforcement in a negative light.
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YouTube videos of police in dubious action have had their effects this week.
First, the South Carolina police officer who in April shot an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, in the back was indicted on a murder charge by a grand jury on Monday. (The incident was filmed and posted to YouTube by a bystander.)
This week has also witnessed the aftermath of a YouTube video of a private pool party last weekend in McKinney, Texas, in which an officer acted with severe, seemingly uwarranted aggression toward a teenage black girl. The incident is under investigation and the officer, Cpl. Eric Casebolt, resigned and apologized.
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It’s clear that there’s a massive culture divide between the circus performers/weight trainers/yoga instructors/freedivers who champion this treatment of babies and, well, pretty much everybody west of Moscow.
Facebook initially refused to take down the Indonesian video of baby dunking, saying that the video didn’t break its rules and that taking it down would also mean that the site would have to ban videos of brutality during the Arab spring or those depicting animal cruelty.
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The interview took place just 48 hours before Clint Eastwood found himself in hot water over an apparently insensitive joke. The veteran star was speaking on stage at the 2015 Spike TV Guys Choice awards, and made an offhand comment about Caitlyn Jenner when discussing athletes-turned-actors.
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Brazil’s Supreme Court has voted unanimously to overturn a law which allowed the subjects of unauthorised biographies to block publication.
The court said that the controversial law, which critics argued amounted to censorship, was unconstitutional.
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Brazil’s Supreme Court voted unanimously on Wednesday to strike down a sweeping 2003 law that empowered the subjects of unauthorised biographies to quash works they disapproved of.
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The Broadcasting Board of Governors (a US Federal agency) earlier this month signed a $2,291,666 contract with the maker of Ultrasurf, touted as “one of the world’s most popular anti-censorship, pro-privacy” computer programs.
Ultrareach Internet Corp., based in Cheyenne, Wyo., created Ultrasurf to help Internet users in China defeat censorship and surf the Web anonymously.
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Privacy
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to be attacked by Social Democratic leaders. Ralph Stegner, a vice-chairman of the Social Democrats who already attacked Merkel a few days ago for her anti-Russia policy, attacked her also on the NSA issue, charging her with stonewalling the parliamentary investigation committee by refusing to release data on who the phone-tapping targets were in industry and political institutions.
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German Bundestag President Norbert Lammert has criticized a government proposal to appoint its own external investigating officers with access to NSA search terms. He wants both government and opposition to have a say.
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President Obama sought to smooth over tensions with a crucial ally, bonding on Sunday with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany over beer, sausages and their shared determination to confront Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, as he declared her a “great friend and partner” during a summit meeting of world leaders.
Greeting Ms. Merkel with an embrace and kisses on both cheeks near Krün’s picturesque town square at the foot of the Alps, Mr. Obama emphasized the ties that connect Germans and Americans despite a troubled history.
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Germany has dropped an investigation into alleged tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The office of federal prosecutor Harald Range said the NSA had failed to provide enough evidence to justify legal action.
The allegations of NSA phone-tapping came out in the secrets leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden about large-scale US surveillance in 2013.
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According to a new report published by The New York Times and ProPublica on Thursday, starting in 2012 the NSA and the FBI launched a secret campaign against foreign hackers that involved surveillance of Americans’ personal data.
The report notes that the agencies acquired vast amounts of Americans’ internet search data as they monitored the information that hackers were processing.
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The catalyst for Congress’ historic vote on NSA reform on Tuesday – the same person who led to a federal court to rule that NSA mass surveillance of Americans was illegal – remains exiled from the United States and faces decades in jail. The crime he’s accused of? Telling the American public the very truth that forced Congress to restrict, rather than expand, the spy agency’s power for the first time in over forty years.
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On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate passed the U.S.A. Freedom Act, voting 67-32 and rejecting four eleventh-hour amendments. President Obama is expected to sign the bill Tuesday night, which means that the government’s metadata program will continue, but on modified terms. Custody of the metadata itself will transition from the N.S.A. to the phone companies. The government will still have some access, limited to specific queries of “a person, entity, account, address, or device,” and most incoming records will be stored for less than eighteen months, not five years or more. On the whole, the bill is a Goldilocks answer to larger questions about security versus liberty. The specific trade-offs will continue to be made by the secret FISA court, but with far more scrutiny and a stricter set of rules.
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CTB Locker ransomware attacks rose 165 per cent in the first three months of 2015.
More than a third (35 per cent) of victims were based in Europe, McAfee Labs reported. CTB Locker encrypts files and holds them hostage until the ransom is paid. As such, the crimeware is picking up the baton that dropped with the takedown of the infamous CryptoLocker ransomware scam in May last year.
The latest edition of Intel Security’s report, released on Tuesday, reports attacks on firmware for the first time. More specifically, the report details “persistent and virtually undetectable attacks” by the so-called Equation Group that reprogram hard disk drives and solid state drive firmware.
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A House-passed amendment would restrict ‘backdoor’ surveillance.
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Legislation by must-pass appropriations bill rider continued Thursday with an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would block funding of any government program to build or encourage cybersecurity back doors.
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The House passed legislation Thursday that would prevent the NSA from spying on American citizens whose data was incidentally collected during foreign dragnets, marking the second year in a row that the lower chamber has put the kibosh on backdoor domestic spying.
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Last night, we noted that an amendment from Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren was on the docket that had two provisions to stop two different kinds of surveillance: the first, taking away funding from “backdoor searches” which are a hugely problematic “loophole” that the NSA uses to do warrantless surveillance of Americans. In many ways, this is much worse than the bulk collection programs that were just hindered by the USA Freedom Act. The second part of the amendment was barring funds from being used to mandate “backdoors” into technology products — another hugely important move. Thankfully, the amendment passed by a wide margin earlier today: 255 – to 174.
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The next time you look up the Wikipedia entry on the Zimbabwean dollar, it will be a lot harder for someone to snoop on you.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced that starting Friday, it has begun “the process of implementing HTTPS by default to encrypt all Wikimedia traffic.”
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Over 17 years, David Darchicourt worked with the National Security Agency as a graphic designer and art director, illustrating top-secret documents about government surveillance programs. Now he is the unwitting central character in a new exhibition that puts the spotlight on the spy agency’s imagery.
Inside the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, a cavernous Renaissance library in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, some of Darchicourt’s designs for the NSA have been placed on display among historic 16th-century pieces by famed Italian painters like Veronese and Titian.
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A 32-year-old New Zealand artist has tapped the art work of a 17-year-veteran of the National Security Agency to create an exhibit in Italy that focuses on the spy agency’s imagery used in secret documents.
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Only a week after Congress passed reforms to the Patriot Act ending the National Security Agency’s metadata phone collection program, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with the help of big business allies, is moving to expand domestic surveillance of a different type.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) may not just be listening to your phone calls. It may also be keeping transcripts of your private phone conversations.
Top-secret documents from the archive of Edward Snowden, NSA’s controversial former contractor, revealed that the spy agency has the capability to automatically recognize the contents within phone calls.
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About an hour after the White House said President Barack Obama had signed legislation ending the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone collection program, the Justice Department told a secret court that the controversial spy program Edward Snowden disclosed could continue under the law.
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The ‘compromise’ USA Freedom Act fails to curtail NSA spying
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The passage of the USA Freedom Act is the first major effort by Congress to rein in parts of the Patriot Act and the NSA’s bulk data collection program. But the law may never have been passed had it not been for Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked information about that agency’s broad surveillance powers.
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Despite a ruling by the Second U.S. Court of Appeals that the National Security Agency’s collection of data derived from the private telephone communications of Americans exceeded statutory provisions of the “Patriot Act,” the Obama administration is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (better known as the FISA Court) to simply ignore the decision of the three-judge panel. In fact, the British paper The Guardian said that the Obama administration does not even consider the decision of the circuit court “the last word” on the matter.
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Recent debates over US government spying have focused on one specific program: the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records — and the Patriot Act provision that supplied the program’s legal justification. From that perspective, the partial expiration of the Patriot Act a week ago and the subsequent passage of surveillance reform legislation might seem like a decisive victory against mass surveillance.
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Sources at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have denied there’s a conspiracy behind the publication delay of a crucial opinion in the Europe v Facebook case.
The ECJ attorney general (AG) was due to give his opinion on 24 June, a decision which could potentially bring down the Safe Harbour dataflow agreement between the EU and the US.
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It’s called the National Cryptologic Museum and it is the first and only public museum for the Intelligence Community.
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Rhizome, the non-profit organisation affiliated with the New Museum has bought together two of the world’s most famous dissidents for a single art project. Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who is still unable to leave his home country since 2011, has joined forces with Jacob Applebaum, a computer security researcher and hacker who has worked closely with Wikileaks.
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Three of the world’s most famous dissidents have come together on a single art project, organized by Rhizome, the non-profit organization affiliated with the New Museum.
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The site was reportedly not secured with HTTPS, a basic encryption method, and hackers were able to take control, displaying taunting messages that read, “You’ve been hacked” and “Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting,” on the site’s main page.
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On June 1, key provisions of the Patriot Act expired. That bill was used to justify the NSA’s collection of metadata, and many panicked that as surveillance went dark, terrorism would flourish. But in the few days the agency was forced to stop spying, the sky didn’t fall, and according to Daniel Castro, that’s proof that it should end altogether.
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Senators have a historic opportunity to uphold, or resuscitate, the basic American belief that liberty cannot survive when government flouts its limits. On Sunday, those who represent us must either vote for Big Brother or vote for the Bill of Rights. They can’t have it both ways.
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Over-classification of U.S. government information is a grave threat to the Republic, giving politicians and bureaucrats the power to hide facts that aren’t really sensitive but are vital to a meaningful public debate, such as the IG report on President Bush’s surveillance program, says ex-NSA analyst Kirk Wiebe.
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Privacy International has stepped up its battle against GCHQ, and yesterday filed an official legal challenge to the spy agency’s mass snooping on net users.
Emboldened by new restrictions to the similar programme run by America’s National Security Agency (NSA), PI filed the complaint in the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
According to PI, the “bulk collection of phone records and harvesting of other databases, from millions of people who have no ties to terrorism, nor are suspected of any crime” must stop.
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UK charity Privacy International has filed the claim, arguing that GCHQ should end the bulk collection of data, which recently became illegal in the US with the passing of last week’s Freedom Act.
A similar programme of bulk data collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US was revealed to the public by whiste-blower Edward Snowden in 2013.
The organisation claims that it has made the first UK legal challenge to bulk data collection, and notes that “the equivalent NSA power has now been curtailed before the debate this side of the pond has even begun”.
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Although it would be naive to think that the tide is turning, it’s heartening to see a few wins against government attempts to formalise and extend surveillance of their populations. The passage of the USA Freedom Act, however flawed and limited it may be, is one example. The various rulings against the UK government are another. While rightly celebrating these, it’s easy to overlook other battles being fought elsewhere, perhaps not so high profile, but just as important.
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Less than two weeks after Congress was forced into passing historic NSA reform, the Senate tried Thursday to sneak a dangerous “cybersecurity” proposal, which would exponentially expand the spy agency’s power to gather data on Americans, into a massive defense-spending bill. The amendment thankfully failed, but it will be back – possibly within days – and it may require a huge grassroots effort to stop its passage.
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Weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Binney retired in disgust when he saw the agency using that technology to spy on every American.
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“I knew it was illegal from day one,” Binney said.
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Two executive branch review panels have found the call record program is not essential to preventing terror attacks. The administration has publicly identified no example of a plot it exclusively unveiled.
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Skynet, the fictional cybernetic warfare system with its own independent Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven central computing core, is real. Leaked NSA documents highlight the capability of the system to pinpoint and locate high-value targets in real time and then continuously monitor them, as well.
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The surveillance law enacted this week stands as the most significant curb on the US government’s investigative authorities since the 1970s.
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“I was, actually, personally, me and my family, were targeted by defense contractors who were contracted by the US Chamber of Commerce,” BradCast host Brad Friedman says, adding that he only found out through the hacktivist group Anonymous.
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Experience has shown that Americans cannot count on intelligence agencies to be judicious, or the Obama administration to be forthcoming, so lawmakers should create tighter rules that ensure that intelligence programs have the robust privacy and civil liberty safeguards that the law and the Constitution require.
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Belgian federal prosecutor reportedly decided to launch an investigation into allegations of Germany spying on the country on behalf of NSA.
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Belgium will react strongly if allegations that German intelligence agencies spied on the country’s companies and government bodies at the request of the US National Security Service (NSA) are confirmed, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said Tuesday.
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3. It was never just about phone records. When an appeals court last month ruled that Section 215 was unlawful, it also pointed out that the issue at stake wasn’t only the government’s right to gather up phone records of innocent Americans and keep them for years on end.
“If the government (argument) is correct,” the court wrote, ” it could use 215 to collect and store in bulk any other existing metadata available anywhere in the private sector, including …financial records, medical records, and electronic communications (including e‐mail and social media information) relating to all Americans.”
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A crucial moment in the debate this past month over the National Security Agency’s access to Americans’ phone records in terrorism investigations came on May 20, two days before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to squelch House legislation that would restrict that access.
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USA Today has published an editorial by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in which he uses fear, innuendo and legal jargon to argue more privacy cannot keep Americans safe from terrorism. The editorial rationalizes the increased reliance on warrantless surveillance by the United States government. It is especially stunning, given the fact that Gonzales lied to Congress about the warrantless wiretapping program in 2006.
Gonzales was asked on February 6, 2006, whether James Comey, who is now the FBI director, and others at the Justice Department, had expressed concerns about NSA warrantless wiretapping. He claimed in testimony their concerns were related to another program and not the wiretapping program.
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With the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act last week, experts at local colleges said that while some of the new guidelines curbing government surveillance are a step in the right direction, the law may fall short of protecting civil liberties.
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In the congressional debate over reforming the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of American’s phone communications, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s political miscalculations allowed three controversial provisions under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act to expire on June 1. However, the law was reinstated the next day when the Senate passed the USA Freedom Act, which the House had approved earlier. President Obama, who supported the bill, signed the USA Freedom Act into law that same day.
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Two of the top trade associations for major technology companies such as Google and IBM voiced their strident opposition to any policy proposal that would weaken encryption systems for the benefit of law enforcement.
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The letter was sent to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, FBI director James Comey (who was an early entrant in the current round of governmental protest over encryption), Attorney General Loretta Lynch (whose outgoing predecessor established the AG’s stand on the issue) and other heads of cabinet.
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At the start of last month, Google and Stanford University researchers released a report on a largely legal yet dubious practice in the advertising industry. It’s called ad injection.
The process effectively intercepts users’ traffic to inject content, namely, those irritating adverts and popups that seem to come from nowhere. Media rightly jumped on the report, highlighting the companies named as the top ad injectors. What went unnoticed, until now, is that most of the searchable organisations involved in this potentially dangerous business are based in Israel. They also happen to have links to the nation’s military and its top signals intelligence agency, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ: Unit 8200, which works out of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
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Ben Wizner, Snowden’s lead lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, declined to discuss possible negotiations with the Obama administration, but appeared less pessimistic about Snowden’s future.
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Civil liberties advocates in both parties are sounding alarms about a Republican attempt to kneecap a small federal privacy watchdog.
A one-sentence provision tucked into an annual intelligence policy bill making its way through the House could hobble the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), critics fear.
The measure is “way beyond troubling,” said Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute who formerly worked for ex-Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and spent eight years at the CIA.
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Tucked into the surveillance bill that became law was a little-noticed section that will let the United States complete ratification of two long-stalled treaties aimed at stopping a frightening scenario: terrorists wielding radioactive bombs.
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When the USA Freedom Act was passed last week, it was hailed as the first major limit on NSA surveillance powers in decades. Less talked about was the law’s mandate to open a secret intelligence court to unprecedented scrutiny.
[...]
But while the USA Freedom Act calls for important FISA court rulings will be made public, there’s no guarantee they will be. For one, final say on declassification still rests with the executive branch rather than the judges themselves.
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Legislation ending the US government’s bulk collection of telephone data is “a historic victory for the rights of every citizen,” former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden said in a commentary on June 4.
In the opinion piece, published in several newspapers internationally including The New York Times, Snowden reflected on what he said was a profound shift in the public’s awareness of mass surveillance since his infamous leaks disclosing the extent to which the US government and some partners monitor electronic communications.
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Ellsberg’s case ended in a mistrial because of government misconduct. But there is no reason to believe Snowden’s trial would end the same way. Even though the case against him would be weak, there is good reason to doubt he would be acquitted.
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Lincoln Chafee launched his uphill bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination with a perfect illustration of why it is vitally important that the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency feature robust debates on issues such as mass surveillance.
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The US has recently taken steps to cut back on its surveillance programmes. In the UK, the government has just received the green light to continue.
The UK can continue to collect bulk data on overseas communications and can access bulk data held by telephone companies and internet service providers on UK citizens.
An investigation by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorist Legislation into the effectiveness of surveillance legislation has concluded that the UK government does need to access bulk communications data in the interests of national security.
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Cisco’s outgoing CEO John Chambers has said that “rules of the road” need to be set for governments seeking to undertake surveillance operations while working with technology companies, as he rejected suggestions that the company’s reputation has taken a hit globally.
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Let’s talk about something happier. What’s been your proudest day as a lawyer so far?
A pretty happy day was when we finished the 9/11 commission report and released it publicly. It was a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. It was so bipartisan…and fulfilled both a psychological and policy need for the country.
What drew you to work for the 9/11 commission?
Until then, I’d been clerking or doing appellate work at a law firm. While I love that work, the thing I didn’t like about it is sometimes it could feel too academic or removed from the real world. The idea of helping on a staff…of people who wanted to investigate what went wrong before 9/11 felt very relevant and in the moment.
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It is similar on the Internet. The American Constitution doesn’t allow mass surveillance of its citizens. Therefore, there is no question that the NSA – without a court order – would knowingly and on a massive scale read the e-mails of Americans.
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The economic reverberations will ‘likely far exceed’ an initial $35 billion estimate, a report says
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If privacy rights weren’t reason enough to curb the NSA’s surveillance program, the economic implications of the program may offer an even more compelling argument. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington DC-based think tank, the NSA’s programs is hitting the country where it really hurts — its collective pocketbook, by costing U.S. tech companies up to $35 billion in foreign business by 2016. This may be the most persuasive ammunition to date for critics of the NSA’s programs.
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Last week, the U.S. Congress passed the first major revisions to the National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities since revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden brought its domestic data-gathering operations to light in June 2013. Snowden, who has been indicted for leaking the classified information, quickly took to the opinion pages of The New York Times for a victory lap.
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One week after Congress voted to stop the National Security Agency from collecting and storing millions of Americans’ phone records, partisans on both sides are exaggerating the significance of this new reform. NSA supporters lament the loss of a key tool for fighting terrorists, while the agency’s critics hail the new law as (in Edward Snowden’s words) an “historic victory for the rights of every citizen,” with some calling its passage a vindication of Snowden himself as an authentic whistleblower who should be let back home as a hero, not a convict.
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In the years since Snowden’s historic act of civil disobedience, the politics of surveillance have evolved. For much of the early 2000s, politicians of both parties competed to show who could be a bigger booster of the National Security Agency’s operations, fearing that any focus on civil liberties might make them look soft on terrorism. Since Snowden, though, the political paradigm has shifted.
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Two years ago this month, a 29-year-old government contractor named Edward Snowden became the Daniel Ellsberg of his generation, delivering to journalists a tranche of secret documents shedding light on the government’s national security apparatus. But whereas Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers detailing one specific military conflict in Southeast Asia, Snowden released details of the U.S. government’s sprawling surveillance machine that operates around the globe.
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On June 2 as President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law, curtailing domestic surveillance, The Associated Press reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been using a fleet of low-flying aircraft over U.S. cities for video and cellphone surveillance. And on June 4 The New York Times reported that the Obama administration secretly expanded the National Security Agency’s role in warrantless domestic cybersurveillance in 2012.
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I have been writing about security long enough to know that USMobile working with the NSA on a surveillance-blocking technology such as this brings to mind the possibility of a backdoor.
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Civil Rights
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Israeli investigation says missile attack that killed boys aged between nine and 11 was ‘tragic accident’ in findings contradictory to journalists’ reports from scene
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This denial of the truth and claim of victimhood extends to the accusation of anti-Semitism trumpeted at every critic, including this one, despite the fact that I have the highest respect for the immense cultural and scientific achievements of the Jewish people. Israel is a different question entirely.
It is this absolute divorce of propaganda from reality that makes Tony Blair an ideal figurehead. Blair has now become head of a Council of Europe (loosely) linked body which claims to exist to promote tolerance, but in fact exists entirely to promote extreme Islamophobia and to shut down criticism of Israel. And it is a further sign of the estrangement from reality of the influential Israelis behind Blair’s appointment that they believe Tony Blair will influence public opinion positively in their favour. A remarkable example of confirmation bias.
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For years, just being a young African-American or Hispanic male in New York meant getting stopped randomly. Most of the people stopped not only had committed no crime to justify the stop, but, once frisked, had no contraband, weapons, drugs, etc. A few fish may have been caught in this over-inclusive net, but (to extend the metaphor), of the ones thrown back, how many were affected by the intrusion? My guess — all of them.
Getting stopped by police for no reason hurts. Not only your time, but your sense of security. Bad feelings well up, suspiciousness of cops, a sense of insecurity when you walk down the street, a feeling that anything can happen at any time by the people posted there to protect you.
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Yesterday I ran an interview with the Florida mom whose children were removed from their home for a month after a neighbor reported the family to Child Protective Services because their 11-year-old son was left outside by himself for 90 minutes.
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The right to be drunk on the front porch of a private home was endorsed Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court, which said a woman can’t be convicted of public intoxication while standing on her front steps.
Patience Paye, 29, of Waterloo based the appeal of her 2013 case on the contention that her front steps are not a public place so she can’t be charged with public intoxication.
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I am delighted that a judge yesterday ruled that the Fast Track asylum appeals system is illegal. It is the most appalling abuse, specifically designed to limit the capacity of individuals in life threatening circumstances to properly develop and present their legal case and put it before a judge. The system of putting law-abiding people, often families, into detention harsher than our harshest maximum security prisons, allowed just one hour a day out of a tiny cell for exercise, is a minor inconvenience compared to the fundamental denial of proper right to justice. The recent unjust deportation of Majid Ali was just the latest of a series of fast track cases I have encountered. Nadira has finished the script of a short film about a tragic couple, based on substantial research of true stories of fast track detention, and is developing the production.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the months since the Federal Communications Commission voted to regulate the Internet like a public utility, opponents of the new rules have clamored to keep them from taking effect this Friday.
On Thursday, those opponents were disappointed as a federal judge denied their requests to stay the rules while litigation proceeds against them. The court did grant an expedited hearing of the case, meaning it could be argued as soon as the fall or early winter.
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The FCC’s Net neutrality rules are slated to go into effect today, but the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday launched a sneak attack that could strip the agency of its ability to actually enforce the regulations that protect an open Internet.
The rules approved by the FCC in February and published to the Federal Register in April reclassify broadband as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act and prohibit ISPs from throttling content or implementing paid prioritization schemes that would create Internet fast lanes.
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Facebook is about to get a much better idea of what you do and don’t like in your News Feed — even if you don’t click the like button. The company is about to start measuring how long you look posts, photos, and comments in your feed. The thinking is, if you linger on a status update and read a couple of comments, you probably are interested in that content. And if you’re interested in that update, your friends would probably like to see it as well.
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06.12.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
HufnagelM; CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Summary: Calls for changes at the EPO have spread to the largest media in German, adding to existing pressure on Battistelli and his ilk
The latest German press report about the EPO comes from Badische Zeitung which, according to Wikipedia, “is a German newspaper based in Freiburg im Breisgau, covering the Black Forest region. It has a circulation of 145,825 and a readership of 409,000.”
The article talks about the keyloggers which we wrote about a few days ago. We received an English translation [PDF] of the article. Here it is:
European Patent Office: Conditions redolent of a police state
At the European Patent Office, computers were spied on using cameras and surveillance software. A climate of industrial unrest prevails.
Bizarre shenanigans at the European Patent Office.
Photo: DPA
Friday, 12th June 2015
By: Thomas Magenheim
Published in the print edition of the Badische Zeitung
MUNICH. The European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich and its President, Benoit Battistelli, show no signs of settling down. Towards the end of last year, publicly accessible computers at the EPO were secretly monitored using cameras and surveillance software over a period of several weeks as confirmed by a number of insiders. The Federal Ministry of Justice in Berlin under Heiko Maas (SPD) is also informed about the incident.
As a result of the surveillance a member of EPO Boards of Appeal was suspended because he is alleged to have disseminated defamatory statements about the Office and its managers. The EPO which is not subject to national German law has refused to comment.
On the other hand, the Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner Thomas Petri has spoken out about the affair. He has requested that an external data protection supervisor be assigned to the EPO because the internal inspectors are not independent enough and in the absence of any action matters are likely to get out of hand. Such a demand is, however, not enforceable. That became clear recently following the judgment of a Dutch court which confirmed that the EPO was violating fundamental rights. Battistelli declared that the court had no jurisdiction and he ignored its ruling. The controversial President also prohibited a demonstration and although such an action might not be justified under German law, the extraordinary legal status of the EPO allowed him to get away with it.
For months now a battle has been raging at the EPO headquarters in Munich between Battistelli and many of the approximately 7,000 employees. The President is reforming the Office at the behest of the 38 Member States and he is far from squeamish in the manner in which he goes about it. Battistelli has therefore been placed under an obligation by the EPO’s Administrative Council to restore social peace at the EPO. However, the recent revelations about the surveillance affair now seem likely to torpedo these efforts.
“I no longer use my office computer to access any pages which might raise suspicions about me and also only use my private phone outside the EPO because everything can be intercepted,” said an EPA employee who wishes to remain anonymous. Many of his colleagues expressed similar sentiments. The goings-on inside the EPO nowadays resemble what was previously thought to only occur in China or at the FIFA. The computers which were under surveillance are actually installed for use by patent attorneys when they are at the EPO in order to allow them to communicate with their clients for the purpose of exchanging documents. Members of the EPO’s Administrative Council might also use them when the Council is in session. During the period of surveillance such a meeting of the Council was scheduled. This means that both patent attorneys and delegates to the Administrative Council could have been affected by the surveillance. The EPO declined to answer questions as to whether this was an isolated case or whether more actions of this kind are currently in progress stating that any questions concerning this matter “refer to a procedure that is currently pending and subject to strict confidentiality”.
In the meantime it remains unclear whether or not the suspended EPO staff member was really guilty of defamation or whether he was merely stating the truth. His remarks reportedly referred to the EPO Vice-President, Željko Topić, and included allegations of corruption relating to his time at the Croatian Patent Office.
The EPO staff union SUEPO has now declared the peace talks with Battistelli to be suspended. For the next Council meeting on June 23, it has called for renewed protest and it has appealed to the Federal Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, to tackle the matter. The Federal Ministry of Justice points to the EPO’s status of immunity. Whatever about that, the issue of internal data protection has now cropped up on the agenda.
This serves to confirm that anyone questioning the potency, qualifications or ethics of Željko Topić, despite corruption and court rulings that support allegations of corruption, is now being threatened. It’s an imposition of self censorship. This is very reminiscent of the way China deals with dissidents. █
Update (15/6/2015): There is a similar article in another German paper and another translation, including additional text [PDF].
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, Standard, Windows at 6:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Windows too old and long in the tooth
Summary: The ongoing migration of various governments to Free/libre software contributes to the demise of Microsoft’s monopoly and common carrier
“REPORTS suggest Windows phone users are jumping ship with sales in rapid decline,” said the British media earlier this week (title is “Microsoft has a very big problem”). Linux and Android are certainly still gaining. When one switches completely to GNU/Linux, embrace of OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Free/libre software is often implied. It’s virtually imperative. It’s like the ultimate and most complete switch, whereas embrace of open standards or Free software alone tends to be ‘softer’ or rather restrained, staged, and at times hesitant. There is lobbying against each at varying (depending on perceived risk or severity) levels of granularity.
“Someone inside GE recently told me that GE was quietly dumping Windows for Linux in its lucrative CT scanners business.”Microsoft is in trouble and there is no denying that.
According to British media, Vista 8 continues to be a disaster technically and in some nations, unsurprisingly, GNU/Linux has greater market share than the latest Vista (Windows 8.1). The desktop monopoly too is in jeopardy, especially where governments made it their policy to embrace Free/libre software (Uruguay and Venezuela in this case).
Here in the UK the National Health Service (NHS), longtime prisoner of Microsoft, is putting up resistance and considering Free software in a growing number of operations. Making the huge mistake of putting Microsoft Windows in medical devices or facilities is not forgivable. Someone inside GE recently told me that GE was quietly dumping Windows for Linux in its lucrative CT scanners business. According to this new report, X-ray scanners (causing cancer) are behaving badly because of Windows. To quote: “the device proved an easy target. TrapX’s team was able to use an exploit for a known weakness in the Windows 2000 operating system to establish what TrapX refers to as a “pivot” – or point of control- on their test network from which they could attack other systems. After creating a backdoor into the device, TrapX researchers added a new user to the system and decrypted the local user password. The company was then able to extract the database files that would contain medical information.”
“In due course, having removed the Office barrier/hurdle, HMRC can move to GNU/Linux because Google is purely Web-based.”This can become ground for many lawsuits from patients or families of dead patients. This is the sort of scandal that ought to push all British government departments which still use Windows XP immediately to GNU/Linux. No version of Windows is secure; the underlying encryption (proprietary) tends to have back doors. Every piece of proprietary software must be assumed insecure until proven otherwise (by becoming Free software and standards-compliant). There are moves in this direction, namely of standards, in Sweden [1] and in Holland [2,3], with calls growing for the NHS to embrace openness [4]. There is an increasing push towards Free/libre software, not just open standards (which relate to one another). The governments in Europe should move to Free software like LibreOffice, where interoperability becomes trivial, to borrow Andy Updegrove’s latest arguments [5], but alas, as we noted the other day (alluding to the UK, Sweden, and India), HMRC is moving from one proprietary office suite to another. Here is the ‘damage control’ from Microsoft, which is trying to avoid the impression of being dumped. To quote the British press, “MICROSOFT HAS HIT BACK at claims that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has dumped the firm in favour of Google’s cloud apps.
“The move, first reported at The Register, will see 70,000 HMRC employees switching from Microsoft’s productivity offering to Google’s cloud-based apps services.”
Google will emphasise ODF support (open standards), but it is not Free/libre software. In due course, having removed the Office barrier/hurdle, HMRC can move to GNU/Linux because Google is purely Web-based. HMRC’s footsteps are likely to be followed by other British government departments (owing to ODF as a national requirement for editable document), taking away some of Microsoft’s most lucrative contracts (British government) and showing other governments across the world that they too can dump Microsoft and proprietary software, not just Windows. Office is the cash cow, Windows is the common carrier. The demise of one leads to the demise of the other. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Sweden’s governmental procurement specialists at Statens inköpscentral are fine-tuning the list of ICT standards that public authorities may use as mandatory requirements when procuring software and ICT services. The procurement agency is working with standardisation specialists at the University of Skövde, to check which ICT standards are truly open.
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Public administrations that continue to ignore the policy to implement open standards in their ICT solutions should be fined, says Dutch MP Astrid Oosenbrug. “Public administrations should come to grips with open data, open standards and open source. With all their talk about regaining the trust of their citizens and creating a participatory society, public administrations should take a cue from open source communities.”
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Public administrations that switch to open source regain financial scalability, says Jan-Taeke Schuilenga, IT architect at DUO, the Dutch government agency managing the financing of the country’s educational institutions. “We had reached the limit of proprietary licence possibilities. Switching to open source gave us freedom of choice.”
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The UK government must open up and highlight the power of more basic data sets to improve patient care in the NHS and save hundreds of millions of pounds a year, Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Open Data Institute (ODI) has urged.
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Once upon a time, standards were standards and open source software was open source software (OSS), and the only thing people worried about was whether the copyright and patent rules relating to the standards would prevent them from being implemented in OSS. Actually, that was complicated enough, but it seems simple in comparison now that OSS is being included in the standards themselves. Now what?
If this sounds unusual and exotic, it isn’t. In fact, code has been creeping into standards for years, often without the keepers of the intellectual property rights (IPR) Policies governing the standards even being aware of it.
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Posted in Apple, Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Proprietary is not “Open Source”, it’s the very opposite of it
Summary: Apple and Microsoft are trying to change their colours (public perception), but underneath this thin cover the same old spots remain
NON-TECHNICAL FOLKS may easily be led into the illusion of ‘open’ Microsoft and ‘open’ Apple (openwashing), much like that of ‘green’ (and yellow) BP or ‘green’ Shell (greenwashing). There is also whitewashing, e.g. of Bill Gates, but these two examples are different matters. They all involve mass deception with a huge budget. it’s quite a theatre!
We have patiently watched hundreds of headlines about Apple. Some talking points were mentioned even in Linux sites/blogs of Swapnil Bhartiya [1, 2], not just a lot of general news sites [1, 2, 3]. Bloomberg went as far as saying that Apple has gone “open source” (that was the headline!), so we decided a rebuttal was needed. It reminded us of what Microsoft had done with .NET last year, re-announcing the news almost every week, even this week (using the term “Open Source .NET”, despite the fine prints that refute it; we wrote numerous articles to rebut that).
“Bloomberg went as far as saying that Apple has gone “open source” (that was the headline!), so we decided a rebuttal was needed.”Here is ECT’s coverage of the Apple PR (there are literally hundreds more like it), complemented even by this tacit endorsement from Jim Zemlin [1, 2]. He claims “Developer Applause”. “It’s inspiring to see companies like Apple and Microsoft validate the work we’ve been doing for more than two decades,” Zemlin writes. “Applause” is the bizarre word here; it was also used by Sam Dean, speaking ‘on behalf’ of what he calls “Open Source” (some recent Web-centric poll, involving only about 100 subjects, also tried to paint Apple users/developers “Open Source” developers because they work on Web sites using Macs). We reject these claims based on observations and we are going to show some real responses from the real “Open Source” community, not some Apple fans who label themselves “Open Source” and label Apple likewise (often citing Apple marketing material/sites).
Digital Trends asked, “what’s in it for Apple?”
That’s a good question and it’s not hard to answer. In the “Open Source” community not everyone is enthusiastic at all, except perhaps Apple fans and people who buy stuff from Apple (including software) while wishing to label themselves “open”. It’s a branding exercise, putting aside API lock-in.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asked (in his headline), “Just how open will Apple allow Swift to be?”
“Some people love that Apple is open sourcing its Swift programming languages,” he wrote. “Others are taking a wait-and-see attitude about just how ‘open’ Apple will make Swift.”
Simon Phipps, the outgoing OSI President (i.e. top authority for the “Open Source” brand), wrote that “questions loom over ‘open source’ Swift”. “Programming languages alone don’t make programs,” he wrote, but “the SDKs they leverage are the key. When Apple speaks of the SDKs that work well with Swift, it is highly unlikely it is talking about anything that works seamlessly on Android or indeed within any other Linux-based open source platform (not to mention Windows).
“Swift may be offering lip service to open source to pay table stakes with modern developers, but I’m not holding my breath when it comes to extending software freedom to anyone beyond Apple’s walled garden.”
Larry Cafiero, an “Open Source” proponent for many years, wrote: “While there have been no injury reports yet from the multitudes simultaneously jumping on the Swift-as-open-source bandwagon — and no shortage of “Apple to tailor Swift to open source” headlines (can someone hand me an air-sickness bag?) — you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t share the rampant enthusiasm for a couple of reasons.
“To be clear, like Microsoft’s foray into FOSS, Apple’s entry is a small step for FOSS, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. It is hardly a giant leap for FOSSkind.”
Many others are refuting Apple’s and Microsoft’s recent claims of “embracing” FOSS (for languages or SDKs). These are self-serving moves, intended to make people blobs-dependent (whose blobs? their own!).
Microsoft openwasher Cade Metz weighed in too. Referring to his article, our reader iophk wrote: “One of thousands of articles, but doesn’t this noise obscure the fact that it is still locked in to iOS and OS X? I thought Objective C at least was cross-platform, except for a few libraries.”
Despite these obvious facts, the Linux.com “administrator” (perhaps meaning editor) went with flattery for Apple just earlier today. It also flattered Microsoft for trying to trap GNU/Linux (two bird with one stone), having recently openwashed Vista 10 using the modified (by him/her) headline “Microsoft’s Big Secret Windows 10 Feature is Open Source” (because of the Linux Foundation-connected AllSeen Alliance).
We are rather disturbed to see Apple and Microsoft openwashing even in the Linux Foundation’s sites, this latest example referencing a Microsoft puff pieces for Vista 10. They are now attempting to openwash it because of one paragraph that says: “Microsoft announced last November Windows 10 would pack a technology called AllJoyn. An open source framework that encourages devices to be interoperable, AllJoyn was developed by the AllSeen Alliance, a group of more than 150 companies including the likes of Electrolux, Honeywell, LG, and Qualcomm that have banded together to make an open standard for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to speak to each other.”
That’s about as bad as calling Microsoft “open source” because it continues to compile proprietary spyware Skype for GNU/Linux, except GNU/Linux that threatens Microsoft’s desktop monopoly (Chromebooks). As the British media put it the other day, “MICROSOFT is continuing to shun Google’s Chrome OS, opening up its browser-based Skype for Web service to all except those using a Google Chromebook.”
To summarise, don’t fall for the illusion that Microsoft and Apple are somehow ‘embracing’ FOSS; they are trying to exploit the “Open Source” brand to attract people to their proprietary crown jewels. That’s an entirely different thing. █
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