02.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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Civilian drone deaths in Afghanistan tripled last year, according to a report by a UN agency. Forty-five civilians died in drone strikes in 2013.
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Patricia “Paki” Wieland, Northampton, was among 12 people sentenced to jail on disorderly conduct charges during a 2012 protest at Hancock Air Base.
Wieland, a retired professor at Antioch University New England in Keene, N.H., and 15 other members of the Upstate New York Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars were charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct after being arrested in DeWitt, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2012. Members of the group were holding a rally at the gates of Hancock Air National Guard Base when they were arrested. Wieland and her group argue that by carrying out drone strikes, which sometimes kill civilians, the United States is violating international law.
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An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year.
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In closing, a defiant Jackson mocks his audience, saying: “Stop whining about drones”. I daresay the families of unintended drone victims around the world are unlikely to get behind him on this one.
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A drone-fired US missile struck a car southeast of here on a winter night last year, killing two alleged Al-Qaeda operatives who lived openly in their community. But it also killed two cousins who were giving the men a ride and who the Yemeni government later said were innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That incident, and other strikes that have followed, helped fuel anger here over civilian casualties from US drone attacks and what critics say is an even less scrutinized problem: The targeting of suspects who are within the reach of the law.
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The CIA and U.S. military are increasingly relying on surveillance information from the NSA to locate then attack drone targets, with innocent people being killed as a result, according to allegations made in a new publication, The Intercept.
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The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
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The NSA’s surveillance programs are often used to help carry out drone strikes on targets, according to a new report. An anonymous former drone operator for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) told The Intercept — a new publication helmed by Glenn Greenwald, who broke the first of many NSA revelations last year — that the US military and CIA use the NSA’s metadata analysis and phone tracking abilities to identify airstrike targets without confirming their veracity on the ground. The claims were corroborated by documents provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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In an exclusive interview, Boyle points out that “Obama’s victims are Muslims” and Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention expressly defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group””
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As for Mearsheimer, the National Interest has published an important piece by the realist scholar that takes on elitist liberal-interventionist ideas more forcefully than any article I’ve read. Called “America Unhinged,” the piece argues that the U.S. has no dog in the Syria fight and no ability to affect the outcome, and– this will be echoed by the left– the price of liberal interventionism has been the loss of civil liberties at home to a national security state and the destruction of American example abroad by the murderous drone attacks.
Torture
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Other approved torture techniques described included “the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours … the use of harmless insects, the water board.”
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It’s been one year since former CIA analyst and counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou was sentenced to prison for 30 months, the first American official to do time for the government’s torture policies during the Global War on Terror.
This is what whistleblower advocates like to point out – and Kiriakou, 49, strongly believes himself – that he is not in jail for doing the torture or even promoting it, but being the first counterterrorism official to acknowledge the use of waterboarding, and then speak publicly against it.
Wikileaks
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that a woman he is alleged to have raped sent text messages admitting that he never assaulted her.
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A lawyer for one of the Swedish women accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of rape ripped calls by some public officials for an end to the investigation.
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Even as members of Sweden’s parliament have been stepping up pressure on prosecutors to question Julian Assange on the sexual allegations he faces in the country, Assange in a Wikileaks affidavit has claimed that text messages between the two alleged victims prove his innocence.
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A former Swedish prosecutor has written an op-ed for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, where he suggests the country’s office i# charge of pursuing the case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange terminate it entirely.
Rolf Hillegren urges the Prosecutor General to reverse the decision to reopen the investigation, revoke the detention order and withdraw the arrest warrant.
For three years, Sweden has been trying to have him extradited so he can be questioned on sexual allegations made by two women. He sought and obtained asylum from Ecuador and has been living in the Ecuadorean embassy in the United Kingdom since June 2012.
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John Timoney has a face like a fist and a CV out of The Departed. He’s been a cop in New York, Miami and Philadelphia. And now he’s advising the Bahraini government on policing matters.
That’s the Bahraini government, the one that gases, tortures and kills protesters as their preferred method of public order policing. And that’s Timoney, who’s been called “the worst cop in America” and faced hundreds of complaints over his violent approach to public order policing in the U.S.
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As the illegal wildlife trade has boomed, it’s also become more sophisticated. High prices for ivory, rhino horn, pangolin, and everything else have attracted organized crime and militants, and despite regular busts, entrenched trafficking rings remain elusive. To aid law enforcement and gather intelligence, a group of wildlife organizations have launched WildLeaks, a secure whistleblower and tipping system modeled after WikiLeaks.
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The organisation that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, revealed the information in a tweet. However, it did not mention the percentage of funding in digital currencies.
Politics
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The tape (listen below) was released today, on the eve of Nuland’s second trip to meet with Ukrainian protestors and opposition leaders in the past two months — last time she passed out cookies to protestors.
The taped conversation demonstrates in clear detail that while Secretary of State John Kerry decries any foreign meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs, his State Department is virtually managing the entire process. The “F**k the EU” part is her expressing anger that the EU is not moving fast enough with regime change in Ukraine and her plan is to get the UN involved in the process.
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The “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” says that member States should be disarming their nuclear weapons, not restoring, rebuilding, arming, and testing them. This test seems to be in direct contradiction to the Treaty, at a time when the U.S. is engaged with measures to prevent Iran from enriching its uranium.
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Western anti-Russian sentiment persists.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News which shows the importance of privacy (collected during the weekend and early Monday)
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British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”
Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and exclusively obtained by NBC News describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.
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A California state legislator has introduced SB 962, a bill that would require smartphones sold in the state to include a “kill switch” that would “render inoperable” the phone if it’s not in the possession of the rightful owner.
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If you’ve ever used Linux, you’ve most likely used OpenPGP without even realizing it. The open-source implementation of OpenPGP is called GnuPG (stands for “GNU Privacy Guard”), and nearly all distributions rely on GnuPG for package integrity verification. Next time you run “yum install” or “yum update”, each package will be verified against its cryptographic signature before it is allowed to be installed on your system. This assures that the software has not been altered between the time it was cryptographically signed by distribution developers on the master server, and the time it was downloaded to your system.
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NBC News’ Richard Engel said that upon arriving in Russia to cover the upcoming event, he was hacked “almost immediately” — and privacy is not something visitors should expect to have.
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David Davis says police would be able to approach central NHS database without a warrant as critics warn of catastrophic breach of trust
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On Tuesday, internet users all over the world are standing up to say no to GCHQ and the NSA’s mass surveillance. Over the last eight months we’ve heard plenty about how intelligence agencies monitor us on the Internet.
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A broad coalition of technology companies and activist groups has declared Tuesday, February 11th 2014 has been “The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance”.
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News organizations publishing leaked National Security Agency documents have inadvertently disclosed the names of at least six intelligence workers and other government secrets they never intended to give away, an Associated Press review has found.
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Along these lines, a recent Pew Internet Center survey found that the clear majority of respondents are making great efforts to mask their identities online. Looking at this data, we need to be frank: We have long had a contentious relationship with the public, and this fundamentally doesn’t help any brand’s bottom line. In the interest of rebuilding consumer trust, which is so essential to the bottom line, we need to be proactive about addressing privacy concerns in personalization, targeting and measurement.
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Even before the Snowden leaks of last year, the EFF had their suspicions in regards to what the NSA was up to. The group even tried to get the government to spill the beans a few times through lawsuits that never went anyway. As you can imagine, the Snowden leaks helped their cause greatly, and now they’re trying to educate the public on just how far the NSA goes.
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Technology powers like Apple and Google have coalesced to register a lobbyist in Washington to focus on government surveillance reform in an effort to maintain credibility following NSA spying disclosures that often implicated them as accomplices.
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Reporter Nick Nicharios asks a very simple but extremely important question in his latest article for The Nation: “Has the NSA wiretapping violated attorney-client privilege?” Evidence leaked by Edward Snowden seems to prove just that when it comes to some terrorism cases. Nick Nicharios talks to host Rob Sachs about how in many cases there was no clear protocol as to when to turn off the monitoring of phone calls, which has led to monitoring of phone calls between lawyers and their clients.
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US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, clearly thought they were speaking on a secure line when discussing the political unrest in Ukraine and how the US government should help resolve the crisis. At one point during the January 25 call, Nuland colorfully rejected recent overtures from European Union leaders by telling her colleague: “Fuck the EU.”
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Thousands are scheduled to gather on Tuesday to protest the surveillance state, but don’t expect any news of riots at the White House gates or marches on the National Mall.
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Imagine that you could wander unseen through a city, sneaking into houses and offices of your choosing at any time, day or night. Imagine that, once inside, you could observe everything happening, unnoticed by others—from the combinations used to secure bank safes to the clandestine rendezvous of lovers. Imagine also that you have the ability to silently record everybody’s actions, whether they are at work or play without leaving a trace. Such omniscience could, of course, make you rich, but perhaps more important, it could make you very powerful.
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In more Snowden news, we learned on Wednesday from PCWorld that the Brit spy agency GCHQ has been engaging in a game of tit-for-tat with the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec. Evidently they’ve used DDOS attacks and other techniques to an attempt to disrupt the organizations activities. They’ve also managed to do a bit of infiltrating.
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In 2010 the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such espionage cases in the US history, where he was tried under the Espionage Act. The fact is that 60 Minutes did a story on him and shortly after, almost every single charge was dropped except for “misuse of a computer”, for which Drake paid incredibly dearly. So, we’re going to talk about a whole lot of topics about NSA, about the President’s new speech today and a whole lot more.
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Drake since has traveled the nation talking about government surveillance efforts and his contention that they violate the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental rights of all Americans.
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Thousands of websites on Tuesday will take a stand against government surveillance by plastering protests across their home pages.
Tech companies and civil liberties organizations are hoping the demonstration, called The Day We Fight Back, will replicate their success in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in 2012.
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Facebook is not secure after all, as users of this social network, we have private settings where by we can change our private setting and regulate the people who can see our personal information and those who are not allowed to see the information. But is this truly what happens.
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Facebook has spent the past 10 years building a business upon your personal information.
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Yesterday, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI asking for details about a surveillance tool we know too little about, called a port reader. According to news reports, port readers copy entire emails and instant messages as they move through networks, in real time. They then delete the contents of the messages, leaving only the “metadata” — the sender, recipient, and time of a message, and maybe even the location from which it was sent — behind for the government. According to the same reports, the FBI is taking steps to install port readers on the networks of major U.S. phone and Internet companies, going so far as to make threats of contempt of court to providers that don’t cooperate.
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Following a stinging report in the New York Times explaining how Edward Snowden was able to collect his trove of top-secret government documents, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y) this morning took to the Sunday show Face The Nation to make the following claim (full transcript): “A lot that have has been changed; there is monitoring now of what goes on. Snowden would not be able to do it again in the future.”
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Ironically, as many conservatives have given up hope on nullification as a way to fight back against federal overreach, several national news stories are highlighting those very state efforts.
For example, in a big story for February 5, the Associated Press reports, “State lawmakers around the nation are proposing bills to curtail the powers of law enforcement to monitor and track citizens.”
The message from these states to Capitol Hill, the story says, is “if you don’t take action to strengthen privacy, we will.”
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If this is the message, it’s not being broadcast in a way that will find a receptive ear in Washington. American spooks don’t like their cover blown, no matter the reason or motivation. If Bibi thought this would make a positive impression on the Obama administration, he’s naïve. But my guess is that this isn’t intended for Obama’s ears. It’s intended as ammunition for the Lobby in making its case both about Iran sanctions and the Kerry peace talks. Members on Capitol Hill can use this new development as grist for the pro-Israel mill in their future Israel-related legislative deliberations.
This is yet another example of how out of synch Israel is with the U.S. administration. Bibi speaks over Obama’s head instead of directly to him. There is no direct communication. No point of common contact.
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A furor in Europe over new reports of National Security Agency surveillance is undermining U.S. efforts to move beyond the affair and has thrown plans for a trans-Atlantic trade agreement into question just weeks before talks are scheduled to resume.
U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have engaged in a diplomatic offensive in recent weeks aimed at putting European fears over the data collection to rest. But a wave of European media reports based on information provided by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have provided further details of the U.S. surveillance programs, confounding Washington’s efforts.
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02.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy/Surveillance
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More than 4,000 groups and websites have signed on to support a day of protest against U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, scheduled for Tuesday.
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Due to the overwhelming concern and outrage regarding all of the N.S.A. surveillance that has come to light in recent months, internet users and groups are taking a strong arm “internet approach”, and plan to fight back. February 11th has been designated as The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance from the N.S.A.
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The eccentric chief executive officer of Swatch Group, one of the world’s top watchmakers, was so incensed by recent allegations of mass U.S. spying that he chastised a top New York official over the matter in a letter late last year.
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The premise of Offnow is local legislation in states, counties, and universities to make it policy to dis-invest in mass surveillance. Twelve state legislatures have introduced versions of the 4th Amendment Act (Alaska, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington). The big target is Utah, home of the huge Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, where the provision of 1.7 million gallons of water by the state every day cools the huge supercomputers.
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In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency”, with double the CIA’s annual budget and snooping the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).
So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine?
They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command just like Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed “only in the next century” we would be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation, and MIT on another system identifying words spoken by different people, while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.
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A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information…
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The digital magazine’s “initial focus will be in-depth reporting on the classified documents previously provided” by Snowden, according to Omidyar and former Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates, who posted a brief item about the launch on the First Look Media Web site today. Bates had been previously announced as a First Look team member, along with a handful of others.
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Got that? Because there are some limitations on all the spying they do on Americans, and it’s too complicated to understand those limitations, so it’s okay to lie and say they don’t spy on Americans. Of course, in the very next paragraph, Wittes tries to effectively brush away the massive amount of surveillance done on Americans.
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History is by some marvels of anti-institutional warriors. Now, the names of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden tend to find copy and coverage, leakers and soldiers against tight lipped secrecy. But last month, when former New York Congressman Otis G. Pike died, there was barely a murmur. Obituaries proved few in number. Most were colourless and unreflective.
As Mark Ames of Pando Daily (Feb 4) quite rightly pointed out, the barely reported, and unremarked death of that great challenger of the national security complex was stunning, a “teachable moment” even as the Snowden snowstorm continues its effects. Such a moment was “probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.” Wither, sadly, the denizens of genuine reform.
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Dutch government ministers have admitted that it was not the American National Security Agency (NSA) that intercepted data from millions of Dutch phone calls in late 2012/early 2013, as was reported in October 2013.
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Co-founder of German company Protonet, Ali Jelveh, poses with a server at their headquarters in Hamburg, January 30. Protonet and many other start-ups in the country offer data security “made in Germany” after former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden alleged the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage and put software in almost 100,000 computers around the world. Picture taken January 30.
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Founded over thirty years ago in Berlin, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an institution in Europe. The CCC is Europe’s largest association of hackers, known for its annual shindig, the Chaos Communication Congress, as well as its involvement in numerous campaigns to raise awareness of digital security gaps, be these lapses in corporate software development or government-controlled spyware. Always imbued with a strong pro-privacy and anti-censorship orientation (previous members include Wau Holland and former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg), Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance in Germany have unsurprisingly proven of pivotal interest to the CCC’s membership.
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The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The disclosure contradicts popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data. It is also likely to raise questions about the efficacy of a program that is premised on its breadth and depth, on collecting as close to a complete universe of data as possible in order to make sure that clues aren’t missed in counterterrorism investigations.
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There are three broad ways that these software companies collaborate with the state: a National Security Agency program called “Bullrun” through which that agency is alleged to pay off developers like RSA, a software security firm, to build “backdoors” into our computers; the use of “bounty hunters” like Endgame and Vupen that find exploitable flaws in existing software like Microsoft Office and our smartphones; and finally the use of data brokers like Millennial Media to harvest personal data on everybody on the Internet, especially when they go shopping or play games like Angry Birds, Farmville, or Call of Duty.
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If you’re headed to Sochi for the Winter Olympics, it might be best to stay off the grid.
The State Department has already warned travelers that they should have no expectation of privacy while in Russia. And now, NBC’s Richard Engel has demonstrated just how easy it is to get hacked while at the games.
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The microblogging service released new statistics Thursday on the amount of information it hands over to governments and the number of posts it removes at their request. (Governments worldwide are asking for more data, and Twitter removes relatively few, though some, posts in certain countries.)
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Censorship
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Social media was one of the first refuges for Syria’s non-violent activists. Now they’re getting kicked off.
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This week Quentin Tarantino decided to sue Gawker after the site published a link to the filmmaker’s leaked ‘The Hateful Eight’ script. In an attempt to make the screenplay harder to find the filmmaker also asked Google to remove several websites that linked to or wrote about it. Thus far, however, the search engine is refusing to comply.
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On January 17, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, as a matter of first impression, that First Amendment defamation rules apply equally to both the institutional press and individual speakers and writers, such as bloggers.
Because this was the core issue in the case, I’ll focus on this issue, rather than on the underlying factual dispute between the parties (a blogger named Crystal Cox, and several companies that Cox had criticized publicly.)
Police
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The wrongly convicted activist John Jordan claims the Met helped plan serious civil disorder. An independent public inquiry is now vital
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The Obama Administration recommends a uniform federal standard requiring businesses to quickly report data breaches and thefts of electronic personal information, acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
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He looked at a future where technology went unchecked by humanity, and he didn’t like what he saw.
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There’s been less discussion over the TSA’s full body scanners recently, especially since the TSA’s brief but insanely expensive (with YOUR money!) experiment with the “nudie scanners” went away. However, Politico has a fascinating story from a former TSA agent revealing that much of what you suspect about the TSA is true: they were able to see you naked even as the scanners had little actual value. They do target attractive women and have a rather long list of official sounding “code names” for good looking women so they can alert each other to them while appearing professional.
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The EU is developing a secret plan to give the police the power to control cars by switching the engine off remotely
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A few months back, we wrote about the horrific treatment by Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol agents of On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and her friends and family at the border. They were all US citizens and yet were detained for many hours for no reason, had their electronics seized and were generally treated terribly. Homeland Security has refused to explain why it stopped them — though, the obvious answer is that they were Muslim. There is now a similar story from Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, the Emmy-nominated producer and host of Huffpost Live (full disclosure: he once had me on his show), discussing how he gets detained every time he returns to the country. This time, he was just coming back from the World Economic Forum at Davos, and he was given a document with a big X over his face and sent to a “special” line:
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This Sunday, BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem was arrested at JFK airport for money laundering. Allegedly, he has sold $1M worth of bitcoin, which has later been used to buy illegal drugs. But that’s not what money laundering is. Not at all. This can only be described as a harassment arrest.
TPP
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Yesterday, a diverse network of organizations opposing Fast Track legislation, including the Free Software Foundation, announced they are extending their ten days of activism following massive and widespread public action. Since its inception on January 22nd, more than a hundred new groups have joined the effort at StopFastTrack.com, including Coalition for a Prosperous America, Ben & Jerry’s, SumOfUs, Democracy for America, Friends of the Earth, Namecheap, and CREDO — adding to an already impressive, and unlikely, list of groups like reddit, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, MoveOn, LabelGMOs, and Fight for the Future.
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The European Union will offer to lift tariffs on nearly all goods imported from the United States as part of negotiations towards the world’s largest free-trade deal, people familiar with the proposal have told Reuters.
The offer will be made on Monday, a week ahead of face-to-face talks between EU trade chief Karel De Gucht and his U.S. counterpart Michael Froman in Washington, they said.
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“This is one of those issues that 90 percent of the left and 90 percent of the right agree on,” Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, said.
Obama dismayed union allies last week when he called for Congress to pass trade promotion authority legislation in his State of the Union address.
The authority, which was last given to former President George W. Bush, would prevent Congress from amending trade deals in exchange for the administration achieving specific negotiating objectives. It also would impose time limits on congressional consideration of trade agreements.
The authority is thought to make it much easier to negotiate trade deals, because foreign partners have more certainty that the deals will become U.S. law.
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Tonight President Obama is expected to address two linked subjects in his State of the Union address: the historic rise in U.S. income inequality and a trade policy agenda that threatens to exacerbate inequality. As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Obama cannot have it both ways: he cannot propose to close the yawning income gap while pushing to Fast Track through Congress a controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” deal that would widen the gap. The TPP would expand the status quo “free trade” model that study after study has found to be an increasingly significant contributor to U.S. income inequality.
Copyrights
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In the U.S. roughly half a million people have been sued for sharing copyrighted files in recent years, but filing of mass-lawsuits is not getting easier. A federal judge in Iowa has just issued a key order which makes mass-BitTorrent piracy lawsuits virtually impossible. The judge ruled that copyright holders can’t join multiple defendants in one suit, since there is no proof that they shared files with each other.
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The European Commission is planning an overhaul of the copyright monopoly laws in Europe, and is asking the public for input. The deadline for such input is February 5, one week from now. Activists have made it as easy as possible for you to submit meaningful input.
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We’ve written plenty of times about the importance of the public domain around here, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain has been Disney, a company which has regularly mined the public domain for the stories it then recreates and copyrights. Of course, somewhat depressingly, Disney also has been one of the most extreme players in keeping anything new out of the public domain, as pointed out by Tom Bell’s excellent “mickey mouse curve” showing how Disney has sought to push out the term of copyrights every time Mickey Mouse gets near the public domain.
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Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm had his custody extended for four more weeks during a behind-closed-doors court hearing today. The investigation into Gottfrid’s alleged hacking activities is still ongoing, with the prosecution today revealing that police records obtained during the hack may have been transferred to servers abroad.
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02.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Hot on the heels of the first CryEngine game Kingdom Come: Deliverance to support Linux, Linux just got another game in its steadily increasing repertory of big-budget games. This time too it is an open world RPG game named Cradle. The game is being developed by Pittsburg based Mojo Game Studios, founded by students of Carnegie Melon University. The game has been in development for a year and has now been put up on Kickstarter to secure the target funding of $350,000 in 17 days. It has also managed to secure a pledge of $75k, so the situation is looking quite plausible for it to secure the necessary funding within the time limit.
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Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, the highly anticipated sequel to the blood splattered and gory game Hotline Miami, will be released sometime around the third quarter of 2014. This bit of news comes from the official Twitter account of the gory top-down shooter.
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The Steam Music Beta is coming soon to Big Picture and SteamOS interfaces, with desktop features soon to follow. To express interest in beta participation, join the Steam Music community group. Group members will be invited in waves, until the feature is released to everyone.
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This will please big picture mode users and SteamOS/Steam Machine users alike, Steam is planning to add music controls built-in to Steam itself allow you to control music while gaming.
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In-Home Streaming was part of the SteamOS announcement Valve made back in September and beta invites to the functionality have been sent to some people around the internet. Luckily I was part of that group and I can share some of it with you!
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When Valve announced Steam Machines, many were concerned about the slew of different models that will be available to consumers. With so many different options and price schemes, it seems as though it may be bit muddled and perhaps problematic for Valve’s new software platform.
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PC World explores the benefits of Steam’s beta game streaming to ancient computers that can now be used for gaming.
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Linux has a prodigious library of free games many of which are released under an open source license. A large proportion of these open source games are eye catching. Popular games often have full motion video, vector graphics, 3D graphics, realistic 3D rendering, animation, texturing, a physics engine, and much more. Early computer games did not have these graphic techniques. The earliest video games were text games or text-based games that used text characters rather than vector or bitmapped graphics.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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One of the amazing things about Linux is the fact that there is always something new out there to learn. A new package manager, a different desktop environment, a different philosophy, a completely different ethos.
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FTP stands for ‘File Transfer Protocol‘ is one of the most widely used and standard protocol available over Internet. FTP works in a Server/Client architecture and is used to transfer file. Initially FTP client were command-line based. Now most of the platform comes bundled with FTP client and server program and a lot of FTP Client/Server Program is available. Here we are presenting 10 Interview Questions based on Vsftp (Very Secure File Transfer Protocol) on a Linux Server.
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At the moment, the uTorrent server for Linux only has a web-based user interface that doesn’t allow users to click magnet links in web pages in order to add them to the download queue. So, if GuTorrent becomes reality, it will be the first ever graphical client for the uTorrent server, a.k.a. the first ever uTorrent client for Linux.
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Maxthon Cloud Browser for Linux is not yet an official release, as it’s still in development, and it resides on the official Maxthon forums for the moment, where users can grab the latest Beta versions. It’s easily installable on Debian, Red Hat and other Linux operating systems, especially Arch Linux users, as a package is already available in AUR.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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02.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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02.01.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Octodad: Dadliest Catch is currently available for Windows, Mac and Linux with a PlayStation 4 release is in the works. All versions support local co-op, and all buyers should absolutely give it a try. Flip on roulette mode and watch as each player’s controllable limbs are randomized after each objective. It’s octo-insanity, it is.
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At a recent announcement, publisher Devolver Digital announced that Duke Nukem 3D, the classic first person shooter, now officially supports cross platform multiplayer as well as co-op, after exactly 18 years the original game hit the market. So now players from Linux, Mac or Windows can join up and start fragging. Up to eight players can join a single game. So if you always wanted to shoot those Windows or Mac gamers smack in the middle of their eyes with Duke, or perhaps squash them under your boots, now’s your time to live out that fantasy.
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If you took my advice and got Trine 2 or have been a fan of the Trine series, and were wishing that the original Trine was on Steam too, then it is your lucky day! The original Trine, according to the developers, is getting a major update that will make it land on Steam. The same update will also include a new Linux port for the game onto Steam, thus making the Steam version playable on Linux too.
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Unigine Corp has shared that their flagship advanced 3D engine, which originally was targeted for games but is now seeing greater use within simulators and professional 3D visualization areas, is forking into Unigine Sim and Unigine Game.
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Full Control, developers of the Space Hulk video game adaptation which launched last year, have successfully ported the game over to Linux.
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Space Hulk now officially has a fully open beta test of the game on Linux available for all gamers who have purchased a copy on Steam.
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Full Control’s Space Hulk, the studio’s adaptation of the Warhammer 40,000 board-game, is now available on Linux.
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The ability to stream games around the house would be cool in and of itself, but Valve’s in-home streaming technology needs to succeed if the company wants its upstart SteamOS operating system and the associated ecosystem of Steam Machines to catch on in the living room. Because SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system, it falls victim to the age-old Linux gaming problem: There simply aren’t many native Linux games.
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