11.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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CIO Gerard Insall predicts major cost savings by shifting away from an IBM operating system. The move is part of a larger IT modernization program geared toward cutting costs and increasing agility at the car rental and sharing company.
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A report in “The Inquirer” states that China has previously denounced Windows 8 as a spyware tool and would therefore be developing its own distribution called “NeoKylin”, based on Ubuntu.
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Server
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Our Partner Lounge at the SF event features Tableau, Red Hat, DataStax, MongoDB, SaltStack, Fastly and Bitnami. Bitnami announced its Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform featuring almost 100 cloud images, enabling our users to deploy common open source applications and development environments on our infrastructure in one-click. Fastly announced a new offering called Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that improves content delivery and performance at the edge.
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A few months ago, I covered the news that Google had released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is essentially a version of Borg, designed to harness computing power from data centers into a powerful virtual machine. It can make a difference for many cloud computing deployments, and optimizes usage of container technology. You can find the source code for Kubernetes on GitHub.
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Kernel Space
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The latest exciting hardware we’ve been testing at Phoronix are two Xeon Haswell processors that are compatible with the MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard. Needless to say with being an Intel processor and especially a workstation-class product, the Xeon E5-1680 v3 and Xeon E5-2687W v3 are running great with Linux.
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Intel users should see a major improvement with their hardware after a group of developers from LunarG found out that there was a bottleneck in the DRM driver.
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Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot of opinions on the new init technology, systemd. Some people think systemd is wonderful, the bee’s knees. Others claim that systemd is broken by design. Some see systemd as a unifying force, a way to unite the majority of the Linux distributions. Others see systemd as a growing blob that is slowly becoming an overly large portion of the operating system. One thing that has surprised me a little is just how much people care about systemd, whether their opinion of the technology is good or bad. People in favour faithfully (and sometimes falsely) make wonderful claims about what systemd is and what it can supposedly do. Opponents claim systemd will divide the Linux community and drive many technical users to other operating systems. There is a lot of hype and surprisingly few people presenting facts.
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Applications
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After a quiet year Tomahawk, the Swiss Army knife of music players, is back with a brand new release to sing about.
Version 0.8 of the open-source and cross-platform app adds support for more online services, refreshes its appearance, and doubles down on making sure its innovative social features work flawlessly.
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Flow ‘N Play is a new video player written in Qt which features a pretty slick and simple interface which provides only the basic features for playing movies.
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Exaile has been a bit quiet in the past two years with maybe only one or two stable releases, but nevertheless, it’s one of the full-featured music players for GNOME which are on par with applications like Rhythmbox or Banshee in terms of features. However, over the past two months a new stable release, 3.4, has been put out under the slogan “We’re not dead yet”, as well as an incremental 3.4.1 release, which shipped on November 1. To be honest, Exaile has so many features that I could go on writing a lot more than an article to cover them all, so let’s have a look at some of the most notable ones.
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QEMU 2.2 is under development to further advance Linux virtualization/emulation capabilities. QEMU 2.2-rc0 is now available as the first test release.
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It was three years ago when Adobe has started to create its free open source text editor dubbed as Brackets. Since then, the company has been very busy adding new features to the text editor, aiming to help Brackets gain a world class status. The latest release, its 45th to be exact, is described as a big milestone for the Brackets project and the company’s way of announcing to the world that Brackets is ready.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desura, the digital distribution platform that’s similar in nature to Valve’s Steam client and is popular with indie game studios, has been sold off by Linden Labs.
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It’s been a bumpy ride for 7 Days To Die as we have extensively covered here, but the developers finally decided to update Linux users waiting on it.
I still don’t see what’s so hard for developers to be open with communication (Developers could take notes from Aspyr Media on their recent blog posts), but that aside if they do actually release 7 Days To Die on Linux as promised then the issues we had with them will have gone.
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I’m happy to announce our games Sales Page has been revamped to be much more useful for you with new filters and sorting options! It may look mostly the same, but it’s had a lot of changes behind the scenes.
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Steam launched into beta for Linux on the 6th November 2012 and it’s been one hell of a ride for Linux gamers since. This was the first time they let in a group of outsider gamers to test out the client.
Previously they put up a sign-up page where you could note your interest to test it and they were overwhelmed by the amount of people wanting to try it. In the first week they had more than 60,000 people sign up for the first Linux beta of Steam.
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War Thunder is one of the best World War 2 games on PC – a period flight and tank sim specialising in combat of the ground-to-air-and-back-again variety. It’s seen ginormous success on Windows, where you could find five million War Thunder players a year after its launch in open beta.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I just want to inform you (those who are still running KDE 4) that we released a new version of your favorite network applet. This new release brings to you many bug fixes and should make your life easier. We really recommend to update to the new version as we, not intentionally, introduced some new issues in the previous version. Together with the new release of plasma-nm we also released our libnm-qt library which is also needed if you want to have fixes from plasma-nm properly working.
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Aaron Seigo is a seasoned open source developer who leads the Plasma team at KDE. He also tried to bring a Linux-based tablet to the market through his Vivaldi project. He recently joined Kolab Systems, and we talked to him as well as Kolab CEO Georg Greve to understand what Kolab does and how Aaron, a KDE developer, will help the company.
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KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has written a lengthy blog post about some of the items that developers will hopefully accomplish in 2015 for Plasma 5.
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Our instant messaging application KDE Telepathy 0.9.0 has been released. Packages are avaialble for Kubuntu 14.10 and our development version Vivid.
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Qt4 has been deprecated since Qt5′s first release on December 19th 2012, that means almost two years ago!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I was glad to be invited to FSONCS 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Remember that this is also the place for next year’s GUADEC! This year’s FSCONS was attended by around 150 people or so. I guess it was a bit less. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a very cool event with many interesting people and talks.
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While Compiz 1.0 might never be reached given its diminishing usage these days and bleak outlook with Unity 8 being designed around Mir, Compiz 0.9.12 was released today with some minor new developments.
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4MLinux Media Edition, a special distribution with a wide set of multimedia tools and software, has advanced to version 10.1 and is now ready for download and testing.
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Kano is a computer and coding kit that is suitable for all ages. Well, to be truthful, Kano’s step-by-step instructions in the included booklets and its simplified Linux-based operating system target kids aged 6 to 14.
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New Releases
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Pisi Linux KDE 1.1, an open source solution based on the Pardus Linux distribution, is now available for download and it comes with a lot of new features and changes.
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The first beta of the OpenELEC 5.0 multimedia focused Linux distribution is now available for testing. OpenELEC 5.0 is to be aligned with the upcoming Kodi 14 that’s the re-branded XBMC.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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CPLANE NETWORKS, the leader in high-performance Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced that Dynamic Virtual Networks (DVN) V1.1 has achieved certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. DVN transforms static physical networks into virtualized resource pools that can be allocated on demand, significantly reducing the time and cost to deploy cloud applications.
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Fedora
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Previously, Fedora was first and foremost a desktop distribution that also contained server elements. If all went well, the new features introduced in Fedora would eventually appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This go-around, there are three Fedora spins: one for the cloud, one for the server, and one for the workstation.
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For reasons I can’t recall I have my encrypted /home *not* on a logical volume so growing it into the free space on the new disk basically just involved booting from a live USB stick, unlocking the LUKS volume, using gdisk to delete the existing partition and creating a new, larger one starting at the same offset, e2fsck, and resize2fs. If you’re going to do this yourself, you should of course back up your data first.
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No, no, we won’t have Beta Council, we’re going to have final release from beginning (although implementation details has to be sorted out). It was just a coincidence – Fedora 21 Beta was released the same day as Council elections nomination period opened. Two announcements that had to go out yesterday.
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Sometimes you can talk a subject to death and it won’t matter. So, it helps greatly for people who have no Linux experience to get a visualization of what Fedora is all about.
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The Fedora Project has released the first Beta for Fedora 21, taking this distribution a lot closer to the final version, which should land in a little over a month.
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Debian Family
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With the Jessie freeze approaching, I took care of packaging some new upstream releases that I wanted to get in. I started with zim 0.62, I had skipped 0.61 due to some annoying regressions. Since I had two bugs to forward, I took the opportunity to reach out to the upstream author to see if he had some important fixes to get into Jessie. This resulted in me pushing another update with 3 commits cherry picked from the upstream VCS. I also sponsored a wheezy-backports of the new version.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) has been available for a couple of weeks and the reception has been positive for the most part, but there is one small piece of interesting information that didn’t get revealed. It looks like the Ubuntu devs don’t need to build specific images for Apple hardware…
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Sometimes it seems that Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, can’t win for losing. Often accused of trying to force other open-source groups to follow their lead by keeping projects internal until they feel it’s ready to be shared with others, when Ubuntu announced its intention to build LXD, a hypervisor for containers, at the OpenStack Summit, the company was immediately accused of announcing vaporware (!); of shoving LXD down other programmers’ throats; and of trying to replace Docker.
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Further, there have been millions of downloads of the new Kylin GNU/Linux based on Ubuntu so growth will likely accelerate.
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The new Click packages that are already used on the Ubunu Touch platform by Canonical are also coming to the desktop and they might be able to change the Linux packaging paradigm.
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When news broke a few days ago about development of an Ubuntu Linux-based x86 tablet called the UT One, it seemed like Canonical was not part of the endeavor. But that’s wrong, according to information from the man behind the project, who contacted The VAR Guy this week with more details on the open source mobile device.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 14.10 came out with about as much fanfare as growing grass. If you’re unsure why this happened, it’s simple — Ubuntu is in a state of holding because of Unity 8/Mir. Until that happens, Ubuntu version upgrades will be about bug fixes and not much more. It makes sense… why dump a bunch of time/effort into an interface that’s about to undergo a radical shit?
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux distros have all kinds of system notification mechanisms. Some are better than others, but for the most part they function the way they should. On the other hand, some developers, like the ones from the elementary OS team, go a little bit further and they are able to provide a much better experience for the end users.
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Each distro is, in fact, a separate Linux based operating system. Usually, a distro is designed to meet specific needs of a particular set of users. RHEL, SUSE and CentOS are designed primarily for use by businesses on servers. Mint, Ubuntu, Mageia and the like are designed for those who need productivity on the desktop and who would rather the operating system just take care of itself — probably the biggest set of users of desktop Linux. The class of distro that includes Slackware and Gentoo are for those who need to customize their systems to exactly fit their needs.
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The internet of things (IoT) offers endless possibilities for smart devices and their applications. So it’s no wonder that the IoT is as equally tempting to hackers, as it is to developers, keen to showcase their latest developments.
A lack of security issues doesn’t mean you’re OK – you’re probably just not being targeted yet.
This paper is designed to help anyone who is developing an internet-enabled Linux device for personal or business use. It highlights the main areas to consider and provides a practical checklist for developing applications for Embedded Linux.
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Fancy building your very own portable Raspberry Pi gaming console? If you do then you might be interested in a new Kickstarter project called eNcade which has been created by Nicolas Wicker at Nzen Mods.
The eNcade takes the form of a portable Raspberry Pi gaming tablet that has been designed to focus on retro gaming online with anyone anywhere. Check out the video after the jump to learn more about this unique Raspberry Pi project and how you can be one of the first to own an eNcade system.
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Phones
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After Google’s Android started shipping in the last quarter of 2008 it took a good 2 years for the Linux kernel based OS to become market leader in the 1st quarter of 2011. Since then Android has seen the largest growth by far and reached a market share of 77.83% in the last quarter of 2013.
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Android
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Apple Pay has gotten an amazing amount of press lately, and its drawn the attention of consumers to the benefits of NFC based payments. This has resulted in Google Wallet being used more than it had been previously. Ars Technica reports on the effects that Apple Pay may be having on Google Wallet.
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NFC-based mobile payments have had a boost in recent months, possibly thanks to the launch of Apple Pay, which was announced in September. Now, a person with knowledge of the matter tells Ars that Google Wallet, which launched back in 2011 and saw tepid success in the ensuing three years, has had considerable growth in the last couple of months. According to our source, weekly transactions have increased by 50 percent, and in the recent couple of months, new users have nearly doubled compared to the previous month.
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In today’s interconnected world many apps created by celebrities are usually looked down upon. And yes, many of them are really, really bad. However, some of them do stand out. Some of them are actually worth trying. So, in today’s article we’re listing some of the best applications created by celebrities:
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Qualcomm is the mobile industry’s equivalent of a god: omnipotent and omnipresent, yet invisible to the naked eye. The company that was founded on the premise of building “Quality Communications” can now be found inside every major smartphone in the US. Even the fiercely independent Apple, which designs its own mobile processors, has no choice but to use Qualcomm’s LTE modems. The same is true of Samsung, whose Exynos chip is replaced by a Qualcomm Snapdragon for the US and other markets. But Qualcomm’s influence spreads much wider and deeper still.
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One of the key moments in the rise of GNU/Linux was when software companies producing their own variant of Unix realised that it made no sense for them all to work on something that was no longer providing any competitive advantage – it was simply part of the digital plumbing that had to be provided in some form. That meant they could usefully collaborate on a common platform, and differentiate themselves in other ways – higher up the software stack, or through services, for example.
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None of this would be possible without the benefits of Free and Open Source software. Start with the platform: Ruby-on-Rails is “a good way to get an MVP (minimum viable product) up fairly quickly, and start engaging with the customer,” Ian Moss told LU&D. Moss is founder of travel start-up 196 Destinations and, along with Capital Relations owner Coral Grainger, collates the long- running Manchester StartUpDigest newsletter.
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Siemens is offering an open source implementation of the Multicore Association’s Multicore Task Management Application Program Interface (MTAPI) specification.
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Lately, it seems that the only news we hear is what other multinational company has been hacked and how many records were accessed. We have always been security conscience, but it does appear that hackers and malware have been making us even more so lately. Unfortunately, this is neither something new, nor something that is likely to go away.
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sBack in the 1990s, the technology world seemed alive with companies that had chosen to monetise an open-source project and get behind it. However, for Intel Capital vice president and managing director of services, open source, and machine to machine Lisa Lambert, the startup landscape today is quite barren, despite the number of open-source projects being higher than ever.
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Facebook’s latest open-source code contribution to the public is Proxygen, a C++ HTTP framework with HTTP/SPDY server capabilities that it’s been using internally in place of Apache and Nginx servers.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Globally, 4 billion people have yet to access the Web. To invite these next billions of users online, access must be affordable. The tumbling price of smartphones, such as the Firefox OS handsets, is a clear step in this direction.
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Mozilla, the mission-based organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is pleased to announce that Firefox OS will soon expand to Africa. The Firefox OS ecosystem has gained support from three new key partners in the region: Airtel, MTN South Africa and Tigo, operated by Millicom, are the first carriers working with Mozilla to soon bring first Firefox OS smartphones to Africa.
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Firefox for mobile, codenamed Fennec, is the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for devices such as Android smartphones and tablet computers. Fennec is available in multiple languages, and just a few months ago, was launched in the Hindi language along with others like: Assamese, Bengali (India), Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Securing the cloud isn’t just about protecting the network layer from external attacks; it’s also about being able to detect fraudulent activities running on the cloud. At the OpenStack Summit here, a group of researchers presented their findings on how to use the OpenStack Ceilometer project—used primarily for billing and metering of cloud usage—to detect fraud.
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Databases
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Open source storage met open source big data this week in a deal between MapR and MongoDB, which announced a partnership to certify the latter’s NoSQL database platform to MapR’s Apache Hadoop distribution.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For our first magazine interview, we got some cheap flights and headed out to Kaufbeuren, an attractive Swabian city an hour’s train ride from Munich. This is where we met Florian Effenberger, Executive Director at The Document Foundation (he was chairman at the time of this interview), and Alexander Werner from the Foundation’s membership committee. This is the non-profit organisation at the heart of LibreOffice, the famous fork of OpenOffice.org now dominant in every Linux distribution. We were able to ask Florian about the split, about arguments over a new name and what wheat beer he’d recommend as a souvenir for our journey home.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Sharing is one of free software’s key principles. People who contribute to the advancement of free software, and to society, are committed to sharing their ideas in order to create something we can all benefit from. Often, they don’t ask for anything in return. That’s why each year, the Free Software Foundation recognizes one deserving individual and one project with the Free Software Awards. Who do you think should receive the 17th annual awards?
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GnuPG, also known as GPG, allows to encrypt and sign data…
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Code Sourcery developers are seeking permission to land their OpenACC C/C++ front-end support inside the mainline GCC code-base.
For the past year the developers at Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics have been working on OpenACC 2.0 with GPU support for GCC. The GPU support is focused on NVIDIA hardware and includes a controversial NVIDIA “NVPTX” back-end for GCC that still requires NVIDIA’s closed-source Linux driver for handling this compute support. The NVPTX back-end is ready for mainline GCC and now so is the OpenACC 2.0 front-end support, or it appears.
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Openness/Sharing
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Cisco has joined the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-driven effort to develop open source servers and switches, 16 months after criticizing it. At that time, Cisco CEO John Chambers said OCP has “weaknesses” that Cisco can exploit.
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This past March, hundreds of protestors stormed Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, in opposition to a pending trade deal with China. Dubbed the Sunflower Movement protests, students occupied the legislature for 17 days to demand line-by-line review of what was perceived to be a cloaked attack on Taiwan’s independence from an ever-growing China. During the protests, organizers brought in food for the occupiers, mobilized 100,000 person strong rallies, and kept the public at-large informed. This impressive act of online and in-person organizing was co-lead by an online community called g0v.
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Open Hardware
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Smaller than a credit card, BITalino is a low-cost hardware and open source software toolkit, aligned with the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement. It enables anyone to create quirky and serious projects alike for wearable health tracking devices. The base kit includes sensors to measure your muscles, heart, nervous system, motion, and ambient light—and it includes a microcontroller, Bluetooth, power management module, and all the accessories needed to start working.
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Programming
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Yes, it’s true – the Internet Archive, stalwart home of the Wayback Machine, now has a special section for the video games of yesteryear, in the Internet Arcade. There are 902 titles available, according to the site, running on a specialized Java emulator known as JSMAME. While not all of them are working quite right yet, there’s already an impressive selection available for you to play right in your browser window. Here are some of the highlights.
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Health/Nutrition
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The violence drew much of its initial strength from the revelation that the CIA had used a fake Hepatitis vaccination campaign in March and April 2011 in its hunt for Osama bin Laden. The operation was widely blamed among Pakistani public health workers for fueling the violence and decreasing trust in vaccinators. As Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, a vaccine specialist at Aga Khan University in Karachi, told the New York Times in July 2012: “There could hardly have been a more stupid venture, and there was bound to be a backlash, especially for polio.”
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Although it has a timely theme and good performances from an estimable cast, much of the media would prefer that you ignore “Kill the Messenger.”
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing war crimes during its campaign in Gaza.
A report released by the group on Wednesday says Israel displayed “callous indifference” launching attacks on family homes in the densely populated coastal strip and in some cases its conduct amounted to war crimes. It adds that war crimes were also committed by Palestinian militants.
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U.S. officials are still figuring out which moderate groups—among the insurgents who’ve been fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—it wants to bring into the battle against Islamic State. Saudi Arabia has offered to host a training camp for as many as 5,000 Syrian fighters, but the Pentagon hasn’t worked out how to transport them. Turkey has also agreed to let the U.S. train rebels on its soil. Fielding a force of two or three Syrian brigades could take two years and cost $1 billion to $2 billion annually, according to Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA Persian Gulf analyst who is at the Brookings Institution.
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As a result, Brzezinski appeared to have taken the 1977 CIA memo quite seriously and so transformed Afghanistan into a perpetual battlefield in order to safeguard America’s hold over the Persian Gulf (the main transport route for oil). The US concern for the free flow of oil led to its support for the Mujahedeen who became the Taliban. And so the West’s quest for hydrocarbon advantage condemned the country to a state of unending civil war.
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Since June 2004, the United States has conducted over 400 drone airstrikes in Pakistan, with 350 of them during the Obama administration, according to a Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) report released this October.
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The Republicans took control of the Senate in Tuesday’s elections, but much more important than which party took control is the nature of the incoming Senators from the new ruling party.
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NATO is a US-led killing machine. Operating globally. Prioritizing war. Deploring peace.
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Fawzi al Odah, 37, was held for nearly 13 years at Guantanamo, starting off in the crude outdoor prison of barbed wire and chain-linked fences called Camp X-Ray. He was never charged with a crime.
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The son of a blacksmith, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born on October 28, 1956, in Garmsar, near Tehran, and holds a PhD in traffic and transport from Tehran’s University of Science and Technology, where he was a lecturer. He was not well-known when he was appointed mayor of Tehran in 2003. During his tenure, he reduced social freedoms and curtailed many of the reforms introduced by more moderate figures who ran the city before him.
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Cockburn further notes that, after lying to fabricate the pretext for aggression, the Western governments and media outlets have fallen mysteriously silent on Libya as the country has spiraled into oblivion. The West thus again all but insists we notice that humanitarian crises play no role in drawing their attention, and that they only trumpet – or invent – human rights violations to cover Western aggression, which is carried out, Cockburn notes, “always in the interests of the country intervening.”
The West immediately lost its feigned concern over the “human rights” violations it exaggerated or simply made up regarding Libya because they were never of concern to begin with, and the West made things much worse: the illegal US-led attack instantly killed or led to the deaths of up to hundreds of thousands.
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Phil Schmitt spent two tours of duty in Vietnam loading 750-pound bombs into Air Force planes in bases at hellholes such as Da Nang and Phu Cat.
Most of the planes came back to be reloaded. The bombs, of course, didn’t.
“I loaded thousands and thousands of tons of bombs,” the 67-year-old Modesto resident said. “They went somewhere.”
But it wasn’t until the brass reassigned him to debrief the pilots after their bombing runs that he saw the real effects.
“Now I’m looking at films of the bombs exploding,” Schmitt said. “Villages being hit. Seeing bodies on the ground. Children. The quality of those films was very good.”
Collateral damage, long before anyone coined the term. Like so many others, he kept what he saw to himself, returning stateside when his hitch ended in 1970.
“Later, it comes into play,” Schmitt said. “I turned to both heavy drinking and burying myself in my work. I didn’t socialize. I was isolated. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t relate well with people outside of the military.”
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The Republican victory in the 2014 midterms is less than 24 hours old. But already, the hawkish wing of the GOP is planning an ambitious battle plan to revamp American foreign policy: everything from arming Ukraine’s military to reviewing the ISIS war to investigating the U.S. intelligence community’s role in warming relations with Iran.
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You could call it the neoconservatives’ revenge or the year of the hawks. But it has produced an interesting moment in Washington, where even the dovish side of the Republican Party now acknowledges the midterms were a win for their party’s American exceptionalists.
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Finance
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Pepsi, IKEA, AIG, Coach, Deutsche Bank, Abbott Laboratories and nearly 340 other companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg that allowed many of them to slash their global tax bills.
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In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
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Governor Brown spoke last week lobbying for Proposition 1 at Stanford University on October 23rd, at a conference organized by the Stanford Wood’s Institute, whose co-director is Stanford Hoover Institute member Barton Thompson. The Stanford Hoover Institute and Bechtel (the multi-billion dollar construction company), through the funding of studies taught at Stanford, appear to be promoting the DTP and its probable use as a source of water for fracking in the possible 15 Billion barrel Monterey Shale Formation spread across central and southern California.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One thing that I’ve learned from my four-plus decades in journalism is that many people only like reporting that reinforces what they already believe. Facts that go off in a different direction can make them angry – and they are usually not hesitant to express their anger.
For instance, in the 1980s, when I was covering the Nicaraguan Contra rebels for the Associated Press, many readers of AP copy, including some of my editors, shared Ronald Reagan’s enthusiasm for these “freedom fighters” whom Reagan likened to America’s Founding Fathers.
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Amazon’s CEO now owns the paper of record in the nation’s capital
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Censorship
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Almost 20 percent of world population is effected by Internet Censorship. In countries like North Korea less than 5% of total population have internet access and even that is heavily monitored and restricted. Internet censorship isn’t limited to oppressive regimes. For example, it is common practice for educational institutions all over the world to implement filtering of content deemed objectionable.
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Tor, after all, doesn’t just let users hide their identities from the sites they visit, anonymously buying drugs on the Silk Road or uploading leaked documents to news sites through the leak platform SecureDrop. It’s also designed to circumvent censorship and surveillance that occurs much closer to the user’s own connection, such as in repressive regimes like Iran or China. And since Facebook uses SSL encryption, no surveillance system watching either Facebook’s connection or the user’s local traffic should be able to match up a user’s identity with their Facebook activity.
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Linux Australia, the umbrella group for Linux user groups in the country, has imposed a censorship regime on its mailing list, with regulations that run to nearly 1000 words to govern them.
The stated aim of the new policy, which took effect on October 22, “is to foster open dialogue and discussion on relevant forums, while providing a safe space free from undesired behaviours such as personal attack and ‘flaming’,” according to a post by the LA secretary Kathy Reid.
In sharp contrast to the avowed open nature of the group, the policy was never put up for discussion on the LA general mailing list. The policy was developed by the office-bearers and announced as being in effect.
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Privacy
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Web giants such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp have become “command-and-control networks… for terrorists and criminals”, GCHQ’s new head has said.
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Our question this fortnight is: If the head of GCHQ is upset, does this mean we’re winning back our privacy? Is this a genuine plea for us to give up our digital rights, or is it just crocodile tears from someone who can still trace every click we make and message we send?
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If Hillary Clinton has a position on the government’s domestic spying, she’s doing a good job of hiding it.
More than a year after Edward Snowden’s leaks, the former secretary of State has yet to offer a meaningful assessment of the National Security Agency’s mass-surveillance programs. She’s had plenty of chances, but in interviews, speeches, and even her new book, Clinton has repeatedly ducked the issue with vagaries and clichés.
The possible 2016 candidate rarely discusses NSA spying unprompted. And when she does, her remarks are often couched in opaque platitudes about the need to balance privacy and national security concerns.
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Earlier this year, we noted that absolutely-running-for-President-while-pretending-to-think-about-it Hillary Clinton gave a stupid and vague non-answer answer to her position on government surveillance. It was the perfect politician’s answer, refusing to really take a position that could be held against her at some point in the future. Except, on important issues, refusing to answer sometimes isn’t an answer, and this is a perfect case of that. The leading contenders for the Republican nomination appear to have all made statements one way or the other, while Hillary has done everything possible not to take a position on the matter.
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The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer alerts us to a district court ruling in NY that effectively says that by merely agreeing to AOL’s terms of service, you’ve waived your 4th Amendment rights. The case is the United States v. Frank DiTomasso, where DiTomasso is accused of producing child porn — with most of the evidence used against him coming from AOL. DiTomasso argues that it was obtained via an unconstitutional search in violation of the 4th Amendment, but judge Shira Scheindlin rejects that, by basically saying that AOL’s terms of service make you effectively waive any 4th Amendment right you might have in any such information.
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It will help you avoid traffic jams as you travel from work to that hot new spot you’ve been dying to try out, tell you on the way about the bar’s half-price coupons and let you check your home video monitors while knocking back a few to see if your cat is clawing the couch again.
But it also might alert your insurer if your car is weaving when you head home and report your frequent drinking to your boss.
“It” is the Internet of Things, which promises to transform daily life, making it easier to work, travel, shop and stay healthy. Thanks to billions of connected devices – from smart toothbrushes and thermostats to commercial drones and robotic companions for the elderly – it also will end up gathering vast amounts of data that could provide insights about our sexual habits, religious beliefs, political leanings and other highly personal aspects of our lives. That creates a potentially enormous threat to our privacy – even within the sanctuary of our homes.
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The looming Republican takeover of the Senate could boost the efforts of civil libertarians and tech companies hoping to rein the National Security Agency this year.
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With confirmation that American spies are working in New Zealand, by a former head of the US National Security Agency last night, there is confirmation that they are based here, says New Zealand First.
“This proves whistle-blower Edward Snowden right again,” says New Zealand First Leader Rt Hon Winston Peters. “Mr Snowden said, while he was in New Zealand, that there were NSA facilities here, and I confirmed that I knew the location of one base.
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The ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit over documents related to the NSA’s activities under Executive Order 12333 has knocked a few more pages out the agency’s tightly-closed fist, most of which are related to its signals intelligence programs. Included in the released documents is an 89-page Inspector General’s report on the investigation of accusations made back in 2009 by David Murfee Faulk, who alleged that NSA linguists were listening in on the phone calls of military personnel, journalists and aid workers and sharing those containing “pillow talk” with other analysts.
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Well, we have that report but we can’t actually read most of it. There’s hardly anything left but the IG clearing the NSA of the specific misconduct alleged by two NSA linguists. The IG memo lists other non-compliance issues like the dissemination of raw US persons SIGINT, as well as violations of reporting procedures and retention guidelines, but the specifics of the IG’s findings remain hidden. I would imagine a legal challenge to the massive redactions in the Inspector General’s report will be forthcoming. There’s more self-interest than security apparent in the NSA’s very selective exposures, making this exculpatory information highly conspicuous in its inclusion.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) is only holding back a teeny, tiny number of code secrets, with director Admiral Mike Rogers promising the world the spook collective shares ‘most’ of the vulnerabilities it finds.
The agency head made the remarks on his second visit to Silicon Valley since his appointment in April this year.
Admiral Rogers told students delegates that US President Barack Obama asked the agency that it should share more of its vulnerabilities with the public.
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There are times that I wonder if former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker is just trolling with his various comments, because they’re so frequently out of touch with reality, even though he’s clearly an intelligent guy. His latest is to join in with the misguided attacks on Apple and Google making mobile encryption the default on iOS and Android devices, with an especially bizarre argument: protecting the privacy of your users is bad for business. Oh really?
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On Tuesday at Web Summit in Dublin, former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said that expanded encryption efforts by tech companies like Apple and Google do more to harm U.S. intelligence than they do to defend against wrongful and excessive surveillance worldwide.
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The former top lawyer to the NSA told an audience in Ireland this week that mobile phone maker Blackberry can blame a major drop in sales during the last few years on its offering of a secure product that can’t be cracked.
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More interesting, though, is the possibility of emerging bipartisan coalitions on sentencing and prison reform and on reform of the National Security Agency. Both are issues that have support from liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans. Neither is so hot-button that the radio talk show/blogger wind machine on the right would go ballistic at the prospect of bills being signed by the president. There are senators on both sides of the aisle — from Al Franken and Ron Wyden to Rand Paul and Mike Lee — who could work together on both these issues.
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Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff doesn’t approve of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance techniques. She’s making that much clear by overseeing the construction of a $185 million overseas fiber-optic cable which will stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Fortaleza, Brazil to Lisbon, Portugal.
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Facebook revealed some startling numbers for those who are in favor of Internet freedom, and privacy on the Internet. At least when the prying eyes are the government or government agencies. The company revealed that requests for user data of Facebook users increased by 25% and global requests to restrict content rose by 20%.
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The Government has been forced to release secret policies which show that GCHQ and MI5 have for years advised staff that they may “target the communications of lawyers,” and use legally privileged material “just like any other item of intelligence.”
The disclosure comes in response to a case brought in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) by the al Saadi and Belhadj families, who were subjected to rendition and torture in a joint CIA-MI6 operation. Both families – assisted by legal charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day – have brought litigation about the kidnappings. The families allege that, by intercepting their privileged communications with Reprieve and Leigh Day, the Government has infringed their right to a fair trial.
Legal privilege is a central principle of British law, which protects confidential communication between a lawyer and their client. If the Government is able to access such communications, it hands itself an unfair advantage in court.
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Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director at the forefront of trying to dismantle the National Security Agency’s domestic spying apparatus long before Edward Snowden became a household name, has been named the digital rights group’s executive director.
Cohn’s elevation, effective in April, is part of a major management overhaul to the San Francisco-based group whose budget has blossomed from $1 million annually in 1999 to about $9 million this year, the group announced Wednesday. Cohn, who has been litigating the constitutionality of the NSA’s electronic eavesdropping since 2006, succeeds Shari Steele, the EFF’s top executive the past 14 years.
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It is not terrorists who threaten that future of the internet, but our intelligence and security services
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GCHQ infiltrates all the communications in and out of the British Isles by tapping transatlantic cables. We discovered last week it has warrantless access to NSA databases, which include the data of UK citizens. GCHQ has done all this in the face of clear parliamentary opposition and in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
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Secure communication is something we all crave online, particularly after Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations increased public interest in privacy and security. With dozens of messaging tools to choose from, many claiming to be ultra-secure, it can be difficult to know which one to choose and which one to trust. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published its Secure Messaging Scorecard which rates a number of apps and services according to the level of security they offer.
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Researchers warn that web sites and apps communicating via WebRTC may have broader access to computer microphones and cameras than users realise.
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You already know that gobs of data about you are strewn across the Internet. The scary part is when they put it all together
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US film director, screenwriter and producer Oliver Stone told RIA Novosti he had met with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in Russia to discuss a new film about the whistleblower.
“I’ve met him [Snowden],” the film director said in an interview, when asked about the meeting to discuss Stone’s scenario for a new film about Snowden.
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The legacies of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning will be enshrined in bronze by a sculptor who is offering a fourth empty chair alongside the trio to anyone who has the courage to side with them, stand up and change things.
At least, that’s the plan for Italian sculptor Davide Dormino, who is looking to build life-size bronze statues of the three individuals. In a new Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that just recently went live, Dormino and project creator Vaughan Smith are asking for 100,000 pounds, or roughly $159,000, to construct these “monuments to courage.”
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Civil Rights
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Minimum wage and paid sick day measures have been gaining momentum in the past year — but keep an eye out for bills promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) designed to crush that momentum and limit local control.
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As you’ve probably heard, the Republicans decisively took control over Congress in the election on Tuesday, and are now strategizing on exactly what plan they’ll choose to try not to mess things up too badly by the time the 2016 elections come around.
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Da’von Shaw, a Bedford, Ohio high school student, brought apples and craisins to school for a “healthy eating” presentation he was giving to his speech class.
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Arnold Abbott handed out four plates of food to homeless people in a South Florida park. Then police stopped the 90-year-old from serving up another bite.
“An officer said, ‘Drop that plate right now — like I had a weapon,’” Abbott said.
Abbott and two pastors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were charged for feeding the homeless in public on Sunday, the city’s first crackdowns under a new ordinance banning public food sharing, CNN affiliate WPLG reported.
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Tuesday’s Republican takeover of the Senate effectively ruined any chance of Congressional oversight of the CIA. Senator Mark Udall, who earned a score of 100 percent from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), lost his seat in Colorado. And Senator Richard Burr, with an ACLU score of 0 percent, is set to become Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), the group tasked with holding the CIA and the NSA accountable.
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Civil liberty advocates were upset on election night when Colorado Sen. Mark Udall lost to Republican Cory Gardner, but no one in the community was ready to announce changes to the NSA’s bulk-data collection program dead.
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The outgoing Senator and champion of civil liberties has one last chance to read the truth about American atrocities out loud, for the world to see – before it’s too late
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He wasn’t vocal about promoting his work on civil liberties and intelligence. But over time, astute national security wonks learned to watch him.
His statements sometimes seemed abstract, but were often signposts pointing to something deeper. He wrote letters, he asked questions and he left hints on the public record signaling major intelligence community abuses. Many times, it was his clues that helped shake those stories loose.
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Former CIA officer Will Hurd on Tuesday became perhaps the first person to jump from the cybersecurity industry to Congress.
An African-American Republican, Hurd edged out incumbent Pete Gallego (D) in Texas’ 23rd district, running mostly on his career as an undercover CIA operative, but also touting his current job as senior adviser at cybersecurity vendor FusionX.
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A U.S. military medical board found he suffers Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. Two doctors recommended the video calls with family to help him cope with it. One testified at court that he had been subjected to “physical, psychological and sexual torture.”
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Last Thursday, British judges ruled that victims of a joint MI6-CIA ‘rendition’ operation should have their day in court. When I reflect on that judgment, the first things I see in my mind’s eye are two rooms.
One is white, stark, temporary, windowless. Fluorescent lights hang from its ceiling. The room is empty save for a woman, crying. She is chained to the wall and obviously pregnant. The woman in the white room comes from Morocco but has married a opponent of Col. Gaddafi, and for that reason is about to be plunged into terrors of which she knows nothing.
CIA agents will come to take her from this room – their room. They will tape her to a stretcher and fly her to Libya. They will manhandle and degrade her to an extent that she will wonder, at one point, whether she has lost her child. She won’t, quite: but her baby, born shortly afterwards, will weigh just four pounds.
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Everyone knows by now about U.S. backing for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s – Exhibit A for those shaking their heads at Washington’s foreign policy blunders in the Muslim world. Rather less widely known, at least until this book was written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson, was how that support had precedents at the start of the Cold War in post-World War II Europe, when U.S. and German intelligence jostled for influence over various Muslim groups as anti-communist instruments to undermine the USSR. With a cast including Nazis, the CIA, the German intelligence agency, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a host of flamboyant individual characters, the subject matter certainly makes for a spectacular title. But although Johnson’s deeply researched book often yields surprises, it is generally less sensational than its blurb might suggest. Nevertheless, it does provide lessons that remain valid about the perils of trying to co-opt hard-line Muslim groups to pursue broader Western policy goals.
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Iranian leaders are quietly expressing fear about the Republican takeover of Congress Tuesday night, with many conveying concerns that Tehran has lost a key bloc of U.S. Democrats who wanted to roll back economic sanctions and hand Iran a favorable nuclear deal, according to an internal CIA analysis and Farsi language reports.
Fears about the Republican takeover of Congress have plagued Iranian leaders for weeks, according to the CIA analysis obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that outlines internal commotion in Iran over the shifting political tides in the United States.
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Republicans have captured control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in eight years, picking up at least seven seats in the November 4 congressional elections.
The shift means that Republicans will control the three top Senate committees dealing with U.S. foreign policy and national security: foreign relations, armed services, and intelligence.
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A court which usually sits in secret will tomorrow (6 November) consider whether the Government should be forced to release more information regarding its surveillance of legally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients.
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If you read the blog of Carlos Miller, you’re probably aware of dozens of incidents in which police officers have illegally confiscated citizen cellphones and deleted incriminating videos, which is not only an act of destroying evidence of possible wrongdoing but is also the unlawful destruction of someone else’s property. They rarely, if ever, face any legal consequences. (These are, of course, local infractions, not federal. But still.)
[...]
Point is, when a federal law enforcement agency wants to charge you with something, it can probably find a way to do it. If you make it more difficult for it to do so by destroying evidence, intentionally or not, the agency will get you for that, too, or at least instead. Yet somehow when it comes to finding a way to charge federal officials and law enforcement officers who destroy evidence, those vague laws seem to get pretty specific, and broad laws seem to narrow. (Currently, Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t apply to government agencies, though as noted, other laws do.)
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Okay world, that ritualistic, vacuous exercise in futile optimism, known as an “election” in America, is over, and the idiots again have spoken.
But how could they not? After all, the entire concept of “democracy” in America’s corrupt, two-party system is nothing more than a farcical illusion, and the extent of this corruption has only been magnified by the Koch brothers controlled majority on the United States Supreme Court, who, in recent rulings, gave billionaires and corporations unbridled power to buy politicians of their choice.
In previous Pravda.Ru articles, I have argued that history is nothing more than a pendulum incessantly swinging back and forth between overreaction and regret, and the recent elections in America have vividly confirmed this thesis.
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As a constitutional scholar, he had promised to restore respect for the law to the presidency, and instead has made end runs around every law imaginable, refusing to prosecute the war criminals of the Bush/Cheney presidency, the CIA, and the military, refusing to prosecute the FBI for violating the Patriot Act, refusing to prosecute the bankers whose crimes brought the US and the global economy to a grinding halt and left the US crippled going on six years now.
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When an event such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri gets media attention, it gets that attention all over the world.
People from London to Sydney are given a media’s perspective on what happens, and they are allowed to make their own judgments. But now the parents of Michael Brown have decided that the international media stage is not enough. They are taking their case to the United Nations.
Michael Brown’s mother and father, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown, Sr., are using a website called FergusontoGeneva.org to raise funds to fly to Geneva and speak before the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture.
African American writer Allen B. West asks why this kind of move is even necessary and wonders what the Brown family hopes to accomplish. It is a question that resonates with the families of police officers who have watched their loved ones get gunned down by street criminals, but with no response from the American people.
The choice to speak before the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture is probably not a random decision. The United Nations has recently turned up the heat on President Obama to release the report on CIA torture, a document relating to the treatment of prisoners taken since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Västervik prison is as ugly as its surroundings are beautiful. Located a stone’s throw from the water in Gertrudsvik, a few hours drive south of Stockholm, its pale concrete walls rise high above the summer homes and wooden jetties dotting the coastline. Tall steel fences encircle the building, topped with heavy loops of razor-sharp barbed wire.
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A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about the decision by German publishers to grant Google a “free license” to post snippets — a humiliating climbdown from their earlier position that Google should pay for the privilege of sending them traffic.
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It was bad enough when the Australian government announced that it was joining the growing club of countries that would be retaining huge swathes of its citizens’ metadata. But now people are beginning to realize that once that store of metadata exists it not only can, but probably will, be used for many other purposes that have nothing to do with the avowed aim of fighting terrorism.
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Worried that your metadata could be used to prosecute you in a piracy case? You should be: the Australian Federal Police Commissioner thinks that metadata could be very helpful to prosecute pirates. Updated with comments from Attorney General George Brandis.
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Following his arrest in Thailand on Monday, local authorities are already preparing Fredrik Neij’s deportation from the country. The Pirate Bay founder is currently en route to the Thai capital Bangkok where he will be met by Swedish police who will escort him back to Scandinavia. A 10 month prison sentence awaits.
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Mr Carl Malamud, on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, along with 7 others including Mr Sam Pitroda, Dr Sushant Sinha, Prof Dhrubajyoti Sen, Prof T.I.Eldho, Mr Srinivas Kodali, Dr Vinton G. Cerf and myself, submitted the petition to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution petitioning for the free availability of Indian Standards to the public. Given that the Standards appear to be Edicts of the Government, and that tremendous public benefit that would accrue by such free availability of Standards, and along with the facts that BIS has already digitized all the Standards, and Public.Resource.Org has already put together the necessary online architecture and value-add to facilitate free distribution of these Standards, the petition asks that the ministry helps make these Standards available and accessible to the public, or in the alternative, to modify its current copyright policy so as to allow for this free availability and accessibility of these Standards.
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Techdirt has been covering for some time Carl Malamud’s project to open source the “operating system of society” by placing digital versions of US laws, codes and regulations on the site Public Resource. But of course, the logic of allowing the public to be able to read all the laws and regulations that govern them applies outside the US just as much. And so it’s perhaps no surprise that Malamud has joined with other campaigners (including Vint Cerf) in petitioning the Indian government to allow that country’s standards to be made freely available to the public in the same way.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed six exemption requests with the U.S. Copyright Office today, part of the elaborate, every-three-year process to right the wrongs put in place by the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). EFF’s requests received crucial assistance from the Organization for Transformative Works, the NYU Technology Law & Policy Clinic, attorney Marcia Hofmann, and former EFF intern Kendra Albert.
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As we’ve noted more than a few times, we live in an era where the products you think you own can be disabled, crippled or held hostage on a whim. That’s been particularly apparent when it comes to video game consoles and software, with an increasing array of titles relying on server connectivity not only for multi-player content, but also for DRM authentication in order to play single player titles. The former was an issue earlier this year when Nintendo announced that the company would be killing online functionality for a wide variety of Wii and DS titles, some of which were only a year or two old. The latter was an issue with Blizzard’s Diablo 3, EA’s latest incarnation of SimCity, and a growing number of other games.
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A new licensing scheme launched today could give wider access to at least 91 million culturally valuable creative works.
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Orphan works, that huge collection of older creations which are out of circulation and have no obvious owners, are more rightly called “hostage works,” since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws. Even when the issue is recognized by society, lobbyists hold so much sway over the political process that legislation crafted to “solve” the orphan works problem is often worse than useless.
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11.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kano, a small British start up with strong Israeli ties, set out to make the inside workings of a modern computer accessible to children again. The idea behind the project is get kids coding and hacking themselves, and was inspired by one of the founders’ seven-year-old cousin who wanted to build a computer and wondered if it could be made as easy as playing with Lego.
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Applications
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Adobe has just released version 1.0 of Brackets, its free open-source text editor that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for coding HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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Games
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Stunt Rally, a free, beautiful 3D rally game for Linux based on VDrift and OGRE, has reached version 2.5, bringing new game features and a few bug fixes.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Another month, another digiKam Recipes update. This version features the updated and expanded Edit Photos with the Levels and Curves Adjustment Tools recipe which now covers the powerful curves tool.
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In terms of user demographic, we’re almost certain to see one thing happening with the new Plasma 5 UI, as distros start to ship it by default, this is what these new users are going to see. Not everybody in this group of users is interested in how cool the technology stack lines up, they just want to get their work done and certainly not feel impeded in their daily workflows. This is the target group which we’ve been focusing our work on in months since summer, since the release of Plasma 5.0. Wider group of users sounds pretty abstract, so let’s take some numbers: While Plasma 5 is run by a group of people already, the number of users who get it via Linux distributions is much larger than the group of early adopters. This means by the end of next year, Plasma 5 will be in the hands of millions of users, probably around 10 million, and increasing. (This is interpolated from an estimation of Plasma users in the tens of millions, with the technology adaption lifecycle taken as base.)
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New Releases
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Pisi Linux has continued its activities after 1.0 and we reached our second stable version 1.1. This version resulting from intensive studies; strong, stable, comfortable to use, safe and so fast. The strength of the structure to prevent damage to your system uses hardware safely to the end. Also in this release, along with many innovations were offered to us.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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The top stories today were the releases of openSUSE 13.2 and Fedora 21 Beta. WRAL looks at Red Hat at 20 and Matt Hartley guides folks to Ubuntu laptops. The openSUSE Tumbleweed/Factory merger is complete and a migration guide has been posted. Other tidbits include OpenBSD replacing OpenSSL with LibreSSL and The Register joking about a character on The Code named Sgt L. Torvalds.
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Slackware Family
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Salix Live, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the Xfce desktop environment, has been promoted to version 14.1 and is now stable.
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Red Hat Family
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This tutorial shows how you can set up CentOS 7 desktop. The CentOS 7 have high quality of desktop environment which is fully suited for day to day business needs of a corporate culture. I will also show some of the specific features from Thunderbird which makes the day to day business use easier.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new Ubuntu Touch RTM version has been released and the developers have made a number of important fixes, not to mention all the improvements that have been made to the backend.
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“Ubuntu MATE is a stable, easy-to-use operating system with a configurable desktop environment. Ideal for those who want the most out of their desktops, laptops and netbooks and prefer a traditional desktop metaphor. With modest hardware requirements it is suitable for modern workstations and older hardware alike.” About ubuntu MATE
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Flavours and Variants
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If you haven’t used Trisquel before then be sure to read the Trisquel FAQ. There’s also a Trisquel discussion forum if you need assistance, and a Trisquel subreddit on Reddit if you want to connect with fellow Trisquel users there.
You can download Trisquel right now in 32-bit or 64-bit versions. You can also choose between the main version, which uses GNOME as the desktop, and a lighter version called Trisquel Mini that uses LXDE instead of GNOME. There’s even a smaller version for kids called Trisquel Sugar Toast.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Tizen based Samsung Gear S was launched in India a few weeks ago for 29,500 Rs, and has now gone on pre-order in via the Samsung online eStore, with a reservation / Booking fee of Rs. 1,000 $16 USD.
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Android
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Google’s Nexus 9 tablet has been out for a little while and the reviews have started to come in. As you might imagine, the Nexus 9 is an important release for Google since it comes with Android 5.0 and is poised to go head to head with Apple’s iPad Air 2. So how well does the Nexus 9 match up against the iPad Air 2? Read on and find out if Google has finally created an iPad-killer.
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Google has had a really good thing going with the Nexus 7 these past two years. With its 7-inch display, it was the tablet equivalent of a paperback book: effortless to tote around, and cheap enough ($200 for the first-gen; $230 for last year’s model) to be a no-brainer purchase. It was perfect for e-books, games, email, video, websites and social feeds. With its great display, ample power and pleasing portability, it felt like it was worth more than its price tag.
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Let’s face it: the masses don’t care about IT; at least not in the way that we do. This has, is, and presumably always will be, a problem that OEMs, software developers, and marketing firms have learned to accept. Put simply, the world-at-large just doesn’t care about operating systems, CPU cores, or firmware updates.
Even new types of products such as bendable tablets and smartphones won’t appeal to many at first, and one need only look at the general reaction to current glimpses of the future to understand the resistance.
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Google’s Android stole share from all of its major mobile OS rivals over the past year to achieve a whopping smartphone market dominance of roughly 84 percent in the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Strategy Analytics report.
Apple’s iOS, which weighed in with about 12 percent, lost more than a point of share to Android since the same quarter a year ago as a result of its limited presence at the lower end of the smartphone market, the report found.
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Pierre Schweitzer of ReactOS shared, “ReactOS now supports reading files from NTFS volume. This was a long awaited feature people were asking for.” A new ReactOS ISO re-spin is now available containing this support.
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Open source software specialist Obsidian Systems has been listed as an official supporter of the Open Source Software for South Africa (OSSSA) organisation, and has joined a growing network of supporters and collaborators championing the value of OS in trade, industry and government.
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With the popularization of knowledge on the online virtual money, more and more virtual money are produced. Since the Bitcoin made the Web money in fashion and gained global attention, the virtual money after Bitcoin were called “Copycat Coins”. While these virtual money use different names merely to differentiate with Bitcoin, like the different names of currencies in the real world, such as the US dollar, the Euro, etc.
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The ONOS initiative joins other open-source efforts like OpenDaylight and ONF in trying to accelerate adoption of SDN and NFV.
A nonprofit group led by some of the earliest developers of software-defined networking next month will make available an open operating system for the industry, the latest effort to bring the open-source model into the SDN world.
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Events
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The face of web development has changed. No longer does the term dredge up images of a lonely hacker in a basement—nowadays, everyone from business executives to schoolchildren enjoy learning how to code. This is, in part, thanks to the development of increasingly easier to use boilerplate tools. The goal of these tools is to enable coders to build rapid Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in an organized and reliable, yet creative, fashion.
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In the GitHub repository, the user will find all the necessary information to begin developing their own fast MVP: installation files, examples, templates, file an issue feature, contributors, and license type. Eskimo: You’ll want to get snowed in.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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It’s not clear what Google is doing with the version numbers for Chrome, but for now it looks like 40.x is not really a problem. The devs are still making small improvements to the application and each new edition brings a few new features.
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SaaS/Big Data
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At the OpenStack Summit in Paris, the OpenStack Foundation’s Mark Collier discusses the open-source cloud effort versus Amazon and why one cloud doesn’t fit all needs.
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A panel of investors at the OpenStack Summit in Paris explain what they’re looking for and why security is ripe for investment.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Presentation videos from GNU Tools Cauldron 2014 have now been posted online. The conference, which this year was held from July 18 – 20, 2014 in Cambridge, England at the University of Cambridge, featured nearly thirty presentations on tools in the GNU toolchain including GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, and GDB, the GNU Project Debugger. Developers shared tutorials and insights in addition to discussing development plans for various projects within the GNU toolchain.
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There’s a new version of LibreJS.
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Openness/Sharing
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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While the United States remains tightly caught in the grip of mid-term madness, and will continue to writhe and lash about until 8 November 2016, the United Kingdom is looking beyond short-term, cheap, and policy-free political fodder. It has taken a stab at addressing longer-term ethical, legal, social, political and economic issues – such as the consequences raised by use of what the UK calls Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs) or drones.
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The latest batch of heavily redacted investigative files reveal that the bureau had grown increasingly concerned over Khan’s anti-American screeds posted to his blog and determined he was a serious threat.
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While recent attention has focused on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria, the United States has continued its covert bombardment of supposed militants in Yemen and Pakistan.
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Engineers in China have successfully developed a laser weapon able to shoot down low-flying, slow-moving drones, according to the country’s state media on Tuesday.
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New York’s Southern District Court — which has been hosting (along with the Second Circuit Appeals Court) the ACLU and New York Times’ long-running, concurrent FOIA lawsuits against the government over its drone killing memos — has reached a partial decision on some of the embattled documents.
The court’s decision was actually delivered on Sept. 30th, but its conclusion and order have spent the last month under seal while the government applied its redactions. An accompanying memo from the presiding judge [pdf link] notes that the court isn’t buying all the government’s redaction arguments.
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The parliamentary elections in Ukraine has been lavished with praise by Western politicians and the mainstream media as confirmation of the country’s turn towards democracy and a rejection of Putin’s evil Russian empire. What the media drones and corporate politicians won’t tell you is that these elections represent a disaster for the ordinary people of Ukraine.
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European security watchdog OSCE said numerous anti-aircraft rounds were fired at one of its drones monitoring a shaky truce in eastern Ukraine, and the United States blamed pro-Russian rebels for Sunday’s incident.
The unmanned aerial vehicle — deployed to help monitor the cease-fire between government forces and separatists — was not hit and it later landed safely, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, said Monday
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Nine drone strikes were recorded in October, the most strikes in a month since October 2011, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
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The US Navy has canceled visits to the Philippine port of Subic amid public anger over accusations that a US Marine killed a Filipino on the city’s outskirts, officials said Monday.
Foreign Department spokesman Charles Jose said the visits of three US ships to Subic this month had been canceled, while the head of the Subic freeport said nine such visits scheduled for this year had been called off.
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Thanks to Edward Snowden, there has been an enormous amount of news about the US intelligence community and the court – the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court (FISA) – that governs it. Following the stunning revelations that FISA approved the wiretapping of millions of US domestic phone calls, the court is now viewed as a ‘almost a parallel Supreme Court,’ whose decisions are made ‘with almost no public scrutiny.’
Despite New Zealand’s deep involvement in the Five Eyes network, and the revelations that a surveillance warrant was held on New Zealander Daryl Jones who was later killed in a US drone strike in Yemen, there has been no discussion or examination of the role of the Commissioner of Warrants who issues surveillance warrants to the GCSB and NZSIS. The decisions of that office remain entirely opaque, creating a body of law that is not subject to challenge in any public forum.
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There was the anthrax letters shell game, Blackwater, Halliburton and pallets of money that disappeared much like Iraqi treasure. The greed and slaughter continued with Obama, presidential ordered secret assassinations, the NSA, telecoms, banks and other corporations conspiring against and committing crimes against US Citizens and the Militarization of the every day cop.
But it is the drone strike that makes Americans the most hated people and nation on Earth. It is a cowardly act that disregards whatever rules of war that ever existed in the however misguided “honor” of men. These bombs not only have killed children, teenagers, mothers, fathers grandparents, neighbors and entire wedding parties; they have created a level of anxiety and fear across vast regions. Mentally they are a torture of mass destruction. The pictures, eye witness accounts and journalist verifications on the ground are infinitely more believable than ANY White House in my lifetime.
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The translated words of Israeli commanders and Israeli pilots from tapes can be heard, numerous times, as confirming the identity of the Liberty as “American.” The tapes include a timeline in the background which fixes the times of transmissions, and establishes that confirmation was made before and during the attack. In 2004 the Jerusalem Post published a transcript of Israeli radio transmissions on that day, critical parts of which match the transmissions in the tape obtained by the film-maker, Richard Belfield.
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How do Wall Street, oil companies and the shadow government agencies like the CIA and NSA really shape the global political order?
That’s the question author Peter Dale Scott examines in his forthcoming book “The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy,” due out on Nov. 12. Scott, a professor emeritus of English at Berkeley and former Canadian diplomat, is considered the father of “deep politics”—the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected.
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President Putin’s recent Valdai Speech contained a striking phrase about the counter-productive nature of much of US foreign policy: “We sometimes get the impression that our colleagues and friends are constantly fighting the consequences of their own policies, throw all their effort into addressing the risks they themselves have created, and pay an ever-greater price.”
President Putin was referring to terrorism, but an equally valid example of the same point is the so-called “War on Drugs” that the US announced in 1971 and which it has been waging with no success ever since.
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The United States is the “world’s leading terrorist state,” based on its deadly, CIA-run operations in the likes of Nicaragua and Cuba, according to new op-ed by historian and social philosopher Noam Chomsky.
In a new piece posted at Truthout.org, Chomsky pointed to the Central Intelligence Agency’s classified review of its own efforts to arm insurgencies across the globe in its 67-year history. As RT previously reported, the CIA conducted the effectiveness analyses while the Obama administration contemplated arming rebels fighting against President Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria.
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In TruthOut, Chomsky described the Central Intelligence Agency’s classified review of its attempts to arm insurgencies across the world in its 67-year history. RT News reported that the CIA conducted the “effectiveness analyses” but the Obama government armed rebels fighting President Bashar Assad’s Syrian forces.
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Let’s imagine a world in which the military-industrial complex controlled by the 1%, so mired in dishonesty and responsible for so much suffering, is decisively overthrown. It shouldn’t take thirty years to topple it.
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Transparency Reporting
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Omidyar was an admirer of Obama’s right up to the moment the Snowden story broke, and many people who know him well, the types you might meet at CGI, struggle to explain his sudden turn toward confrontation. “He’s a very serious and public-spirited person,” says General Wesley Clark, who has been friendly with Omidyar since he raised money for his 2004 presidential campaign. Clark has publicly dismissed concerns about NSA surveillance and told me he couldn’t really explain why Omidyar was so agitated. Omidyar is mellow by nature; he lives in Hawaii and is a devotee of Buddhism. “He’s not this hard-core, radical maverick,” Greenwald says. “Back before this all happened, he just seemed like the normal, average, amicable billionaire.” Omidyar has communicated little about his motivations beyond a handful of abstruse public statements. He remains a remote and somewhat mysterious figure, even to his collaborators.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We’re approaching the end of an era for the polar bears of Canada’s Western Hudson Bay – or, in the more straightforward way of putting it, we’re approaching the end of the polar bears, period. Typically, as the weather turns cold and sea ice forms, the region’s bears migrate out onto the bay, where they spend the winter filling up on enough seals to last them through the ice-free summer months. But that sea ice has been tending to melt earlier and earlier each spring, and to form later and later each fall. This year, like every year, the bears are ready to get moving. But so far the Hudson Bay, which used to be traversable by as early as November 8, remains largely ice-free.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ABC-ERNST-2The right-wing Media Research Center released a study (10/22/14) slamming the evening newscasts for not giving the midterm election much airtime. It has a partisan interest here; the group wants more attention paid to the Republicans’ impending victories. ABC World News, it said, was notable for having nothing on the election over the study period.
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Rex Sinquefield, who has been described as a “new American oligarch,” has reported spending almost $9.5 million on Missouri state politics in 2014 alone, bringing Sinquefield’s total spending in the state to nearly $41 million since 2006.
“If you get involved at the local level with the route I described, you will be amazed at how much influence you can have,” Sinquefield told his business school alumni earlier this year.
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The truth about the CIA’s involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. In January 1950, when Orwell died at the age of 46, New Yorker Hunt had been part of the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Workshop and he had been sent to obtain the screen rights to Animal Farm from Orwell’s widow Sonia. Some people believe that Hunt exaggerated his own role in sealing the deal – he supposedly promised Mrs Orwell that he would arrange for her to meet her favourite star, Clark Gable – but he was certainly involved in getting the film off the ground.
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What is the point of a social network that doesn’t share your content with friends and followers? Oh, yeah, for profit, government spying, emotional experiments and now, political manipulation.
Since they went public, Facebook has been playing with their algorithms to prevent “viral” content from occurring naturally in favor of charging users to show content to their followers. This profit-seeking strategy destroyed the only thing that made Facebook useful. Now it seems to serve as little more than an oversized telephone or IM app. But underneath, in the shadows, it’s still so much more than that.
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Censorship
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We just wrote about famed pianist Dejan Lazic’s rather misguided attempt to make use of Europe’s new focus on “the right to be forgotten” to cajole the Washington Post into removing a 2010 review of one of his performances, written by Anne Midgette. The story has gotten lots of attention, and Lazic has posted a response on his website (as far as I can tell, there’s no way to permalink just to the response).
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The “gay propaganda” law caused outrage and protests in the West, particularly in the run-up to the Winter Olympics hosted by Mr Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in February.
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Privacy
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Do you ever get the feeling that some law enforcement agencies just do whatever the hell they want? In most areas, this is the exception rather than the rule. In Virginia, however, that ratio seems to be reversed. Last year, an ACLU FOIA request uncovered the Virginia State Police’s wholesale harvesting of license plates from political rallies.
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Many of us were excited, 11 months ago, when District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone metadata was unconstitutional. This was the first program revealed via the documents from Ed Snowden, and it involved the US using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, approved by the FISA Court with little explanation (until much later) to say that it’s okay to request all phone records from Verizon. What had been often mentioned as a brief aside, is the fact that the plaintiff in the case, Larry Klayman is a bit of a conspiracy-theorist nutjob.
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Cryptome highlight that the Windows FAQs on drive encryption says that a recovery key for your encrypted device is uploaded to your SkyDrive (now named OneDrive) account to make sure that you have a means of logging into your device should you forget your password. This would be a reasonable expectation as the encryption was passively turn on, however it goes on to remind us that Microsoft’s SkyDrive/OneDrive was a target/collaborator of the NSA’s PRISM program which means tha NSA have keys to decrypt your computer.
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Colorado Sen. Mark Udall lost his seat on Tuesday, the Associated Press is projecting. He lost a hard-fought race against Republican challenger Rep. Cory Gardner.
The candidates sparred over a variety of the issues, from Obamacare to birth control. But the biggest impact of Udall’s defeat could be on civil liberties.
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With Colorado Sen. Mark Udall’s defeat Tuesday night, the Senate will lose one of its most vocal, most active and most powerfully positioned advocates for dialing back the intelligence community’s surveillance powers.
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In reviewing a post-Snowden case Tuesday, an appeals court questioned whether the government’s bulk collection of phone records needs to be reined in.
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A case challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) metadata collection efforts against United States citizens made its way into an appellate court today, where lawyer and opponent of domestic spying Larry Klayman was grilled by a three-judge panel. At issue is the collection of metadata in a massive program run by the National Security Agency known as PRISM, which was first revealed to the public by Edward Snowden.
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Critics of the National Security Agency’s most embattled program harshly condemned the spying in a top appeals court on Tuesday.
Judges, however, seemed largely skeptical of their claims that the spy agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records was unconstitutional.
Instead, they seemed to express a desire to reverse a lower court ruling nearly one year ago that called the NSA program “almost Orwellian.”
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The December ruling that the NSA telephone surveillance program was unconstitutional looks to be in serious jeopardy, as the US Appellate Court challenge to the ruling has drawn a three-judge panel that seems extremely hostile to the idea of limiting federal surveillance powers.
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Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s remarks at an October campaign event, in which she said a new underwater data cable being built from Brazil to Portugal would be made by Brazilian companies to protect it from US “espionage,” were widely seen as a slam on the US National Security Agency’s spying tactics.
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House Republican Tom Cotton looks set to defeat Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor in Arkansas and take over his seat in the United States Senate. If this happens, it is a distinct possibility that Cotton will become one of the most vocal opponents of any efforts to reform surveillance and constrain the National Security Agency or any other government agency’s power.
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Privacy advocates and anti-surveillance activists have been taking a close look at the way that some vendors of so-called lawful intercept and surveillance software and hardware systems conduct their business and which customers and governments they sell their wares to. Now, some of those vendors–and the customers they work with–are mounting their own criticisms of the researchers and their tactics.
[...]
Hacking Team is an Italian company that develops and sells surveillance equipment and spyware to government clients.
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Earlier this month the NSA was forced to launch an internal review of the practice after Reuters published a story detailing how the agency allowed Patrick Dowd, the NSA’s chief technical officer, to work 20 hours per week for IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., a private cybersecurity firm founded by former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander. The company reportedly charges financial institutions up to $1 million per month for cybersecurity services based on technology patents Alexander developed while he was employed as NSA director. Under pressure, Alexander terminated the agreement with Dowd last week.
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I’ve long warned that no one is truly anonymous on the Internet. Tor guarantees anonymous downloads about as much as naming your hacking collective “Anonymous” guarantees you won’t be arrested. Those private snaps on your smartphone? If anyone cares to see them, they can be stolen and posted publicly. Repeat after me: When you use the Internet, anonymity is not a feature.
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If you think the two-factor authentication offered by Google and other cloud services will keep your account out of the hands of an attacker, think again. One developer found out this weekend the hard way; Google’s account protection scheme can be bypassed by going after something most people would consider an even harder target—the user’s cell phone account.
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A government proposal to change the rules for obtaining search warrants risks making all of us more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
The FBI wants to be able to infect computers with malware when it doesn’t know where exactly they’re located. The implications for computer security, and for constitutional limits on the government’s search powers, are drastic.
The Department of Justice is asking a judicial committee to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which generally permits magistrate judges to issue search warrants to the government only for searches within their judicial district. The government wants to lift the geographical limitation to allow it to conduct electronic surveillance of devices whose locations are unknown.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden sparked controversy when he advised consumers (twice) to “get rid of Dropbox” if they want to protect their privacy. Today, Drew Houston, CEO of the cloud storage startup, responded to the accusations. People can do more to encrypt their data, he admitted, but It’s “a trade-off between usability/convenience and security,” he said. “We offer people choice.”
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The National Union of Journalists has told parliament that police misuse of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to snoop on journalists and their sources is “systemic and institutionalised” and is doing “irreparable damage” to the industry.
Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ’s general secretary, told the home affairs select committee that police were routinely bypassing the need for judicial scrutiny to discover journalistic sources by using Ripa to go through phone records and other data.
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The data can be picked up by a mobile phone up to 23 feet away and then transmitted over Wi-Fi or a cellular network to an attacker’s command-and-control server. The victim’s own mobile phone can be used to receive and transmit the stolen data, or an attacker lurking outside an office or lab can use his own phone to pick up the transmission.
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A conservative gadfly lawyer who has made a career of skewering Democratic administrations is taking his battle against the National Security Agency’s telephone surveillance programme to a federal appeals court.
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As questions continue to be raised about the legality concerning the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance apparatus, the NSA’s ex spy chief is now coming under attack for ties he had to a tech company while in office.
A report published on Monday this week by Shane Harris at the Daily Beast revealed that Gen. Keith Alexander, the recently retired head of the NSA, bought and sold tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in a firm called Synchronoss Technologies Inc. while he ran the United States’ intelligence gathering agency.
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Snowden told The Guardian that when some NSA analysts intercept photos of a sexual nature, they cannot pass up the temptation to pass the images around. He witnessed this privacy invasion “numerous” times and called the occurrences “routine enough” to be considered “fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”
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Haugh is just as absolutist when it comes to ending foreign wars and bringing home troops from far-off outposts. Not only does he advocate stopping the current air strikes against ISIL and other extremist groups in Iraq and Syria, but he’s also quick to draw a connection between winding down wars and removing prohibitions on recreational drug use.
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The battle over encryption of consumer internet users’ data has pitched US technology companies against the US government itself, former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said on Tuesday.
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Civil Rights
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In a motion filed in US district court in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors say attorneys for the journalist James Risen have told them that, even if subpoenaed, Risen will refuse to provide any substantive testimony at the pending trial of the former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling.
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Federal prosecutors said Monday they have no deal in place with a New York Times reporter whose testimony they want as they prosecute a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information.
In a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, prosecutors say attorneys for journalist James Risen have told them that, even if subpoenaed, Risen will refuse to provide any substantive testimony at the pending trial of former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling.
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ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — Federal prosecutors said Monday they have no deal in place with a New York Times reporter whose testimony they want as they prosecute a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information about covert operations against Iran.
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Federal prosecutors say they have no deal in place with a New York Times reporter whose testimony they want as they prosecute a former CIA officer accused of leaking sensitive information.
In a motion filed Monday in federal court in Alexandria, prosecutors say attorneys for journalist James Risen have told them that, even if subpoenaed, Risen will refuse to provide any substantive testimony at the pending trial of former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling.
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Even the documented account by James Risen of the White House orchestrated plot in the wake of 9/11 to circumvent (indeed, ignore) legal restrictions on domestic wire-tapping has not crossed the threshold of public attention.
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President Bush signed the bill into law, but – this being George W Bush, who saw his office as above the law on issues from going to war to torturing during an endless war and even spying on his own citizens – he also issued an adjoining statement expressing his view that the statute is an unconstitutional encroachment on presidential power. The Obama administration has taken the same position, in reasserting the White House’s official neutrality as to which sovereign controls Jerusalem – and in resisting the power for Congress to keep the president’s power in check.
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The Central Intelligence Agency’s call to black out all pseudonyms from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture would be unprecedented – and represents an unacceptable effort to obscure key facts, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said last week.
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With Republicans taking control of the Senate, there’s a good chance the CIA won’t be held accountable for its crimes during the Bush era
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On Oct. 29, students led by Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES) and Progressive Students of Milwaukee (PSM) disrupted a CIA recruitment event held on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.
The CIA is a defender of U.S. corporate interests against democratic people’s movements. Protest organizers say that for more than 60 years, the CIA has assassinated foreign leaders and civilians around the globe, systematically tortured, trained assassins to kill both US and foreign civilians, facilitated weapons and drug trafficking by terrorists and paramilitaries, influenced foreign elections with money and murder, and lied to congress about its activities.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Back in May the Federal Communications Commission proposed flawed “net neutrality” rules that would effectively bless the creation of Internet “slow lanes.” After months of netroots protests the FCC is now reportedly considering a new “hybrid” proposal. EFF is deeply concerned, however, that this “compromise” risks too much, for too little.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Let’s pretend for a moment that for-some-reason-a-celebrity Kim Kardashian reads Techdirt. Someone needs to let her know that lawsuits and lawyers are not for temper tantrums over threats to your own celebrity. I’d have thought she’d have previously learned this lesson after Old Navy staved off the lawsuit she filed because the clothing company had the gall to hire a brunette woman for one of their commercials. It would appear not, now that she’s reportedly investigating whether or not she can sue a woman named Jen Selter for “copying” Kim’s poses (bwah?) and having a big ass.
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To Los Angeles, where Lost in Showbiz learns that a landmark court case may be brewing. It derives this knowledge from a feature in leading legal periodical Closer magazine, headlined KIM KARDASHIAN FUMES OVER BOTTOM “COPYCAT”. We won’t go into too much detail here, because quite frankly, reading the whole article made Lost in Showbiz worry that civilisation as we know it is doomed and that brimstone is going to start raining from the sky any minute. Suffice to say, the general thrust is that Kim Kardashian is angry at a woman the piece refers to as “internet bottom sensation” Jen Selter. Selter has been posting photographs of her large buttocks on Instagram, an activity Kardashian apparently feels is an unacceptable infringement upon her very raison d’etre: one of the gangplanks of Kim Kardashian’s global celebrity being her nonpareil ability to take photographs of her own large buttocks with a cameraphone. “Kim thinks Jen copies all her poses … she is fuming as she feels her curvy bum is one of her most unique selling points and feels that Jen is just trying to cash in.”
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While playing the original versions of classic games on aging original hardware can sometimes be difficult, it’s at least typically possible. That’s not the case for many online games, which are functionally inoperable once the developer or publisher decides to shut down the official servers that provide the only way for players to communicate with each other. Unofficial hobbyist projects that try to create new servers for these abandoned games could run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its ban on “the circumvention of access control technologies.”
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In 1998, a man named John Stacks formed a company, Johnny Resin, that sold model kits to a niche audience. His specialty was a line of sculpts bearing the likenesses of actors from 1966′s Batman television series: Adam West, Burt Ward, and an assortment of villains, all in costume.
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As we foreshadowed, a new law requiring mandatory data retention by ISPs was introduced into the Australian federal parliament last week. In the few days since then, there have been claims and counter-claims about whether data obtained under the new law would be limited to use in fighting major crimes (such as terrorism, as the government originally claimed), or if it could be used to target citizens who download and share files online.
The current party line, from flip-flopping Attorney-General George Brandis (whom some may remember from this train-wreck interview in which he attempted to define “metadata”) is that the new laws “can’t be and they won’t be” used to prosecute file sharers, because copyright infringement is only a civil offense.
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Copyrights
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A majority of the Dutch Parliament has backed a proposal to target online piracy through warning popups on “pirate” sites. The warnings should inform Internet users that they’re breaking the law, while pointing out what the legal alternatives are. The opposition characterizes the plan as “stupid” and notes there are better ways to deal with the issue.
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Four hundred police officers raided 121 homes today in a crackdown on the popular linking site Boerse.bz. The homes are believed to be connected to active uploaders of the site but no arrests have been made. The Boerse.bz website itself switched to a new provider but remains online.
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Send this to a friend
11.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linux distributions are always heralded as the most secure operating systems and Windows is usually left in the dust, but it’s good to know that it can also perform much better in other areas, like application and memory management.
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Server
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IBM i ERP software developer HarrisData recently unveiled AppsInHD, a new platform that will serve as the foundation for the company’s future Web-based, loosely coupled, REST-enabled applications. The new “mashup” AppsInHD apps will run on IBM i as well as Linux.
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Every time I write a Bash script or schedule a cron job, I worry about the day I’ll star in my very own IT version of a Folger’s commercial. Instead of “secretly replacing coffee with Folger’s Instant Crystals”, however, I worry I’ll be replaced by an automation framework and a few crafty FOR loops. If you’ve ever had nightmares like that, you’re in the right place. The truth is, the need for system administrators isn’t going down—it’s just that our job function is shifting a little. If you stay current, and resolve to be a lifelong learner, system administration is as incredible as it’s always been. (And far better than instant coffee! Yuck!) This month, we focus on system administration. It keeps us all relevant, all informed and most important, we should all learn a little something along the way.
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CoreOS is a slimmed-down Linux distribution designed for easy creation of lots of OS instances. We like the concept.
CoreOS uses Docker to deploy applications in virtual containers; it also features a management communications bus, and group instance management.
Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoogleComputeEngine (GCE), and Brightbox are early cloud compute providers compatible with CoreOS and with specific deployment capacity for CoreOS. We tried Rackspace and AWS, and also some local “fleet” deployments.
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Two of the major Linux distributors, Red Hat Inc. and SUSE, appear to believe that becoming the dominant supplier of cloud services and technology will allow them to continue to battle mainframes, Windows and single-vendor Unix in both corporate and services provider datacenters. Both of these suppliers have made recent announcements based on cloud-related products and services. Let’s take a look at what they’re doing.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Looking forward to attending MeetBSD in California this weekend. Still working on finding a new /home for all my stuff, but thank you all who have offered suggestions and hosting.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Daniel Vetter has sent in his latest drm-intel-next pull request for DRM graphics driver code targeting the Linux 3.19 kernel.
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Benchmarks
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With last week having delivered our latest Linux vs. Windows NVIDIA benchmarks where we found that the NVIDIA Linux driver can outperform the Windows 8.1 driver with OpenGL workloads, the tables have turned to looking at the AMD Windows vs. Linux performance using the latest code. In this Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Windows 8.1 comparison, the open-source Radeon driver on Linux is also being tested against the Catalyst drivers.
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Applications
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So just a quick update. I pushed out the 1.5 release of Transmageddon today. No major new features just fixing a regression in terms of dealing with files where you only have a video track or where you want to drop the audio track as part of the transcoding process. I am also having some issues with Intel Hardware encoding atm, but I think those are somewhere lower in the stack, so I hope to file a bug against either GStreamer or the libva project for that issue, but for now I recommend not having the Intel VA plugins for GStreamer installed.
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The current XBMC project is preparing to make way for Kodi, its successor. In many ways, it will be the same application, but only with a different name. On the other hand, Kodi is also a new version and a true evolution of the famous media player. There is a lot of pressure on the developers to make this new version just as good as the previous ones.
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Proprietary
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Yandex is a Chromium based internet browser developed by the guys that have created the Yandex search engine. It has an intuitive graphical interface and provides easy access to some internet services like mail or cloud and has synchronization features for bookmarks, extensions and browser data with other mobile devices.
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This is an Ubuntu AppIndicator which acts as a wrapper for Viber, hiding the top left Viber icon and adding a proper Unity AppIndicator for Viber, which provides the same functionality as the original icon…
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Instructionals/Technical
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EPEL stands for ‘Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux‘ , as the name suggest epel provides additional rpm packages for RHEL , CentOS , Scientific Linux (SL) & Oracle Enterprise Linux (OLE) . EPEL is created and maintained by Fedora community and EPEL packages are 100% free/libre open source software (FLOSS).
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Games
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Dust Racing 2D has a pretty simple game interface, but it offers an AI to race against, 2-players mode, several configuration options, a track editor (as a separate program), several tracks to race on. You will need to configure the controls before playing.
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Interstellar Marines is really starting to shape up with good performance, and some more single-player content.
In the latest update they have updated the AI for “The NeuroGen Incident” the single-player mission that has you fighting off killer robots, and it’s surprisingly jumpy. If they manage to keep this up for more missions it will be a bit like playing the FPS ‘F.E.A.R’ again, and that’s great.
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Aspyr Media are continuing their porting on the Linux & Mac ports for the new Civilization Beyond Earth, while most of the work right now is for Mac they do make a few notes about Linux.
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Clockwork Empires is the latest game from the developers behind Dungeons of Dredmor. It looks great and they are working on the Linux & Mac versions right now.
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Serious Sam 3: BFE is already available for Linux so this sounds like a good deal if you’ve been thinking of picking that one up. Unfortunately there are no DRM free options for either game.
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The remake of the massively popular roguelike The Binding of Isaac makes its début on Steam for Linux today. As previously reported the remake comes with a vast amount of improvements and additions, and a new engine, which should be a major improvement to Linux users.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I don’t have access to k3b.org so can’t update the news there, shows why the Manifesto is such an important thing.
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K3b 2.0.3 has been released earlier today, bringing a number of bug fixes and improvements to this burning application. This is the first incremental release since 2011, after over three years in which everything was quiet regarding the development of K3b.
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Choice and flexibility are the hallmarks of a Linux distribution, and by extension the Linux ecosystem. With the proprietary Windows and OS X, you’re stuck with the system as designed and can’t make changes no matter how unpleasant you may find the experience. Linux distributions are free of such limitations.
Each distro has the Linux kernel at its core, but builds on top of that with its own selection of other components, depending on the target audience of the distro. Most Linux users switch between distros until they finally find the one that best suits their needs. However, for new and inexperienced users, the choice of hundreds of distros, with seemingly little to distinguish them, can seem challenging to say the least.
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New Releases
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Version 7 of the Trisquel GNU/Linux distribution, codenamed Belenos after a Celtic sun god, has been released. Belenos is a Long Term Support release that will be maintained until 2019.
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Trisquel GNU/Linux, a 100% free operating system that features a complete selection of applications, has advanced to version 7.0 LTS and brings a number of improvements.
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Trisquel, the Free Software Foundation approved free-software-only Linux distribution based off Ubuntu, is out with its version 7.0 “Belenos” long-term support release that they intend to maintain until 2019.
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Makulu Cinnamon Edition should now run smoothly without any further issues …
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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This is the first release after the change in the openSUSE development mode, with a much shorter stabilization phase thanks to the extensive testing done in a daily basis in the rolling distribution used now as a base for openSUSE stable releases. The perfect balance between innovation and stability with the great level of freedom of choice that openSUSE users are used to.
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After one year of development and a change in their development practices, openSUSE 13.2 was officially released this morning.
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Red Hat Family
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Twenty years ago [on Oct. 30, 1994], the world had their first glimpse of the operating system that would eventually evolve into Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Marc Ewing’s “Halloween” release of Red Hat Linux. In the mid-90s, Linux was not the juggernaut that it is today, instead the domain of hobbyists and hackers. Red Hat Linux “Halloween,” however, forever changed the game, showing not only the growing demand for Linux but also that you could actually make money in open source.
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Fedora
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Today in Linux news the community tackles the “too many forks” question. Jack Wallen has how to find the right distro for the job and Mayank Sharma updated his “10 best Linux distros” article. Danny Stieben has five reasons to look forward to Fedora 21 and Bryan Lunduke looks at ChromeOS in his latest desktop-a-week review.
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Fedora 21 is well on its way to being released in early December, and it brings with it a ton of goodies! Plus, since Fedora is known for being a cutting-edge distribution, there will be a lot of interesting software and technologies that you’ll get to use. Since Fedora moves so fast, it’s important to have these new releases.
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Fedora 21 is now available in beta form following its latest delays. Fedora 21 is still hoped for in official form next month and continues to be shaping up to potentially the best Fedora release ever.
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Following hints earlier in the year, a beta of Red Hat Fedora Linux 21 has finally arrived in three incarnations: Cloud, Server, and Workstation. Fedora 21 also provides the first public glimpse of Project Atomic, Red Hat’s initiative to produce a Linux distribution optimized as a Docker container host.
Users who have deployed Fedora in the past as a workstation environment can turn to the appropriately named Fedora 21 Workstation. In addition to updates of all previously included software, the new version features a technology preview of the Wayland display server, an improvement on the X.org display server currently used by Linux distributions. Workstation also includes the Dev Assistant tool to provide developers with a fast way to instantiate project environments.
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Debian Family
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Well Halloween has come and gone here in the Northern reaches of the Linux blogosphere, but for those of us paying attention, few things could be more frightful than the bloodshed now taking place in Debian’s civil war.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Five more apps have been added in this small update, including the Cinnamon 2.4 PPA (while the old one for 2.2 has been kept as well). The total number of supported applications is now 55.
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Over the years I’ve seen a lot of bad advice with regard to selecting the best Ubuntu laptop to purchase. To make matters worse, most laptop buying guides were Windows specific – not addressing Linux compatibility at all.
In this article, I’ll share which brands of laptops are the best bet for Ubuntu users, and I’ll also share my insights about the advantages of choosing a Linux pre-installed laptop.
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Working in conjunction with Google, Canonical is launching a public beta of Ubuntu for Google Cloud Platform. These are part of the Certified Public Cloud (CPC) programme which means that the cloud versions of Ubuntu will be updated just about as quickly as the regular ground-tethered versions. Images for Utopic Unicorn, TrustyTahr, and Precise Pangolin releases are now available on Google Compute Engine.
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Ubuntu is one of the more widely used GNU/Linux distributions in the world with the project’s parent company, Canonical, reporting around 30 million computers shipping with Ubuntu pre-installed in the past two years. Ubuntu, along with its many community editions, continues to be used by millions around the world and the decisions made by Ubuntu developers have an direct impact on many computer users.
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A company named Demski Group and Mastermind Hardware and Logistics is developing a tablet called UT One, which may be an OEM-made device that would normally use Windows or Android, or the first Ubuntu tablet on the market.
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At the OpenStack Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, announced that Canonial and Docker have started working on a new secure hypervisor, LXD — pronounced lex-d — for containers.
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Open source vendor Canonical made another investment in the public cloud market with the announcement of certified Ubuntu Linux images for Google Cloud Platform, a move that comes on the heels of its launch last week of a home-grown Ubuntu OpenStack distribution.
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Working in conjunction with Google, Canonical is launching a public beta of Ubuntu for Google Cloud Platform. These are part of the Certified Public Cloud (CPC) programme which means that the cloud versions of Ubuntu will be updated just about as quickly as the regular ground-tethered versions. Images for Utopic Unicorn, TrustyTahr, and Precise Pangolin releases are now available on Google Compute Engine.
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HP’s latest notebook saves money by ditching Windows for Ubuntu. Is your next notebook Open Source?
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Google partnered with Canonical to bring official Ubuntu images to Google Compute Engine.
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Gizmo for You has gone to Indiegogo to ask for $600 for a modular, Linux based “Open Source Remote Control” for UAVs and other remote-controlled craft.
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The $269 iBox Nano, billed as the “world’s smallest, cheapest 3D resin printer,” offers WiFi and 328 Micron resolution, and runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi has been used as a computer interface device for 3D printers, as well as a calibration add-on, but as far as we know the iBox Nano is the first 3D printer in which Linux is running the show internally. Last month, an engineering student named Owen Jeffreys showed a video of a Raspberry Pi-based 3D printer project, but the project has yet to be completed (see farther below). Meanwhile, the only other commercial 3D printers we know of that run Linux are the three MakerBot Replicator models announced earlier this year.
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Phones
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Legitimate questions have been raised as to whether Linux platforms designed for smartphones are as good as a tailored embedded Linux stack built from scratch. Yet, so far experiments outside the mobile realm have proven fairly successful. Over the last week, we saw how several of these platforms, including Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu, and WebOS, are spreading out to new device types.
First, Mozilla revealed a Firefox OS port to the Raspberry Pi that it hopes will rival Raspbian. Also last week, Samsung showed off a Tizen-based smart TV prototype, as well as a new camera. In addition, specs for the first Ubuntu Touch-enabled tablet were floated on the web, and earlier last month, LG hinted at an upcoming WebOS smartwatch.
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Tizen
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The Tizen Samsung Gear S is slowly extending its global rollout, with many of our readers being excited about seeing the Smartwatch / phone arriving on in the US on November 7 on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.
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Android
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The Nexus 7 formula wasn’t broken, but Google went and fixed it anyway. The Nexus 7 tablet has been discontinued, and the Nexus 9 is the replacement.
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Android is about to complete its metamorphosis into an operating system with not just cohesive design, but stunning good looks. Android 5.0 Lollipop looks great, but that says nothing of the apps. It’s up to developers to get their apps updated using the new material design guidelines with bolder colors, layered UI elements, and floating action buttons. It’ll probably take a while for everyone to get on-board, but some developers have already done the work to create beautiful materialized apps. Here are five of the best.
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Anticipating the Material makeover for one of Google’s most beloved apps? The wait is over, and here’s how to get a copy for your Android device.
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Ready for the latest and greatest Android release? Android 5 “Lollipop” is rolling out over-the-air to select smartphones and tablets now.
The new Android software, which features the new Material Design, is already on the recently released Nexus 6 and 9. It’s also now on its way to the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 (both first and second generation), and Nexus 10. It will also be showing up on ” Google Play Edition” devices. These include the Moto G and HTC One M8.
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Put simply, getting involved in an open source project is a great way for anyone to show that they can contribute in a meaningful way, work well with others, and develop skills and experience that can be directly transferred to a work environment.
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The government of Albania should benefit from using free and open source for managing the country’s hospitals and health clinics, says Gjergj Sheldija. The ICT consultant is implementing Care2x, an open source Hospital Information System (HIS) for the Mother Teresa Hospital in Tirana.
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Chris C. Kemp is the Chief Strategy Officer of Nebula, Inc., a leading cloud computing and IaaS provider which helps enterprises deploy and manage OpenStack-based private clouds. Previously to founding Nebula, Chris served as NASA’s first CTO where he cofounded the OpenStack project.
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Today Adobe announced the 1.0 release of Brackets, the company’s open source text editor designed for developers who work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
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Google today introduced a new tool for testing network traffic security called Nogotofail. The company has released it as an open source project available on GitHub, meaning anyone can use it, contribute new features, provide support for more platforms, and do anything else with the end goal of helping to improve the security of the Internet.
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The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab), a non-profit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and UC Berkeley, today introduced the open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS).
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PLUMgrid, a leading innovator of virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack clouds, has announced that it has incorporated third party open source SDN functions from partners or community-built open source software modules on its PLUMgrid Platform to provide a single service insertion architecture that simplifies and accelerates the adoption of virtual network services. PLUMgrid Platform helps enterprises and service providers to create and manage L2-L7 virtual network services.
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TIBCO StreamBase now supports a wide range of open source connectors enabling customers to connect, understand and act upon the data processed from the Internet of Things.
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Events
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We are not referred to as “The Linux Community” out of hand. Yes, we can be a loud community. We are often an argumentative community, coloring outside of the lines into larger reaches of the Internet. But we are a community nonetheless. We’re people like Alan Dacey, who stops what he’s doing to write a script to solve a vexing problem for Reglue. People like Clem Lefebvre, who’s devoted to creating a safe and fantastic Linux environment in which to work.
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As I covered yesterday, this week the OpenStack Summit is taking place in Paris, and there is already a lot of related news flowing out of the event. Internap, which provides Internet infrastructure services, has stated that it is expanding its OpenStack-powered AgileCLOUD public cloud footprint to Amsterdam, and Amysta has announced the release of its billing system for OpenStack, which is essentially a revenue management platform.
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SaaS/Big Data
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It has been a busy seven days for PLUMgrid. Last week it announced the availability of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) 2.0 for OpenStack. Today, as the OpenStack Summit opens in Paris, it has made three new announcements. The first two around the availability of ONS 2.0 on different OpenStack distributions and the third that it is adopting Docker containers to speed up the delivery of SDN and NFV components.
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Akanda, a start-up incubated with DreamHost since 2012, launched out of stealth mode to deliver an open source Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform for cloud service providers. The platform is already in use by 500+ tenants at Dreamhost and supporting 1,000s of VMs in its cloud compute service. DreamHost is now spinning-off the solution into Akanda, a start-up whose mission will be to accelerate open source NFV for cloud operators.
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Until today, Midokura’s flagship MidoNet network virtualization Software Defined Network (SDN) platform was a closed piece of proprietary code. That is now changing, as Midokura announced today at the OpenStack Summit in Paris that it is open sourcing the core pieces of its MidoNet platform.
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OpenStack has emerged in the last four years to be one of the leading ways that enterprises can leverage their server capacity to build cloud infrastructure. OpenStack is also being used with great impact at CERN, quite literally helping to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
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CMS
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In some cases it seems that hackers actually patched vulnerable systems themselves – not as an act of charity but to prevent rival hacking groups getting in.
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Business
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Midokura giving its product away to fill OpenStack gap
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Why someone would start a new open source ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) project, is the question that people ask me again and again. If I had known what it takes, I might not have done it! But I did not know that in 2006 when I started to write my own ERP in Python and MySQL.
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Our biggest satisfaction will be when a whole bunch of small, local, innovative organizations across the world gets access to tools that will help them compete with large, global, and inefficient corporations—creating a level playing field that will leave our world a little bit more fair.
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Barclays Bank is to work with Commonwealth Bank of Australia on the development of open source tools for analysing large data sets in an effort to break free from the tyranny of vendor licensing fees.
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BSD
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PC-BSD, a BSD distribution with the goal to be an easy to install and use desktop operating system based on FreeBSD, is now at version 10.1 RC2 and is ready for testing.
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The developers of the FreeBSD operating system have been working very hard to close the cycle for the 10.1 version and it looks like this might be the final version in the series. If everything goes well we might get a new stable version of this OS next week.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Technological neutrality is the principle that the state should not impose preferences for or against specific kinds of technology. For example, there should not be a rule that specifies whether state agencies should use solid state memory or magnetic disks, or whether they should use GNU/Linux or BSD. Rather, the agency should let bidders propose any acceptable technology as part of their solutions, and choose the best/cheapest offer by the usual rules.
The principle of technological neutrality is valid, but it has limits. Some kinds of technology are harmful; they may pollute air or water, encourage antibiotic resistance, abuse their users, abuse the workers that make them, or cause massive unemployment. These should be taxed, regulated, discouraged, or even banned.
The principle of technological neutrality applies only to purely technical decisions. It is not “ethical neutrality” or “social neutrality”; it does not apply to decisions about ethical and social issues—such as the choice between free software and proprietary software.
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Free software advocacy groups are hopeful that the incoming European Commission will advance the use and development of this type of software solution in public administration.
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The GNU Tools Cauldron, a conference on the low-level toolchain (GCC, glibc, GDB, etc.) was held last July. There is now a full set of videos from the event available for your viewing pleasure.
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Public Services/Government
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Last month, PwC announced it intended to offer a bid for the Department of Defense (DOD) Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) EHR contract. The DOD is searching for a contractor to replace the existing Military Health System (MHS) which currently has more than 9.7 million active duty, retired, and dependent beneficiaries.
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The treasures of Europe’s rich history are carefully documented and stored in our many libraries, archives and museums. However, although our history is intricately interconnected, our repositories don’t necessarily have the technology to effectively link and share their content. Museums and libraries often have their own data codification and representation methods which means that the information may not accessible to web search engines and to other institutions.
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Licensing
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The Open Government Licence (OGL) is recommended as the default licence for public sector information in the UK.
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Programming
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The message is clear, there’s never been a better time to write code for a living. Programmers aren’t just coding applications anymore, they are coding networks, data centers, and continuous integration systems. Infrastructure that used to require an up-front investment of millions is available to start out on for free, with a logical, understandable API to access and consume their resources. And behind it all, open source software is powering the new generation.
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If you think like a super-villain, laugh like an anti-hero, and can write code, it’s time to polish off the cackle, sharpen up the brain, get extra coffee, and start working on your entry to the Underhanded C contest.
The 7th Underhanded C contest seeks, like its predecessors, code that is “readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible”, but with the twist that “it must fail to perform its apparent function”.
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Google’s Miško Hevery, co-inventor of the popular AngularJS framework, has announced a new project to improve JavaScript by adding type annotations and other features.
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Standards/Consortia
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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that it is promoting the HTML5 specification to Recommendation status, that highest level of approval, which effectively pushes HTML5 to the level of a web standard.
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The standard called the Open Document Format (ODF) was chosen by the government in July 2014 to standardise document formats across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also approved for viewing files.
In September 2014, government departments were told to publish their implementation plans, which are expected to trickle through over the coming month.
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Security
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The UK’s lack of available talent with the right cyber security skills presents a very real danger to British businesses, according to a London-based cyber security specialist recruiter.
Responding to recent reports by EY and the office of the Minister for Universities and Science, Cornucopia IT Resourcing, warned that the unless the deficit in the number of available cyber security professionals is addressed, British businesses will remain the target of cyber attacks.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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He introduced it as “a story you will see nowhere else this morning.” That story is that one of the founders of the Weather Channel, retired TV weather forecaster John Coleman, thinks “climate change is a hoax.” And saying so got him invited on Fox News.
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The current CEO of the Weather Channel arrives next to affirm the channel’s statement that it disagrees with Coleman. And, since the discussion mostly skipped over challenging any of Coleman’s rhetoric, one could actually argue that there wasn’t much of a debate at all.
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Young birds attempting to call for their parents over man-made noises are inadvertently attracting predators, research finds
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Finance
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With the popularization of knowledge on the online virtual money, more and more virtual money are produced. Since the Bitcoin made the Web money in fashion and gained global attention, the virtual money after Bitcoin were called “Copycat Coins”. While these virtual money use different names merely to differentiate with Bitcoin, like the different names of currencies in the real world, such as the US dollar, the Euro, etc.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Republican voters are more excited about voting. Beyond that, it shows that Barack Obama is less popular now than he used to be, which doesn’t feel all that newsworthy.
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And, of course, just as I was finishing up with that article, I came across a report of a patent from Sony from a few years ago. It actually got some attention back in 2012 for describing a system in which your TV may ask you to say the advertiser’s name to end a commercial. This figure in the patent is the one that quite reasonably got plenty of attention.
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Censorship
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The pianist Dejan Lazic, like many artists and performers, is occasionally the subject of bad reviews. Also like other artists, he reads those reviews. And disagrees with them. And gripes over them, sometimes.
But because Lazic lives in Europe, where in May the European Union ruled that individuals have a “right to be forgotten” online, he decided to take the griping one step further: On Oct. 30, he sent The Washington Post a request to remove a 2010 review by Post classical music critic Anne Midgette that – he claims — has marred the first page of his Google results for years.
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Privacy
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Open Rights Group has responded to an FT comment piece by the Director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, in which he calls for “greater co-operation from technology companies’, who are in his words, “the command and control networks of choice” for terrorists.
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So, we weren’t too impressed with previous GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA) boss, Sir Iain Lobban, who insisted that GCHQ didn’t do “mass surveillance” so long as you defined “mass” and “surveillance” the way he does (and not the way the English language does). This statement was made just days before it was revealed that the GCHQ (contrary to its own claims) gets access to NSA data without a warrant.
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Some of the most disturbing revelations to emerge from Edward Snowden’s leaks are that the UK’s GCHQ is involved in spying on all the Internet traffic as it enters and leaves this country, and that it is jointly responsible for undermining basic cryptographic methods that keep communications private – and which make e-commerce possible. All of this without any kind of legal justification, just Jesuitical casuistry that largely turns on contorted interpretations of laws and stretched definitions of key concepts.
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Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “It is wholly wrong to state that internet companies are failing to assist in investigations.
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In an unusual step the new head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, has written an article accusing technology companies of aiding terrorism and failing to help with investigations. The article is entirely vague in its criticisms of the tech companies, giving little detail of what information GCHQ is failing to receive from the tech companies.
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Verizon users might want to start looking for another provider. In an effort to better serve advertisers, Verizon Wireless has been silently modifying its users’ web traffic on its network to inject a cookie-like tracker. This tracker, included in an HTTP header called X-UIDH, is sent to every unencrypted website a Verizon customer visits from a mobile device. It allows third-party advertisers and websites to assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors’ web browsing habits without their consent.
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As the article notes, Facebook had experimented with “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter” buttons on its site to see if that would encourage friends to vote, but its civic engagement tactics have gone much further than that.
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The US intelligence community’s $600 million cloud computing deal with Amazon was finalized roughly a year ago, but recent revelations about the CIA’s behavior in shared virtual spaces is raising questions about the government’s move to virtual computing.
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A billboard challenging Amazon to fully disclose the terms of its $600 million contract to provide cloud computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency has been unveiled at a busy intersection near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
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How can the US government possibly claim that its collection of the phone records of millions of innocent Americans is legal? It relies mainly on two arguments: first, that no one can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their metadata and second, that the outcome is controlled by the so-called “third party doctrine,” which says that no one has an expectation of privacy in information they convey to a third party (such as telephone numbers dialed). We expect the government to press both of these arguments on November 4, before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. We look forward to responding.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Tuesday said she is prepared to make changes to her cybersecurity bill to assuage privacy concerns.
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Reports are coming out that Congress is looking to push forward with bad cybersecurity legislation after the election, but before the new Congress takes over in January. We’ve discussed the bill in question, CISA, before. The main idea behind it is to immunize companies from liability if they share certain information with the government. Supporters of the bill note that the information sharing is entirely voluntary, but by taking away the liability it also makes it a lot more likely that companies will choose to give information to the government, and it’s not yet clear why the government really needs that information. But the FUD levels are high, with Senator Saxby Chambliss actually suggesting the entire economy is at stake here…
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Earlier this year, we wrote about the case of Gulet Mohamed, a US citizen who was put on the no fly list and ran into some issues in the Middle East because of that (and by “issues” we mean he was beaten by Kuwaiti officials for wanting to fly home to Virginia). The DOJ was making some nutty arguments, including claiming that the whole case should be thrown out because “state secrets.” This is the usual claim in these kinds of cases. Back in August we noted that the judge, Anthony Trenga, was skeptical of this argument, asking for the DOJ to provide a lot more info to back up its claims (in that post we also noted that the DOJ wanted to pretend that the leaked guidelines for how the no fly list works hadn’t been leaked).
Now the judge has ruled officially and rejected the DOJ’s argument, saying that they can’t just claim “state secrets” and walk away.
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Like its successors, such as PRISM, Trailblazer was all about collecting everything it could from everywhere it could. “At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata”, Bill tells us, “are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.” At the very least, revelations by Bill and other sources (such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning) make it clear that the Fourth Amendment no longer protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. In the era of Big Data everywhere, it’s reasonable to grab all of it.
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Civil Rights
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Last week, we noted that Attorney General Eric Holder was hinting that the DOJ was near “a resolution” with reporter James Risen — the NY Times reporter who the DOJ has been harassing and trying to force to give up sources. In a recent interview, Risen makes the rather compelling case, that this effort by the DOJ was never about actually solving any sort of crime (the DOJ knows who did the leak), but rather about totally discrediting and/or punishing Risen for some of his other investigative reports. If the DOJ can undermine the ability of Risen to protect sources, he loses many sources.
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Anyone who criticises Sharia law or gay marriage could be branded an “extremist” under sweeping new powers planned by the Conservatives to combat terrorism, an alliance of leading atheists and Christians fear.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, unveiled plans last month for so-called Extremism Disruption Orders, which would allow judges to ban people deemed extremists from broadcasting, protesting in certain places or even posting messages on Facebook or Twitter without permission.
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In the video embedded below, two Austin, Texas police officers were accidentally recorded by a dashboard camera having what they thought was a private conversation.
After a brief back-and-forth between the two men about a minor collision they handled earlier in the day and other matters, an attractive woman walks by.
“Look at that girl over there,” one officer says.
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A few more details have emerged concerning the Dept. of Homeland Security’s daring daylight raid of a Kansas City lingerie shop. Our long, dark national nightmare ended just before Game 1 of the World Series when Peregrine Honig’s custom-made Royals-related underwear was seized by gun-toting DHS agents. The crime? Presumably trademark infringement (the government’s panty raiders specifically pointed out the joining of the letters K and C as problematic), although everyone involved (including the DHS super troopers) keeps referring to it as a “copyright” issue.
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A few more details have come to light on the police state experiment conducted in Ferguson, MO over the past couple of months. Despite repeated denials that continued all the way up until October 31st, the real reason for the FAA’s no-fly zone over Ferguson has been revealed.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Pirate Bay founder Fredrik Neij has been arrested in Asia. Neij had moved to Laos to avoid the jail sentence handed down for his involvement in The Pirate Bay. But, after driving across the border from Laos into Thailand more than two dozen times, the Swede was arrested yesterday by Thai border police executing an Interpol warrant.
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A bunch of libraries in the UK are protesting ridiculous copyright terms by displaying empty cases where they say letters written during World War I should go, but won’t, because figuring out how to properly license the work under copyright law is impossible.
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This isn’t a huge surprise, but the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case concerning whether or not Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. As many news sites are reporting, this more or less means that the character of Sherlock Holmes is considered public domain.
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One issue that has concerned us here on Techdirt for some years is the routine lock-down of public domain works when they are digitized. This means that far from representing an opportunity to widen public access to such freely-available analog works, converting them to digital format puts them back under copyright’s restrictive intellectual monopoly.
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The Spanish government has successfully passed a new copyright law which imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News, in an effort to protect its print media industry.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Here at FOSS Force we’re proud to be associated with Ken Starks. We’re proud because of the great articles he writes advocating Linux. We’re also extremely proud that he was chosen to be a keynote speaker at this year’s Ohio LinuxFest. But most of all, we’re proud because of his big heart, which he expresses through his work through Reglue, the nonprofit he founded in 2005 to give Linux computers, and training on how to use them, to financially disadvantaged school children in and around the Austin, Texas area where he lives.
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Desktop
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After tinkering with the term “de-Microsofting,” Ni Guangnan decided instead to go with “de-Windowsify.” “We call this a de-Windowsifying movement,” he said.
Speaking last Saturday at a temporary office in a residential neighborhood in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s answer to Silicon Valley, the 75-year-old computer science professor and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering talked about his ambitious project to bring together all of China’s homegrown operating system (OS) developers in an alliance to replace Microsoft Windows in one to two years.
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This is not a review of ChromeOS. Nor is it a discussion of the viability of using a Chromebook as your primary computer.
No, sir. We’re simply going to be looking at ChromeOS as a Desktop Environment from a usability perspective, and how it compares to the other Linux Desktop Environments I have reviewed in my “Desktop-a-week” series thus far.
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Server
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I’m really excited to have joined the OpenPOWER Foundation as an individual member (The first Ubuntu member even) just yesterday. I have already started contributing to projects and joined a workgroup of the foundation where I hope to offer my experience around software and hardware.
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Kernel Space
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Systemd is working on PPoE support, a method for encapsulating PPP frames inside Ethernet frames, which is commonly used by DSL providers.
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After a week of tests, I realized that `systemd-journal` is not ready for prime time.
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In this article I will show you how to install Kernel 3.14.23 on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusy Tahr, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, LXLE 14.04, Peppermint Five, Deepin 2014, Linux Lite 2.0, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and other Ubuntu 14.04 derivative systems.
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Another week, another rc, and things aren’t really shrinking the way I would hope for…
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Like with 3.18-rc2, Linus Torvalds isn’t happy that the development pace isn’t calming down for nearing midway through the kernel’s development. There’s still been many changes all over the place in the past week, while feature development has been over for some time.
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It’s been a couple of weeks that I’ve returned from Düsseldorf, Germany, after attending the seventh KVM Forum; an event where developers and users of the Linux virtualization technology gather to discuss the state of the hypervisor and tools around it, and brainstorm on future plans. As with the previous few years, the event was co-located with LinuxCon Europe.
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Linux has what appears to be a useful feature that can be enabled to diagnose tricky kernel bugs. The feature is called kdump. A crashdump mechanism that uses kexec to switch to a different kernel, before writing out memory to disk, nfs, wherever. It’s a pretty neat idea.
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Graphics Stack
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Red Hat’s David Airlie as the Linux kernel’s subsystem maintainer has written a status update about his plans and thoughts for DRM graphics driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 3.19.
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Vetter posted his atomic mode-setting patch series in latest form on Sunday. There’s the helper libraries for migrating over to atomic mode-setting and the other core/driver interface changes for this work. The description on his latest patch series is quite lengthy so check it out if you’re wanting to learn some more. These patches though don’t offer the actual atomic mode-setting ioctl to expose to user-space.
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Open-source developers have been working on pushing the Direct3D 9 state tracker into mainline Mesa that would allow patched copies of Wine to natively use this D3D9 support for speeding up the process of running various Windows games on Linux.
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Benchmarks
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Last month on Phoronix I posted some dual-HDD Btrfs RAID benchmarks and that was followed by Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 testing on four Intel solid-state drives. In still testing the four Intel Series 530 SSDs in a RAID array, the new benchmarks today are a comparison of the performance when using Btrfs’ built-in RAID capabilities versus setting up a Linux 3.18 software RAID with Btrfs on the same hardware/software using mdadm.
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Applications
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Linux is also an attractive way of reading e-books on a desktop computer or notebook. Linux has a good range of open source software which helps users to organise their e-book collection, catch up on a novel, and to create, validate and publish their own e-book.
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Dear werepenguins, we’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Pitivi 0.94! This is the fourth release for the new version of our video editor based on GES, the GStreamer Editing Services library. Take a look at my previous blog post to understand in what context 0.94 has been brewing. This is mainly a maintenance release, but it does pack a few interesting improvements & features in addition to the bug fixes.
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Pitivi 0.94 was released as the latest version of the open-source, non-linear video editor powered by the GStreamer Editing Services library.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writting: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.
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Wine or Emulation
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A new Wine development version, 1.7.30, has been has been released and the developers have made more improvements to DirectWrite, among other changes.
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Games
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It also has the source code published on github for anyone wanting to take a look at its dirty innards. You need to agree to their contributor file before submitting anything though as they keep the rights to do with it as they see fit, so it’s really only open for people who genuinely want to add something or fix something in a game they like to play. That’s not a bad thing in my eyes though, but it doesn’t fit the term of “open source” which is why I won’t call it that.
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In the second of a two part opinion series, I will offer up my own personal conviction that the Amnesia games do not actually live up to the full potential demonstrated by their predecessors.
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Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition has arrived for Linux, and it was a day-1 release which we are very happy about. Evil stirs beneath the Spine of the World. In the northernmost reaches of the Forgotten Realms lies the region of icy tundra known as Icewind Dale. Journey deep into the Spine of the World mountains, a harsh and unforgiving territory settled by only the hardiest folk.
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Valve have released the Steam Hardware Survey results for October, so it is also time to release our own survey results. 857 people completed the survey, making our sample size 187 people larger than last time, so thanks everyone!
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Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition was released this week for Linux at the same time as the Windows, OS X, and Android releases.
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The latest monthly development release of the Unvanquished game is now available. This is now the thirty-third alpha release for the project while it’s not expected to reach beta until at least next year.
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Age of Empires II is considered one of the best real-time strategies ever made, and there are few gamers who haven’t tried or at least heard of it. A group of developers is now working on a free engine clone that should greatly improve upon the original title.
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Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II, a free mod for Half-Life 2 developed and published by Octoshark Studios, will arrive on Steam for Linux soon.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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14 years ago, I started creating an image viewer. Back then it felt like a good project to get started with graphical application development for my newly installed Linux system. Little did I know… In 14 years Gwenview went through one toolkit change (GTK+1.2 to Qt2/KDE2), got ported to Qt3/KDE3, moved from SourceForge CVS to KDE Extragear, got ported to Qt4/KDE4, became the default image viewer of KDE4 and finally got ported to Qt5/KF5.
[...]
You may be aware I spend most of my free time these days on some other project. I am not completely out of Qt and KDE development however: I have a number of small side projects, many of them Qt-based, to which I want to give a bit more visibility. Stay tuned for more announcements.
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DWDs are not CSDs, and all theming and drawing is handled by the window manager and decoration. In addition, applications only export the structure of their widgets, they do not pre-draw or draw the widgets themselves. Applications would have little or no say in how their decorations look, just like traditional SSDs.
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Published last month were the plans by KDE developers to create Dynamic Window Decorations (DWD) as a hybrid between client-side and server-side decorations. Here’s more information on this concept for improving window decorations.
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The last blog posts about KDM/LightDM/SDDM/WhateverDM left things a bit on an exciting cliffhanger so I’ve been asked a few times what the current state is.
The short summary is we recommend SDDM as the display manager for Plasma 5.
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SDDM has a relatively short history but is a lightweight, QML-based display manager. The first SDDM release was just in March of 2013. Besides interest from KDE developers, SDDM is also supported by the Hawaii/Maui desktop project.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Cinnamon 2.4 Desktop Environment is now out ahead of its official debut with Linux Mint 17.1 later this month.
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On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 2.4!
This new version will be featured in Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy” planned for Spring 2015.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the new things in Cinnamon 2.4.
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A preview release of what will become Cinnamon 2.4 is now available for testing. The stable version will ship with Linux Mint 17.1, which will be released at the end of the month, but if you’re willing to take it for a spin and report any bugs you find, you can upgrade to it now.
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Cinnamon 2.4 was released recently and it comes with improved settings, a redesigned toolbar for Nemo along with various other changes which bring a smoother overall experience.
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If you’re looking for a Linux distribution to handle a specific (even niche) task, there most certainly is a distribution ready to serve. From routers to desktops, from servers to multi-media…there’s a Linux for everything.
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New Releases
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We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 4.2. This service release comes with a brand new kernel 3.16.3 (+bfq I/O Scheduler) which includes many driver updates and improvements in power saving functions. Our improved installer now offers you to install on uefi capable PCs and brings in a new option which allows you to disable sudo for your user during installation.
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XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi Japanese chess) and Makruk. Many variations of chess are also supported.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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A couple of weeks ago the 11th edition of SUSE’s hackweek took place. This year I decided to spend this time to look into the different orchestration and service discovery tools build around Docker.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Version 5, featuring the powerful systems management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is a comprehensive solution that supports organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds. With Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Version 5, users can now manage their virtualization and OpenStack environments simultaneously, via a single platform.
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Five companies contributed a combined $440,000 to help get the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina off the ground.
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Red Hat has launched version 5 of its Cloud Infrastructure package, which is intended for organizations that want to dabble in both OpenStack and traditional data center virtualization simultaneously.
Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) version 5 debuted on Monday at the OpenStack Summit in Paris. As before, it bundles the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service platform with the company’s virtualization platform and CloudForms, its tool for managing hybrid cloud setups.
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Fedora
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After a one-week slip the Fedora QA, release engineering, and development teams have agreed that Fedora is ready to release Fedora 21 Beta on Tuesday, November 4, 2014.
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Fedora 21 Beta is set to arrive tomorrow, and this is the first piece of good news that has arrived from the Red Hat developers in quite some time. Everyone was expecting a delay, but it looks like we’ll get to test the new release very soon.
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Debian Family
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The developers have been hopping from one Beta version to another and it seems that it might take them forever to get to the final version, but they want to make sure that everything will work as it should for the users that will eventually try it.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Lately, almost all of the headlines about Ubuntu Linux and Canonical have involved the cloud. But open source fans dreaming of an Ubuntu-powered Intel (INTC) x86 tablet may reason for excitement, if reports are accurate that the UT One Linux tablet will ship by this December.
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For an operating system named after a magical creature, the release might strike some of you as somewhat overwhelmingly similar to the previous release, Trusty.
It’s the same creepy default wallpaper (if there is a difference I failed to notice it), the Amazon icon remains firmly conspicuous in the launcher despite protests and there is the same old universal purple shade.
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Mobile advertising and social data tied up like ribbons to holiday tech story packages are starting to fall like autumn leaves, but the cloud will partially hover over the spotlight for the first half of the month.
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Ubuntu developers are working to bring the new Unity 8 to the desktop flavor of the distribution and it will take a while, but users are not really mentally prepared for the change. It will be different from Unity 7, which is the version currently in use, and not many people will be happy.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” is scheduled to launch in just a few weeks and it will arrive with a brand new version of Cinnamon, 2.4, which promises to be one of the biggest updates so far.
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Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 Utopic Unicorn is an official ubuntu flavor based on Ubuntu 14.10 and uses GNOME 3.12 as the desktop environment. It released and announced by Ubuntu GNOME Development Team with new features and updated applications.
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Drones and other remotely piloted vehicles are inherently limited by their controls; you frequently have to switch controllers when you switch vehicles, and you can usually forget about customization. You might not have to worry if the Open Source Remote Control (OSRC) project gets off the ground, however. The long-in-development peripheral uses a mix of modular hardware and Linux-based software that lets you steer just about any unmanned machine. On top of a programmable interface, you can swap in new wireless modules and shoulder switches to either accommodate new drones or improve existing controls. You can also attach a 4.8-inch touchscreen module (typically for a first-person view), use cellular networks or even share one vehicle between multiple operators — handy if you’re at a flying club or shooting a movie.
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Free Electrons has posted free training materials on building an embedded Linux project using Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded on a BeagleBone Black.
The Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project has been largely supported and influenced by Intel, but it has long since evolved into a phenomenon of its own that is as at home on ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS targets as it is on x86. In fact, for its latest training course on Yocto Project and the associated OpenEmbedded build environment, Free Electrons turned to the ARM-based BeagleBone Black single board computer as the target device. The course shows how to boot root filesystems built with the Yocto Project, as well as run and debug the custom applications compiled with it.
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Phones
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Android
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Buying a phone from service providers is one of the things we dread the most. If you want a good deal on a new Android phone, you usually have to sign a two-year contract. But the issues don’t stop there; carrier-branded phones never get software updates as fast as unlocked phones do, and they are always weighed down with additional software that no one really cares about. We wouldn’t complain much about bloatware if service providers only included the apps you need to manage your account or check your visual voicemail, but most phones have anywhere from 5 to 20 additional apps (most of which are available through Google Play) pre-installed into the system partition, making it impossible to uninstall them.
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For the quarter that ended in September, Apple held 12 percent market share, while Windows Phone and BlackBerry commanded 3 percent and 1 percent.
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Android ran 84% of smartphones shipped globally in the third quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics, down slightly from 85% in the second quarter.
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This year marks the 15th anniversary since The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was formed as a non-profit corporation to support the development of Open Source software, beginning with the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF has grown significantly since, and today houses more than 150 top-level projects, exceeds 500 individual members, and over 4,000 committers have collaborated on ASF projects. We are incredibly grateful for all those who have volunteered their time to the Foundation, the millions of users of Apache software, and the generosity of our sponsors and donors that provide vital resources. This anniversary gives us a great opportunity to take a look back at what has made the ASF so successful, and what that means for its future.
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Open source is a great thing. It’s certainly an awesome way for a fledgling project to gain some momentum – one only needs to see the rapid growth of Linux, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Docker to see the benefits that open source brings.
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In every sector of the technology world there is now an open source project that is defining that particular technology. Software drives value in nearly every industry, and open source projects are where most of that value comes from.
That’s according to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation and one of Monday’s keynote speakers at this week’s OpenStack summit in Paris – the first in Europe. “Open source is really eating the software world,” Zemlin said, adapting the famous phrase from a 2011 Wall Street Journal OpEd by venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, titled Software is eating the world.
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Larry Augustin spoke with TechRepublic about his work at SugarCRM, why he bets on big markets, and how he helped coin the term “open source.”
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Open source is so ubiquitous. Anyone want to go talk to a purchasing officer when they want to spin up another node? That is driving the adoption systemically. We’re seeing the evolution of DevOps, and open source is a driving force for modern application development.
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Today, in conjunction with the OpenStack Paris conference, StackStorm is releasing the 0.5 version of its software under an Apache open-source license, giving people a way to try it out and discover its capabilities.
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Ericsson Research has announced plans to release its web browser and the underlying framework OpenWebRTC as free and open source. The intention is to further quicken the pace of innovation in the WebRTC community by providing developers with more choice and flexibility.
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LastPass has published an open source command line application to provide terminal-loving devs with alternative access to their passwords and login data.
The outfit says the app improves user security, with a growing list of commands that lets users edit their LastPass data. It also supports functions such as regular automated password changes and the ability to generate and store passwords for servers.
LastPass community manager Amber Gott said it welcomed community pull requests.
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Banks
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His meeting with Harte put Fayyad in touch with Andrew Kerr and his team, who after two or three years working on the Hadoop-based tools decided to submit it to the open source community.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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At Mozilla we know that developers are the cornerstone of the Web, that’s why we actively push standards and continue to build great tools to make it easier for you to create awesome Web content and apps.
When building for the Web, developers tend to use a myriad of different tools which often don’t work well together. This means you end up switching between different tools, platforms and browsers which can slow you down and make you less productive.
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At Mozilla we know that developers are the cornerstone of the Web, that’s why we actively push standards and continue to build great tools to make it easier for you to create awesome Web content and apps.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The cloud is everywhere. It’s unavoidable. In the words of Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, “Right now, we’re in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile. It’s a once-every-twenty-years kind of change.”
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Any doubts you might have had about Canonical, best known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, refocusing it energy on cloud-based Linux rather than desktop or mobile Linux were put to rest at the OpenStack Summit.
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In 2010, the OpenStack Summit in San Antonio, TX had 250 attendees. Fast forward and the 2014 OpenStack Summit has 4,600 registered members from 59 countries and hundreds of companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 businesses such as IBM, HP, and OpenStack’s newest Platinum member Intel.
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BSD
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Today marks twenty-one years since the release of FreeBSD 1.0, the first production-ready release of this BSD operating system.
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The OpenBSD project has released version 5.6 of its operating system. It includes LibreSSL, the fork of the OpenSSL cryptographic library in which a serious vulnerability was discovered earlier this year.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The adns 1.5.0 release now provides full IPv6 support with the ability to request AAAA records for IPv6 addresses and in communicating with nameservers via IPv6. There’s also new C functions for converting between addresses and address literals. Beyond these new features are also a number of bug fixes and API/ABI improvements.
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Project Releases
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RAR, an archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP, and other file types, is now at version 5.20 Beta 3 and it comes with a couple of new features.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Cloudera, a leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, announced the formation of Cloudera Labs, a virtual center for fostering innovations in incubation within Cloudera’s engineering R&D, and fast-tracking promising open source initiatives. Cloudera intents to use the Labs is to bring more use cases, productivity, and value to developers by seeking and exploring new solutions to their problems through the development of future standard technologies that will power the Hadoop ecosystem.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Hardware
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Once upon a time, Intel’s processors didn’t dominate AMD. In fact, AMD’s Athlon processors were mighty competitive, enough so that Intel allegedly “manipulated” its Pentium 4 benchmark scores in the early 2000s to mask the performance gap. Intel denies those claims, but nevertheless, you’re probably feeling pretty taken advantage of right now.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Two of the main rebel groups receiving weapons from the United States to fight both the regime and jihadist groups in Syria have surrendered to al-Qaeda.
The US and its allies were relying on Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front to become part of a ground force that would attack the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
For the last six months the Hazm movement, and the SRF through them, had been receiving heavy weapons from the US-led coalition, including GRAD rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles.
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American consciousness by capturing the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Mosul in June, many US elites blamed a lack of US intervention. The US should have kept troops in Iraq, they said, and intervened in Syria’s civil war. This analysis, coming from both conservatives and liberals, went virtually unchallenged by journalists whose response to the latest US wars has been a depressing replay of the coverage of more than a decade ago. Few lessons seem to have been learned.
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Using the oppression of women to sell another Iraq War
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world’s population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that’s a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
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Finance
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Facebook’s corporation tax in the United Kingdom for 2013 came to a grand total of £3,169 ($4,005). The company also received £185,196 in credits from previous years, leaving it with a credit balance of £182,027, according to documents filed with Companies House on Tuesday, Oct. 21.
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London house prices could “dip” in coming months after the number of new buyer inquiries fell to a six-year low, property experts said today in their strongest warning yet.
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But the year-on-year pace of house price growth has been slowing for two months in a row, and Nationwide said the housing market appears to have lost momentum.
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Property prices in England fell 0.2pc from August to September as prospective homeowners struggle to access finance.
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Billionaires flocking to London has seen central property prices spike. But the end of cheap money, the threat of a mansion tax and a stronger pound could mean the market’s best days are behind it.
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House prices in London are surging at a rate of almost 20% a year, which is five times the increase seen in in north-east England, according to the latest official figures. The Office for National Statistics data also revealed that the annual rate of house price growth in England hit 12.2% in August – the highest figure for a decade.
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If the latest guideline of Supreme Court is to be followed, the entire list of black money account holders should be out by the early hours of October 29. The Apex Court has ordered the Narendra Modi-led central government to reveal the entire list of perpetrators who are guilty of stocking up unaccounted sums of money. A day after the government revealed the names of Pradeep Burman (Promoter of Dabur India), Pankaj Chimanlal Lodhiya (Rajkot-based bullion trader), Radha Satish Timblo (Director of Goa-based mining company Timblo Pvt. Ltd), the SC lashed out the government to give the complete list of the black money holders to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) and the court too. Any predictions before the list come out tomorrow; please mention in the comment section below!
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Supreme Court in Delhi tells lawmakers that a list of secret foreign bank account holders that may be hiding illegal funds must be handed over Wednesday.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A hole in Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws opened by federal judge Rudolph Randa in September is being exploited by out-of-state billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, blowing open the floodgates to huge checks for the state’s gubernatorial candidates in the final weeks and days of this hotly-contested race.
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The Koch-backed American Future Fund is running a series of web-only ads urging Wisconsin stoners not to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, but instead to support the Libertarian Party candidate, Robert Burke.
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These ballot measures reflect “model” legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch, has reported.
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Attkisson resigned this year after two decades at CBS and promptly launched a media tour attacking her former employer for supposedly protecting the Obama administration from her reporting. Her new book has been published and promoted by conservative interests, who clearly see this narrative as a confirmation of their worldview that the “liberal” media is biased against them.
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HBO’s John Oliver did what many others in the media have not by shining a spotlight on the shadowy influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). But ALEC’s latest initiative, which has its sights set on molding county and municipal governments, has deeper aspirations than even Oliver’s show explored — and has been almost entirely ignored by the media.
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Censorship
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Russia has been discouraging public celebrations of Halloween as part of a campaign against western influence.
But that did not stop Teatr.Doc from staging a bitingly satirical “Night of the Living Dead” on Friday night in what may be one of the last ever productions at the tiny basement theatre in central Moscow famous for innovative and uncompromising work.
In a move that has shaken the international theatrical community, the Moscow authorities have ordered Teatr.Doc to vacate the basement on grounds that it had violated property regulations.
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The community leaders of Maiden, it turns out — to one vignette in particular. Remember that scene with the falling-down gag? There’s no sex, or kissing, or even allusions to lust. But the gravity-prone characters are both men, which was incendiary enough to lead the principal to cancel the production, citing “sexually explicit overtones and multiple sexual innuendoes.”
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A play that examines Lebanon’s censorship system has been approved by the country’s office in charge of artistic permits, a decision that could point towards a more open future for the country’s writers and performers.
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Jerry Springer the Opera creator Richard Thomas has become the latest industry figure to speak out about the importance of freedom of speech within the arts, claiming organisations funded by the taxpayer have a particular responsibility to take risks.
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A few months ago, we wrote about the strange saga of self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Stefan Molyneux more or less admitting that he and a colleague named Michael DeMarco had filed questionable DMCA notices in response to some critical YouTube videos. DeMarco and Molyneux defended the use of the DMCA by arguing that the videos involved doxxing some Molyneux supporters.
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The Northeast Ohio Media Group last week posted a video of Ohio Gov. John Kasich and challenger Ed FitzGerald meeting with the editorial board, then took it down without explanation and replaced it with an audio recording.
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Instagram did take the photo down, as per their guidelines, prompting this response from Handler: “If a man posts a photo of his nipples, it’s ok, but not a woman? Are we in 1825?”
After her first photo was removed, Handler reposted the pic again only for Instagram to remove it again.
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Earlier this week, actress Alyssa Milano posted a tender snap on her Instagram page of herself breastfeeding her one-month-old baby girl Elizabella.
The 41-year-old was the picture of maternal bliss in the black and white snap, joining the many other proud celebrity mothers who have chosen to share the intimate moment with friends and fans through social media.
The responses to this, like most A-list breastfeeding photographs, has been overwhelming positive. One follower wrote: ‘Such a beautiful photo! Thank you for sharing this sweet moment with us, and thank you for helping to normalize breastfeeding!’
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Instagram a popular social networking service that allows users to share photos and videos will now support video advertisements also. The company has reportedly allowed a few advertisers including Disney, Banana Republic, Lancome, Activision and CW to run a 15 second ad video.
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It’s well known that CIA’s been stalling over the release of the officially declassified 480 page “executive summary” of the 6,300 page CIA torture report, put together by staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee over many years at a cost of $40 million. It’s known that the report is somewhat devastating to the CIA and the CIA isn’t happy about it (at all). Originally, the CIA suggested redactions that made the report incomprehensible, even as James Clapper said it was “just 15%” that was redacted.
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We’ve heard some mumbling about one of the main reasons that the CIA has been dragging its feet on declassifying the executive summary of the CIA torture report that the Senate Intelligence Committee put together: it knows there’s a decent chance that the Republicans will win the Senate next week, and suddenly the report may disappear from view. As you may recall, the Intelligence Committee (with support from GOP Senators) voted to declassify the 480 page executive summary of the 6,300 page report (which the Senate spent $40 million putting together). Multiple leaks concerning the report have suggested that it’s devastating and details how terrible the CIA’s torture program was, how it was completely ineffective and how the CIA lied about it all.
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Privacy
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Documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal systematic espionage by the British intelligence service GCHQ on international climate negotiations. It provided UK Government agencies, including the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office, with intelligence on the negotiation strategies of other countries, and deployed agents with “suitable cover within UK delegation”
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When you have large companies that can effectively collude to block or kill certain powerful and useful apps and services, it hinders and blocks important innovations, leaving consumers significantly worse off. Not only are they left with fewer choices and lower quality apps and services, but it also pushes consumers into services — like CurrentC — that take away their privacy.
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Yet again, we see how the government handles these kinds of cases. Deny, obfuscate and hide. It’s as if the DOJ has such a weak argument that it really doesn’t want to make it publicly, because it knows it will lose.
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Twitter is using a newly discovered hidden code that the telecom carriers are adding to every page you visit – and it’s very hard to opt out.
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Wikileaks has blown the whistle on the purchase of a German surveillance software by a Bangladesh law-enforcing agency to monitor the country’s digital traffic.
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One hundred and fifteen feet deep under ground, inside a mountain on the Southside in central Stockholm, behind huge doors that look like a gateway to the future, lies one of the world’s coolest offices.
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Civil Rights
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Marathon County sits in the center of the state of Wisconsin. The rural area has a little more than 135,400 residents and is the heart of the US’ ginseng growing industry. It is also the proud owner of a BearCat armored vehicle, which was used this month to draw a 75-year-old man out of his home because he owed $80,000 to the town in which he was born and raised.
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Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that he expects “a resolution” of the dispute over federal prosecutors’ demand for New York Times reporter James Risen’s testimony in a leak case against his alleged source.
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Another argument for default phone encryption: to keep criminals from accessing your personal photos and sharing them with others.
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The California Highway Patrol officer accused of stealing nude photos from a DUI suspect’s phone told investigators that he and his fellow officers have been trading such images for years, in a practice that stretches from its Los Angeles office to his own Dublin station, according to court documents obtained by this newspaper Friday.
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When you get off a train, do you get off ahead of passengers? Or do you get off behind passengers? When you’re going on a trip, do you come off as nervous? Or are you an unusually calm traveler? How about if you make a phone call at a station, do you look around? Or do you stare straight ahead?
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When Young started getting selected for enhanced screening in 2009, he was not terribly surprised. “When you have an activist background, you tend to repress this stuff,” he says. ”I had Stockholm Syndrome. I did this thing some years ago and now I just have to deal with it.” But he had a long-distance girlfriend to whom he would vent after every trip, and she thought it was crazy. She encouraged him to start writing it down. He started journaling.
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A Goodyear police officer is accused of recording at least 21 women while they were undressing in an Avondale tanning salon.
One of the victims reported seeing a camera phone on top of the dividing wall separating the tanning salon rooms as she undressed, Avondale police spokesman Sgt. Mathew Hintz said.
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Recordings obtained by the AP show that the feds accepted a no-fly zone over Ferguson aimed at media helicopters
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On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, FAA air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to let commercial flights operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and police helicopters fly through the area — but ban others.
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The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.
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I was told by a member of the Metropolitan Police Operation Lydd team that they believe there are grounds to prosecute Jack Straw, but that the Crown Prosecution Service will bury it. That was over two years ago when I gave my own sworn evidence to the investigation.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Hungary has decided to shelve a proposed tax on internet data traffic after mass protests against the plan.
“This tax in its current form cannot be introduced,” Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday.
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Earlier this week, we wrote about widespread demonstrations against a monumentally stupid plan by the Hungarian government to tax internet usage on a per-gigabyte-downloaded plan. The protests caused the government to “modify” the plan and put a cap on how much tax would be charged, but that seemed to do little to stop the complaints — and thus, the government is shelving the plan entirely, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban announcing that the “tax in its current form cannot be introduced.” Of course, that leaves open the possibility of it coming back in “another” form. But perhaps Orban is learning not to take on the internet.
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Gautham Nagesh at the Wall Street Journal (who was also the first to reveal many of the details of Tom Wheeler’s original net neutrality proposal) had a story last night confirming the buzz over the last few weeks that Wheeler is now exploring a new set of “hybrid” net neutrality rules that appear, on their face, to take parts of the plans that consumer groups want and parts of what the broadband players want… and comes out, in the end, with a plan that almost no one wants. There is something to the old saying that a good compromise leaves everyone a little unhappy, but it appears that the rules being contemplated right now might leave nearly everyone really unhappy. It’s not clear that’s a good result.
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Every year the MPAA spends millions of dollars in Washington to guarantee their anti-piracy interests are secured. In the most recent quarter the Hollywood group added several of its topics to the agenda of U.S. lawmakers, including Internet tax and net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Australia’s administration has introduced a Data Retention bill, learning nothing from the court rulings that declare the practice to be in violation of fundamental rights. They plan to log everybody’s correspondence and movements – with the idea of using that data to enforce the copyright monopoly.
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When Google is taking intellectual works from within the EU and using them, then the EU has to protect those works and demand a tax from Google.
Coming from the person who is charged with reforming European copyright, this does not augur well. If Oettinger really thinks that such a tax is the way forward for copyright in the digital age, he is evidently as clueless about the Internet as everyone feared he was, after telling the European Parliament that celebrities storing nude pictures online are stupid.
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After more than a year in the works, Spain passed on Thursday its Intellectual Property Law, with its hotly debated, so-called Google tax that allows for fines on aggregators that show snippets of content without paying for it.
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Apparently ignoring just how badly this worked out for publishers in Germany, the Spanish Parliament has passed a law to fine aggregators and search engines for using snippets or linking to infringing content. As plenty of folks have described, the bill is clearly just a Google tax. As we had discussed, the proposed bill would be a disaster for digital commons/open access projects. There had been some thought that the proposed bill might be delayed because of a referral to the EU Court of Justice on a related issue, but apparently that didn’t happen. Either way, it looks like the bill kept the ridiculous “inalienable right” to being paid for snippets — meaning that Creative Commons-type licenses may not even be allowed, and people won’t even be allowed to offer up their content for free. That’s ridiculous.
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Send this to a friend
11.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Most of the mainstream angst directed towards Windows 8 and 8.1 in the U.S. has to do with the Modern UI and little things like the lack of a Start menu. But while hopes are high that Windows 10 will be the OS everyone wanted Windows 8 to be, China’s concerns run much deeper than the UI. As such, China reportedly plans to undergo a “de-Windowsifying” process in which its systems will be move to a state-endorsed version of Linux by 2020.
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Desktop
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China is presently in a situation to completely eradicate Windows from the country. Though this is not immediately possible, the map to wipe-out the Windows operating system from every computer is planned over a period of a few years from now.
According to a report on SoftPedia, China has planned to move away from Microsoft Windows completely. Recently, China had announced the ban of Windows 8 in the country accusing Microsoft of spying the China government and businesses via the operating system.
China has made it mandatory to all organizations to switch from the Microsoft Windows operating system to a locally developed operating system based on Linux.
China believes that by the year 2020, they will successfully eradicate Windows and would have an already switched to a more powerful and secure operating system of their own.
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Kernel Space
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News seemed a bit slow on this All Hallows Eve, but there was still plenty to highlight. Folks are questioning Microsoft’s recent claims to “love Linux.” Systemd is back in the headlines with a primer from Chris Hoffman, a Fedora Rawhide systemd warning is in effect, and someone Ask Slashdot if readers could say anything nice about systemd. Jack M. Germain reviews Qubes OS and Larry Cafiero brings “The Wide World of Canonical.”
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Graphics Stack
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While Enlightenment E19 has significant Wayland improvements, it looks like E20 will be even better with regard to Wayland support.
There was a big branch merge yesterday that makes the new Wayland compositor functional (e-comp-wl).
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Published on Friday was a massive set of 72 patches to improve the Freescale iMX DRM driver that’s currently within the Linux kernel’s staging area.
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Applications
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I’m not a fan of applications that attempt to manage my music collection, mostly because I have the music arranged, in folders, how I like it. Similarly I’m not interested in ratings systems, fuzzy searches, popularity statistics or tagging, other than making sure the data in the built-in tag matches the file name. Sorry. It’s just not my nature.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this article I will show you how to install Calibre 2.8.0 on Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, Pinguy OS, LXLE, Linux Lite, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux, Manjaro and other Linux systems.
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizza Boy will be the first Linux game released using the engine, which was made available on GitHub back in February. By using the GODOT to create the game, they are adding the tools necessary to create adventure games on the engine – which will then be made public after its release.
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Here is the latest instalment of Steam’s Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Skrooge Team announces the release 1.10.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.
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From the One-to-watch Department: If you do any graphics work you should take a look at Krita Desktop, a really impressive painting tool that rivals Adobe Photoshop for features and makes some ways of working much easier.
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New Releases
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Simplicity Linux 14.10 is now available for everyone to download. It uses the 3.15.4 kernel. Netbook and Desktop Editions both use LXDE as the desktop environment, and X Edition uses KDE 4.12.3. The download links are as follows:
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Red Hat Family
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Johnny Hughes has revealed that CentOS 6.6, the next version of the famous modular Linux distribution, is now available for download for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
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Jim Whitehurst, who was chief operating officer at Delta Airlines before becoming CEO of Red Hat, has led the open-source software company to new heights.
Annual revenue, which totaled $523 million when Whitehurst took over the helm at the outset of 2008, is expected to be more than triple that – approaching $1.8 billion – for Red Hat’s fiscal year that ends in February.
The Raleigh-based company prospered during the recession, and it has continued to thrive as the economy has slowly improved.
Wall Street has taken notice. Red Hat shares have nearly tripled during Whitehurst’s tenure.
Amazingly, the company is built on a foundation of free software.
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Fedora
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While Fedora 21 Beta is coming next week, if you’re wanting to upgrade early to the Fedora 21 packages, it’s advised right now against using Fedora’s upgrade utility (Fedup) unless you want to potentially trash your system.
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Currently Fedora 21 has a build of systemd that includes a new feature that was added upstream after the release of 216, which is intended to time out system startup if it’s not complete after 15 minutes – the idea being to avoid things like your laptop melting / starting a fire in your bag if it gets accidentally powered on, stuff like that.
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Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has announced the election schedule meant to fill the two new “at large” slots on Fedora’s upcoming Fedora Council governance body.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for October 31st, 2014:
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Did you ever wonder whether the packages you have installed are still maintained or will be available when you update to the next release? I might have a solution to answer this question for you. Recently I wrote a little script that reports packages that are orphaned, retired or missing from your current Fedora/EPEL release or any newer release. It is still only in a proof-of-concept status, but I hope to get it into Fedora eventually together with a useful cron job (or systemd timer) to get regular status reports.
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Debian Family
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My significant other is running Debian stable on her laptop, and it has worked fine for quite a while. But since a week or two, she could not access her University IMAP account via Evolution. Obviously quite a showstopper!
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I haven’t done a review of Ubuntu in a while, so the release of Ubuntu 14.10 last week game me a good excuse to do just that.
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Phones
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Tizen
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It looks like we will be getting the first Tizen Smartphone being released VERY soon, as a dual SIM Samsung SM-Z130H/DS, which is Samsung’s first budget Tizen Smartphone, has just been listed as undergoing certification at the FCC. Generally speaking devices do tend to be launched / released soon after FCC approval. It was announced that we could get a Tizen Smartphone in India for November, so this maybe the prophecy coming true.
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Android
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Poynt launched a portable, Android-based PoS device with 7- and 4.3-inch touchscreens, plus WiFi, BLE, 4G, NFC, and EMV, plus a printer and card scanner.
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Under Google, Motorola has been one of the more exciting OEMs out there. It produced the first round Andorid Wear device, the Moto 360, and great flagships like the Moto X. It made best-in-class low-end phones with the Moto G and Moto E, and now with Google it produced the Nexus 6.
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ExecutiveBiz: Where can Open Source help agencies manage some of those budget challenges?
Jonathan Moneymaker: In our National Security market Open Source is an idea whose time has come. Gone are the days of questions around quality, scalability, or security. The value is really in speed and flexibility. In many cases deploying open source solutions enable us to start at a 80-90% or higher solution then integrate or customize that framework to a specific mission set that is able to adapt as fast as the threats our customers are combatting.
In terms of scalability or security, we designed in parallel to our customer’s roadmaps building on Accumulo, the AWS infrastructure and ensuring capabilities such as our big data and visualization platform, Lumify, are fully ICITE compliant. By doing so, it gives our customers the speed to mission required and every dollar spent goes directly into mission capability delivering budgetary relief that they have been looking for from costly traditional proprietary licensing models.
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TIBCO stages its annual global convention next week – what used to be called TUCON is now called TIBCO NOW.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Google plans to disable support for SSL 3.0 in an upcoming Chrome release. Mozilla has similar intentions.
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SaaS/Big Data
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A lot of people back up their data to the cloud. But how do you back up the cloud itself? Convirture, the company that until now has specialized in cloud and virtualization management solutions, hopes to answer this question with a new backup and disaster recovery solution for the OpenStack open source cloud operating system running on the KVM hypverisor.
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Mirantis, the “pure-play” OpenStack vendor, is gearing up for the release of version 6.0 of its open source cloud computing platform, which will be based on OpenStack Juno and include the latest Hadoop big data and network functions virtualization (NFV) features, the company said in details of the new release.
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CMS
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Up to 12 million websites may have been compromised by attackers who took advantage of a bug in the widely used Drupal software.
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BSD
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We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.6. This is our 36th release on CD-ROM (and 37th via FTP/HTTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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When it comes to code that runs a computer or a program, Richard Stallman believes it should be free.
Not only at no cost to the user, but unshackled and independent. To Stallman, it is a matter of liberty, not price.
“We say free software as in ‘free speech’ not ‘free beer,’” Stallman said.
The computer programmer and activist shared his views, which earned him the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” during a presentation at Weber State University on Thursday.
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Red Hat’s David Malcolm remains committed to landing his just-in-time (JIT) compiler support for GCC.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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To those who are only marginally familiar with bitcoin, the world’s leading digital cryptocurrency, the idea of adapting the tech into a type of globally accessible passport may seem odd. But Christopher Ellis, a hacker that specializes in privacy and decentralized security, sees them as a natural fit.
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VistA is the electronic health records system created by the Veterans Administration, which became open source because as the result of taxpayer funded work it was covered under the Freedom of Information Act and was obtained by outside companies seeking to leverage it for their own projects. The VA and the DoD flirted with using VistA as part of a common open source EHR that would cover members of the military from the first day of active duty into their lives as veterans. But whether because of organizational or technical reasons, that joint technical project broke down.
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This year sees the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. From 1961 to 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by the most visible sign of the Cold War: a barrier more than 140km (87 miles) long.
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A 15-year-old Army cadet who was selling poppies for Remembrance Day suffered burns to his face in an attack with a lit aerosol can.
The boy, who was wearing his uniform, was at a bus stop near Manchester Art Gallery at 18:00 GMT on Saturday when he was attacked.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Once again making open mockery of the territorial integrity of Pakistan , the American CIA operated planes struck in the North Waziristan agency Thursday morning killing at least four people. The foreign office has strongly condemned the fresh drone hit in NWA where the Pakistan Army led security forces are already conducting an effective surgery against the insurgents for the last more than four months and made substantial gains in curbing the terrorism. Unconfirmed reports say those kill in Thursday’s missiles hit, include two foreign militants.
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Mamana’s son, Rafiq ur Rehman, is a 39-year-old primary-school teacher. He and his two children, Zubair, 13, and Nabila, 9, were the first family members of a U.S. drone strike victim ever to speak to Members of Congress. Rafiq explained that he and his family were educators, not terrorists. He wanted to know why his family was targeted by the U.S. military. Zubair, a teenager, recalled how he “watched a U.S. drone kill my grandmother.” He described why he now fears blue skies: “Because drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” Nabila was picking okra with her grandmother for a religious holiday meal, when day became night. “I saw from the sky a drone and I hear a dum-dum noise. Everything was dark and I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a scream.”
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The lesson for me from the play and the quilts is that there are many different victims of drone warfare – and that it’s time for the US to reconsider this policy. Congress needs to reassert its control over US war-making and insist on ending this drone program. Of those who speak for us in Congress, Senator Schumer is only one who has not acted to demand that Congress be the decider over what is now becoming an undeclared and endless war policy – in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.
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Islamabad- Pakistan has strongly condemned the recent US drone attack in South Waziristan.
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The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Thursday directed a petitioner to help it determine whether the judiciary had the authority to deliberate on a case against US drone strikes. The court issued these instructions in light of a Supreme Court judgment last year which declared the apex court could not decide on matters of foreign affairs.
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The current surge in drone strikes in FATA has reignited the infamous ‘drone debate’ and ‘Pakistan’s tacit agreement’ on intelligence sharing with the United States.
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Drone attacks are widely unpopular across Pakistan and the country has opposed the strikes several times in past considering it a violation of their territorial sovereignty. (end) sbk.ibi
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It was a familiar and warm exchange of greetings and spirited talk. The small group of activists I was with had called out to the military gate guards with a question concerning the spider web like substance that seemed to be everywhere around the base; on cars, vegetation telephone poles, fences, floating in the air and across the land. Men with sidearms and radios in camo fatigues approached us.
It was just then getting dark with the officer-in-charge and us each on our legal side of the white line that marked base property and certain arrest should we cross it. With U2s and fighter jets flying around overhead, the officer in charge cheerfully insisted we were looking at spider webs. He then asked if we intended to cross the line at which we answered “not tonight”
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Peace protesters placed photographs of children injured in drone attacks in the Middle East on the fence of a Gwynedd airfield.
Cymdeithas y Cymod (Fellowship of Reconciliation) members were responding to news that Llanbedr Airfield will start flight tests of Remotely Piloted Aircraft or drones in early 2015.
Around 25 people took part in the protest yesterday.
Peace campaigner Anna Jane Evans said: “We are worried Wales is being used more and more as a practice ground for killing.
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Last year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London embarked upon an ambitious effort to record the names of people reportedly killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. The project, called Naming the Dead, aims to acknowledge those who have lost their lives in the strikes and to create more transparency about a counterterrorism program shrouded in secrecy.
The CIA has conducted hundreds of drone strikes targeting militants in Pakistan’s tribal regions since June 2004. U.S. officials have lauded the program for its effectiveness and precision, and it has become an essential pillar of the administration’s counterterrorism policy. Yet despite promises by President Barack Obama to make the program more transparent and apply the highest possible standards to avoid civilian casualties, the administration has, so far, continued its secretive practices.
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Former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern was arrested as he attempted to attend an event in New York City featuring former CIA director and retired military general, David Petraeus. He was charged with resisting arrest, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.
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Ray McGovern, a retired CIA agent turned peace activist, was arrested by the New York Police Department before McGovern could attend a speech by David Petraeus. Witnesses say McGovern was “yelling in pain” as he was being detained.
Former CIA director David Petraeus, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel John Nagl, and author Max Boot were slated to give a speech on American Foreign Policy at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side in New York. The anti-war group “The World Can’t Wait” said McGovern was arrested “at protest of speech.”
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A former CIA analyst turned anti-war activist was arrested right after attempting to crash a discussion about foreign policy with retired Army Gen. and former CIA Director David Petraeus — even although he claims he purchased the $45 ticket. Ray McGovern,…
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Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau’s new book unveils the secret history of how the United States became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents. Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”
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Amazon’s $600 million contract with the CIA related to cloud computing services has caused alarm throughout the civil liberties community. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed raising concern that the CIA could be using its access to Amazon’s massive data to conduct intelligence work rather than simply storing data. In light of the ongoing domestic spying scandal regarding the NSA, fewer and fewer people are willing to take government assurances on protecting the public’s privacy.
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Thus began the Iran-Contra scandal. The Contras were an irregular military formation put together by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1981 to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The war they provoked caused tens of thousands of deaths and devastating damage to Nicaragua’s economy.
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Federal prosecutors obtained 100 blank subpoenas last week for use in the upcoming trial of a CIA officer accused of leaking top-secret information to New York Times reporter James Risen.
The move clears the way for the Justice Department to proceed with a new review of whether Risen should be subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, the CIA employee accused of disclosing details of a CIA effort to set back Iran’s nuclear program.
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Former CIA operative Bob Baer’s newest book on assassinations hasn’t even been released yet, and he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” federal officials have already told him there’s a threat on his life.
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/Newsfront/CIA-Book-Bob-Baer-FBI/2014/10/27/id/603354/#ixzz3HvRbCqLm
Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!
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Be it war, counterterrorism, securing Africa’s natural resources or fighting ebola, this former US Navy SEAL, now a billionaire, is the ultimate Mr Fix-It when it comes to the world of what used to be known as mercenarism.
Today, that word, “mercenarism”, with its dogs-of-war and soldiers-of-fortune connotations, is frowned upon by the likes of men like Prince, who much prefer the less lurid acronym of PMSCs – private military and security companies – to describe their line of business.
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While Attorney General Eric Holder is calling for the Senate and the Obama Administration to lay bare the alleged abuse of detainees in Central Intelligence Agency custody, his Justice Department is going to unusual lengths to impose a complete black-out on details about the investigations he supervised into those same incidents.
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For politicians, “Transparency and accountability!” is one of those uncommonly generous and dark-horse-sympathetic political slogans: the kind that parties of any ideology can plagiarize but that underdogs can most easily claim as their own (at least while they remain underdogs).
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Finance
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Over 50,000 low-income homes in Detroit have had their water services terminated since 2013. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes dismissed a lawsuit that argued that terminating water services is denying individuals the right to life. Rhodes ruled that free or affordable water is not a “fundamental right.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The chatter around Kill the Messenger, the film based on the life of investigative reporter Gary Webb, has mostly faded. But this week USA Today ran a column that mangled the basic facts of Webb’s reporting.
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Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool—what the firm calls the “voter megaphone”—has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook’s ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company’s actions can affect the voting behavior of its users.
In particular, Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users—the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience—can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.
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The Center for Media and Democracy has asked Wisconsin’s U.S. Attorneys to investigate Wisconsin Club for Growth for allegedly making false statements on tax filings and conspiring to defraud the United States, federal crimes arising from WiCFG claiming to spend $0 in political activity in 2011 and 2012 while spending almost $20 million influencing elections.
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Censorship
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Hungary’s leader suspended a controversial plan to tax Internet traffic in the face of mass protests and corporate opposition.
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It’s hard being Verizon sometimes. The poor little wireless carrier and Internet service provider often gets a bum rap in the tech press for its controversial actions on net neutrality and on enabling the American government’s surveillance programs. To combat these nattering negative ninnies in the media, Verizon has decided to take action and bankroll its own news site where none of those nasty sorts of stories will ever pop up.
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Privacy
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Tenet had a request from former President George H.W. Bush, who served as CIA director from 1976 to 1977. Olson says Bush was always a “strong advocate” of intelligence, and wanted it to be taught at A&M’s new school of government and public service that bore his name. Olson’s move to Marquette was two weeks away, but the idea of “helping build a program of intelligence and national security” was too appealing, he said.
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A UK court has upheld the Government’s right to ban commercial marketing of a money-saving telephone service on security grounds because it could provide anonymity for callers. The service uses “GSM gateways” that can reduce call charges by rerouting calls through mobile phone SIM cards – but it also allows users to make anonymous calls, potentially avoiding government surveillance.
The Court of Appeal refused to award companies damages for a government licensing system that in effect bans the GSM gateway services they offered and largely halted their business.
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Earlier this month we wrote about potential malicious behavior in Adobe’s e-reader software, “Digital Editions.” There were several independent reports claiming that Adobe’s software was sending back to Adobe–in the clear–a list of books read in the software. There were also independent reports that the program was sending back lists of books on an attached e-reader, even if those books had never been opened in ADE itself – in other words, collecting information not just about the book you are reading now, but your electronic library.
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In terms of both design and security, hidden services still need some love. We have plans for improved designs (see Tor proposal 224) but we don’t have enough funding and developers to make it happen. We’ve been talking to some Facebook engineers this week about hidden service reliability and scalability, and we’re excited that Facebook is thinking of putting development effort into helping improve hidden services.
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Two high school students in Taunton have been suspended after they posted a photo of themselves holding Airsoft rifles. Thousands of people have leapt to their defense online, but their school isn’t backing down.
The Airsoft rifles look dangerous, but they shoot plastic pellets. Tito Velez, 15, often competes with a team as a hobby.
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The National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records will face a fresh test this coming week when a Washington, D.C., appeals-court panel hears arguments over the surveillance program.
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Brazil is building a cable across the Atlantic to escape the reach of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The move is one of many ways the Brazilian government is breaking ties with American technology companies — but it won’t come cheap.
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While Congress mulls how to curtail the NSA’s collection of Americans’ telephone records, impatient civil liberties groups are looking to legal challenges already underway in the courts to limit government surveillance powers.
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With little more than two months before he closes the book on a 16-year Congressional career, U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.) discussed the challenges in store when it comes to preserving civil liberties in the 21st century.
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This is a longstanding issue that’s been brought up by lots of people lots of times. It’s not some minor subtlety. If the government decides to look for “all calls from the 213 area code,” that’s not necessarily bulk collection even though it would amass millions of records. It would be up to a judge to decide.
[...]
If and when we get close to Congress actually considering bills to rein in the NSA—about which I’m only modestly optimistic in the first place—this is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on. As the ACLU and the EFF and others keep reminding us, reining in the NSA isn’t a simple matter of “ending” their bulk collection program. The devil is truly in the details, and tiny changes in wording can literally mean the difference between something that works and something that’s useless. Or maybe even worse than useless. As Pohlman points out, if you choose the right words, the NSA could end up having a freer hand than they do today. This is something to pay close attention to.
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That man, Leslie James Pickering, is a bookstore owner in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, however, Pickering was formerly a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, an environmental group deemed “eco-terrorists” by the FBI—and the presumed cause of his surveillance.
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On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman’s state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the “Iran oil situation”, and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected “leftist” governments.
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The Pentagon has scaled back its plan to assemble an overseas spy service that could have rivaled the CIA in size, backing away from a project that faced opposition from lawmakers who questioned its purpose and cost, current and former U.S. officials said.
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Will we ever see the Senate’s 6,000 page report on CIA torture without someone leaking it? A leak always been the most likely resolution for the transparency-seeking public, but, in this case, it’s increasingly looking like the only one.
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The document is known as the “Panetta Review,” and senators contend it backs up damning conclusions in their still-classified report on the CIA’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program. Senate investigators uncovered the internal CIA document in their years-long probe, and the agency was so concerned that it alleged the investigators had broken the law in obtaining the review. CIA agents, in turn, searched Senate computers.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a new brief in response to a government opposition against a summary judgment motion.
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Not satisfied with a Bay Area judge’s ruling that allowed the government to withhold a series of documents about its telephone surveillance program, the Obama administration filed an appeal Monday over the one document that the judge ordered disclosed.
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Not only did this explanation finally clarify what had previously been to me a very confusing idea, it also confirmed what I had already come to suspect: namely, that high-ranking officials from the NSA possess a paternalistic and condescending attitude toward the American people. The fundamental premise of Hayden’s argument is that the American people are like children, who must not only be protected from external threats, but also from themselves.
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Private companies should not use the law of talion, taking revenge over the entities, which are suspected to be hacking them, warned Joel Brenner, a former senior counsel at the NSA and and head of US counterintelligence under the Director of National Intelligence.
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National Journal raises an interesting question about the presumed candidacy of Hillary Clinton: Where does she fall on NSA spying and the mass surveillance state?
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On 6 June 2013 the Guardian and Washington Post published the first in the latest round of revelations about the NSA’s surveillance programs. Amidst the outpouring of brave rhetoric about the need to change, I predicted that nothing would happen. Rather, our passivity would encourage the leaders of the national security state (aka the Deep State). After 17 months it’s clear I was right
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Civil Rights
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…U.S. economic and military policies have made huge impacts in Central America.
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Boynton Beach police arrested their own Stephen Maiorino Thursday for allegedly raping a woman earlier this month. Police said he held a gun while he assaulted the 20-year-old victim and threated to kill her family if she told anyone. He will be fired, the department said.
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Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned-antiwar activist, shared details with RT on Friday about an incident the night before in New York City during which he was arrested for trying to enter a public event.
McGovern, 75, says he had ticket to see former CIA director David Petraeus speak Thursday night at the 92nd Street Y, a “world-class cultural and community center,” according to its website, but was arrested before he could get inside.
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A dozen of Nobel Peace Prize laureates have urged US President Barack Obama to declassify information on tortures applied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in interrogations of suspected terrorists.
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The torture techniques were devised by the CIA in collaboration with intelligence officers from the Egyptian and Saudi regimes, according to the report.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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As we’ve pointed out in the past, the wireless providers, led by lobbying group CTIA, are desperate not to have the FCC include wireless broadband in whatever new net neutrality/open internet rules it releases. However, Tom Wheeler has been hinting that he’s had enough of wireless providers screwing over the American public. The head of CTIA, Meredith Attwell Baker (famous for jumping from an FCC commissioner job to head Comcast lobbyist just months after she approved Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal), has written an absolutely hilarious opinion piece at Wireless Week insisting that everyone loves their wireless providers, so there’s no need whatsoever to apply any net neutrality rules.
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[I am posting below a short essay by my friend and colleague Brett Frischmann of Cardozo Law School concerning the “net neutrality” rules now being considered by the FCC. I’ve stayed largely away from the whole net neutrality debate over the years — too much inside [FCC] baseball for my taste — but Brett’s been in the middle of it for some time, and I think he draws attention below to a simple, but very profound, problem at the heart of the approach the agency is taking: the distinction it is drawing between “edge providers” (suppliers of content) and “end users” (recipients of content). One can hardly imagine a more inappropriate distinction one could draw on the Internet that we now have, so much of whose power has come from its “end-to-end” design: all senders are recipients, all recipients are senders, and all IP addresses are equal. But I’ll let Brett fill in more of the details./DGP]
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THE NET NEUTRALITY DEBATE looks set to be settled soon with a neither-fish-nor-flesh solution designed to appease everyone and please no one.
According to sources close to Tim Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and chief architect of the deal that no one wants except the cable industry, the Shill in Chief is expected to announce that the FCC will take on greater responsibility for broadband management.
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Public advocacy groups said they are making progress in talks with U.S. regulators to apply utility-style rules to ensure broadband providers treat Web traffic fairly.
“The baseline of what we can expect has gone up,” Chris Riley, senior policy engineer with browser maker Mozilla, said in a blog post yesterday. Likely outcomes are that the Federal Communications Commission will use powers crafted last century for telephone companies to devise net neutrality rules, he said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Activist and writer Peter Kofod argues that the trial of Swedish Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg represented a total failure on the part of the Danish police and legal system.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.31.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So, XP is dead, “7” is dying, “8” is a zombie, and “10” is vapourware with nowhere to call home. M$ continues layoffs. POOF! It all falls down. In the meantime Google and the OEMs will crank out many millions of ChromeBooks. Canonical, Linpus, RedHat, Suse… and the OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux PCs. Several OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux thin clients. Android/Linux will reverberate with another billion or so units of small cheap computers(tablets, smartphones). This looks like good news to me.
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Desktop
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CHINA HAS DISCLOSED plans to move its systems to a state-endorsed version of Linux by 2020.
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Server
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Linux Warehouse, a value-added distributor of enterprise open source solutions, is proud to announce its collaboration with Stratus Technologies, a global provider of always-on solutions. The partnership will enable Linux Warehouse to introduce Stratus Technologies’ next-generation software, everRun Enterprise, which has been developed to prevent downtime, to the sub-Sahara African market.
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Container-loving Linux vendor CoreOS has made its on-premises Docker container registry software available as a standalone product.
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Kernel Space
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If Linus Torvalds doesn’t have any big issues with the design of systemd, perhaps it’s not all bad. If you’d like a calm look at why a Linux distribution might want to go with systemd, Debian’s systemd discussion document is good reading.
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The Ubuntu kernel team is pleased to announce that we will be providing extended stable support for the Linux 3.16 kernel until April 2016 as a third party effort maintained on our infrastructure. The team will pick up stable maintenance where Greg KH left off with v3.16.7 [1].
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David Airlie at Red Hat spent today looking at DisplayLink USB 3.0 support and froum the sounds of it, it’s going to be a mess to support without some official documentation or development support.
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Wim Tayman added a native Bluetooth HSP headset backend to PulseAudio. This backend allows PulseAudio to output audio to a headset supporting the HSP profile. HSP is short for the Headset Profile and is the most commonly used profile for Bluetooth headsets and mobile phones. Those wishing to learn more about Bluetooth HSP can visit Bluetooth.org.
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Graphics Stack
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For those wondering whether there’s ABI breakage with this week’s X.Org Server 1.17 Release Candidate, there is indeed some breakage that will warrant the proprietary driver ABIs to be updated and released.
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Among other things, commit b851ca968b7cce6d1a6438c05d3d5c8832249704 added a NameWindowPixmap function pointer to ScreenRec, shifting some of the fields around.
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In an interesting change of events, Code Aurora on the behalf of the Qualcomm Innovation Center has added Adreno A4xx product support to the Freedreno-spawned DRM/KMS “MSM” driver.
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At yesterday’s X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting they approved one project for the Outreach Program for Women.
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Applications
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There are quite a few terminals out there, and some of them follow the drop-down style. GNOME has Guake, a GTK-based terminal emulator with lots of features, but there is also Tilda or Final Term, while the KDE de-facto terminal is Yakuake.
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I’m sure many Atom users already know this, but I didn’t get to write an article about it, so here’s a quick update: the Atom developers have started providing 64bit DEB packages for more than a month. Also, 4 days ago, they added official 64bit RPM packages.
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CherryTree is a notes-taking application which organizes your notes into a hierarchical tree, has support for text formatting, and is written in GTK2/Python. Lately this application has got a lot of attention due to rich features and frequent updates. It also comes by default in distributions such as MakuluLinux MATE Edition.
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GSmartControl is an application that allows users to check the health of the drives with the help of the SMART data. It’s not a unique application and there are others that can do this job, but it’s always a good thing to have alternatives.
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Xine is both an open source multimedia playback engine and a video playback application that’s been around for a very long time. The number of people using this application has diminished, and there are few maintained third-party apps that are based on this engine. We’ll take a closer look at the application to see why this is happening.
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Instructionals/Technical
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She who rules databases rules the world. Even if you don’t want to rule the world, knowing a good set of database commands will make your life easier.
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.30 is now available.
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The newest release, Wine 1.7.30, still lacks the Direct3D command stream multi-threading work or any breakthroughs in better Direct3D 10/11 support, but it continues working on Wine’s recent focus of DirectWrite support, a text layout and glyph rendering API with hardware aceleration that began in the Windows 7 days to replace their GDI(+) interface.
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Games
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Humble Bundle’s in-house port team has ported more than 100 games to the Linux platform, the company announced today.
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It’s no longer absurd to build a gaming box around Linux. Sure, there are still far more titles available for Windows, but between solutions like Wine and a growing concerted effort to support the open source platform, the situation is improving at a faster rate than ever before. Valve deserves kudos for promoting Linux through Steam, and surprise, surprise, Humble Bundle is fast becoming a pioneering force with over 100 games having been ported to Linux.
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The Steam Halloween Sale is a new promotion which includes games fit for the Halloween theme, which will last until November 3rd. Tens of titles for Linux are included as well, and come at discounts as high as 90%.
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Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is a role-playing game which has finally made it to Steam earlier today. The game takes place in a fantasy universe called the Spine of the World and features single-player, multi-player and co-op modes.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Desktop Linux users beware: IT has noticed you and decided it;s time you were properly managed.
So says VMware, which yesterday at its vForum event in China let it be know that it will deliver a desktop virtualisation (VDI) solution for Linux desktops.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today we did an important change in how KWin will distribute its assets in the upcoming 5.2 release. When we started our thoughts about the Look’n’Feel Package and how we want to have meta themes for the complete Plasma workspace we also wanted to have this for the Window and Desktop switcher provided by KWin. So the structure of the Look’n’Feel Package already has all the pieces for including the Window and Desktop Switcher, but it was not used. Now we finally addressed this for the 5.2 release and moved the default switcher into the Look’n’Feel Package and KWin can locate the switchers from the Look’n’Feel Package.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Earlier this month GTK+ 3.16 development code gained native OpenGL support. This GTK+ OpenGL support involved adding support for wrapping an OpenGL context for native windows with GLX on X11 and EGL on Wayland to use OpenGL to paint everything. A GtkGLArea widget was also added for providing OpenGL drawing access within GTK+ applications. The GtkGLArea has already seen some more improvements to better GTK’s OpenGL support.
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For the past several months, Olivier Crête and I have been working on a project using libnice at Collabora, which is now coming to a close. Through the project we’ve managed to add a number of large, new features to libnice, and implement hundreds (no exaggeration) of cleanups and bug fixes. All of this work was done upstream, and is available in libnice 0.1.8, released recently! GLib has also gained a number of networking fixes, API additions and documentation improvements.
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Reviews
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Puppy Linux 6.0 is a lightweight Linux distribution that can easily be run off a USB stick, SD card or live disc. This version has been dubbed “Tahrpup” by the Puppy Linux developers, and it is based on Ubuntu 14.04. It also uses Linux kernel 3.14.20.
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It has advanced far beyond the primitive proof of concept demonstrated more than four years ago. Release 2 (beta), which arrived in late September, is a powerful desktop OS.
Qubes succeeds in seamless integrating security by isolation into the user experience. However, comparing Qubes to a typical Linux distro is akin to comparing the Linux OS to Unix.
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New Releases
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There are numerous Linux distributions that are oriented towards education, but you can never have too many in a domain such as this one. It’s based on the Black Lab Professional Desktop, which is a very good and powerful solution. Interestingly enough, Black Lab Linux is actually based on Ubuntu, and the latest one uses the 14.04.1 base (Trusty Tahr).
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Arch Family
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The Arch-based Manjaro crew has been developing Calamares, an open-source installation framework they hope will basically lead to being a universal Linux distribution installer.
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Red Hat Family
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Adlink released two Linux-ready COM Express Type 2 modules running on Intel 4th Gen. Core and Intel Atom e3800 SoCs, respectively.
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Open source software company Red Hat expects big business in India as the government kick-starts its investment in IT and number of startups in the country grows and also expects to grow its shared-services base in India.
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Fedora
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While Fedora 21 Beta was delayed, today it received the go ahead to be released next week Tuesday.
Jaroslav Reznik of Red Hat shared that at today’s Go/No-Go meeting the F21 Beta was approved by Fedora QA, release engineering, and development teams. Fedora 21 Beta will make it out now on Tuesday, 4 November.
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At the Fedora 21 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting #3 that just occurred, it was agreed to Go with the Fedora 21 Beta by Fedora QA, Release Engineering and Development.
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We arrived at the olf1Drury Friday afternoon and got settled into the room. We then checked on the event and got our registration stuff all taken care off that afternoon. I checked out where we needed to set up. We had the table right next to the Red Hat table. We were in a good location at the end or the isle for easy access for everyone to get to. This weekend the weather was good and there was not a cloud in the sky. We were hoping for a busy day on Saturday.
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This week saw a nasty little bug land in rawhide that hit most everyone: bug 1159117
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Specs have been leaked for a 10.1-inch Ubuntu Touch tablet called “UT One” that runs on an Intel Atom Z3735D SoC, with shipments expected in December.
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I thought perhaps it was a one-off mistake made by a marketing department flunky who perhaps had too much Red Bull while writing a press release. Being the responsible company that Canonical/Ubuntu is, and being the good FOSS community member that it portrays itself to be, I assumed they’d fix the error right away and make sure that ludicrous hyperbole was not the order of the day.
Would that be asking too much?
Perhaps. Sadly, a company that claims to be a FOSS leader can’t be bothered with getting simple facts correct. An ad on LinkedIn posted a week ago today makes the same claim for a job in London. You can click on the photo to the right and read, “It is used by over 20 million people in 240 countries in 80 languages.”
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The same Intel Core i7 4770K system used for yesterday’s Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks were used when benchmarking the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, 970, and 980 graphics cards. Windows 8.1 Pro x64 had all available system updates at the time and was running the NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL binary driver that was their latest release at the time of testing. When running Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 on the system with its Linux 3.16 kernel, the NVIDIA 343.22 driver was used. The 343.22 driver was the latest publicly available proprietary Linux driver at the time of testing and their first to support the GTX 970/980 under Linux. All of the same hardware was used under each operating system and each OS was with its software default settings as were the driver settings.
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As I have previously announced, the Ubuntu Touch development branch is based on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, while the Ubuntu RTM branch is still using Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn as code base, because it has already received stability improvements and will by default on the first Ubuntu powered Meizu phone. Currently, all the new features are implemented on the Ubuntu-Devel branch, the RTM one receiving only fixes.
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Lumera Labs is aiming to Kickstarter an open source Linux camera attachment for one-click transfers to the cloud via WiFi, plus GPS tagging, HDR, and 3D.
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Phones
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Tizen
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As promised, the Tizen IVI team announced the release of the Tizen IVI 3.0-M3-Oct2014 Release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). The major changes are below:
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Android
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The Nexus 6 is Google’s biggest phone, and judging by the initial reaction from Android users, it may end up being its best-selling phone ever. Creating the Nexus 6 was a bold move by Google and it has resulted in pandemonium as Google’s initial supplies of the phone were quickly depleted by enthusiastic buyers. However, Google gave no warning about Nexus 6 preorders and that has angered some Android users who tried to buy it.
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Today, the Nexus 6 went up for pre-order on the Google Play Store for a grand total of five minutes by my count. No warning, no announcements, no broadcasts from the Nexus Twitter account, no excitement from Sundar Pichai or any other Android leaders, nothing. I, like many of you, had no idea that pre-orders had even started. And by the time I tried to go order, it was too late. Sold out, gone. Nexus 4 all over again.
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Google Play Downloader is a simple open source application which can be used to download APKs from Google Play to your computer.
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The move is, perhaps, not a total surprise. Last March, Rubin left the Android group and was replaced by Sundar Pichai. His latest project, as detailed in a lengthy New York Times report in December, was creating robots for a project outside of the company’s Google X lab, something that dovetailed with Google’s shopping spree of robotics companies. In 2012, there were also rumors abound that Rubin planned to leave for a stealth-mode startup called CloudCar, though they were vehemently denied.
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But here’s another, equally salient fact: Every company on the planet must embrace open source to varying degrees, including vendors that make their money selling proprietary software or services.
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In my previous column, I pointed out that free software was now so successful, and in so many fields, that people might wonder whether there’s anything left to do. The question was rhetorical, of course, of course: the ingenuity of the open source community means that people there will always find new and exciting projects. And not just the big one that I suggested of baking strong crypto into all our communication tools. There are countless other novel uses for open source, as these three very different examples below indicate.
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Events
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I went to the Ohio Linux Fest this year to give the closing keynote address to somewhere around 300 folks. And trust me…this will show up later so you’ll know what I mean…the last two minutes of my keynote were the best part. Wait for it…soon.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Everett is also a core contributor to the Apache jclouds project, an open source tool designed to make it easier for developers to build applications which are able to reap the benefits of cloud computing while being agnostic to which cloud infrastructure project lies underneath.
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This week, PLUMgrid, which specializes in virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack cloud deployments, announced the availability of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) version 2.0 with expanded support for OpenStack distributions and network functions. The company claims that “PLUMgrid ONS for OpenStack is the industry’s first software-only virtual networking suite that provides terabits of scale out performance, production-grade resiliency, and secure multi-tenancy for businesses to build agile cloud networks.”
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CMS
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The top story tonight is a highly critical flaw in Drupal 7 that may have allowed a lot of compromised websites. At tonight’s Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 21 Beta was approved for next week. The folks at ROSA have released an LXDE version and LibreOffices 4.3.3 and 4.2.7 were released. Red Hat Software Collections 1.2 was released and Jack Wallen looks at the “science behind Ubuntu Unity’s popularity.”
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The current situation being faced by Drupal users is evidence of just how determined the black hats are in their quest to find vulnerable sites and exploit them. According to Drupal, “Automated attacks began compromising Drupal 7 websites that were not patched or updated to Drupal 7.32 within hours of the announcement of” the vulnerability. On any site on any platform, paying attention to security is just as important as paying attention to content.
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For those that fall into the affected category we’re looking at 264,265 live sites that are currently running Drupal version 7, as a CMS at least, as of this writing. The advisory outlining this problem was originally posted on October 15th, 2014. Within 7 hours there were multiple exploits circulating in the wild. A safe assumption that if you are running an affected version that you were compromised unless you managed to have your site updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC.
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Whenever a security exploit is fixed, users are advised to patch quickly to reduce the risk of attack. In the case of a recent open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) vulnerability, the window in which users needed to patch before being exploited has been quantified as being only seven hours.
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Healthcare
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The federal hospitals are running a system that was released in to the public domain called VistA, written in MUMPS. This is the same language that the $100 million software is written in! Except there is a huge difference in price. OSEHRA was founded to protect this software.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
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…Eric Mack thinks it might be time for a “GNU” political party.
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Openness/Sharing
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In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Ubuntu at 10 years, open source for patent-free cancer drugs, Berlin backsliding on open source, and more!
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On October 13, the Linux Foundation launched Dronecode, an open-source project to unite coders working on a software standard for unmanned aerial vehicles.
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Programming
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Google’s Go language implementation is now in beta for the upcoming 1.4 major release.
Go 1.4 is bringing Android ARM support, NaCL on ARM support, big changes to the Go runtime, minor performance improvements, changes to Go’s existing libraries, and a ton of other improvements.
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Rocker is hosted on GitHub, with three containers already available in the repository – r-base, r-devel and rstudio. The last container (rstudio) provides R and an instance of RStudio Server. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R.
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Standards/Consortia
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More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. You could be forgiven if you thought the HTML5 standard — the follow-up to 1997’s HTML 4 — has long been set in stone, given that developers, browser vendors and the press have been talking about it for years now. In reality, however, HTML5 was still in flux — until today. The W3C today published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the standard after years of adding features and making changes to it.
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Today is my last day in office at the European Commission.
Over the years, I have met a lot of people – people who have inspired, encouraged, and energised.
In fact over 5 years in digital policy there have almost been too many to thank. But that is what I would like to today.
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Security
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People who use Gmail and other Google services now have an extra layer of security available when logging into Google accounts. The company today incorporated into these services the open Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, a physical USB-based second factor sign-in component that only works after verifying the login site is truly a Google site.
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Of course, this damage could have been mitigated by promptly patching when M$ releases their “Patch Tuesday” updates or sooner in an emergency. That’s the point. Consumers are not IT-people. They don’t know about this stuff. They just know about the speed and convenience of PCs on the web. That other OS is supposed to be “easy to use” but that’s just PR in the ads. It’s also easy to lose all security, have the system slow to a halt or crash. Sometimes, M$ gets it wrong and the patches don’t work. Consumers eventually buy another machine or take the box in for repairs to get it working again.
[...]
Of course, one should patch GNU/Linux systems too, but they do very well unpatched. The great beauty of GNU/Linux for consumers is that there are hundreds of distros and the typical malware-artist can’t hack them all simultaneously whereas “the monopoly” is a single big fat target. So, better code, fewer malwares and diversity all work together to protect consumers whereas the salesmen running M$ seek to make life “easy” for both consumers and malware-writers. I choose freedom. I use Debian GNU/Linux.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Yesterday I was asked to do an interview on RT in the immediate aftermath of the Ottawa shootings. As I said, there needs to be a full forensic investigation, and I would hope that the government does not use this terrible crime as a pretext for yet further erosion of constitutional rights and civil liberties. Calm heads and the rule of law need to prevail.
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Here is a short excerpt from a panel discussion I took part in after the London première of the new cult anti-prohibition film, “The Culture High”. This is an amazing film that pulls together so many big issues around the failed global 50 year policy of the war on drugs. I seriously recommend watching it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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On November 4, Wisconsin voters will decide if the state constitution should be amended to require that “revenues generated by use of the state transportation system be deposited into a transportation fund administered by a department of transportation for the exclusive purpose of funding Wisconsin’s transportation systems and to prohibit any transfers or lapses from this fund.” The ballot measure reflects model legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that is intended to prioritize road funding over all other types of transportation spending.
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epublicans are accusing Democrats of race-baiting? It sounds like the Times’ Jeremy Peters is making that accusation–isn’t that what “race-baiting” means, to “play on fears” with “racially charged messages”?
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Rick Berman, the king of corporate front groups and propaganda, has been caught on tape detailing his attacks on public interest groups in the labor and environmental movements, including on efforts to increase the minimum wage for workers.
As noted in a new story by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, Berman met with energy company executives at the posh Broadmoor Hotel earlier this year to raise money from them to attack groups representing citizens concerned about clean water, clean air, and the future of the planet. But Berman’s “win ugly” tactics apparently did not persuade all of his prospective clients for his lucrative business of creating tax-exempt non-profit front groups that then contract with his for-profit PR firm to give corporations cover for his attacks on their opponents. The way Berman profits from this arrangement has spawned a legal complaint to the IRS.
An audio tape of Berman and his associate, Jack Hubbard, has been provided by a person at the Broadmoor event to the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch and has long tracked Berman’s deceptive PR operations.
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If extreme polarization is now an enduring feature of American politics — not just a bug — how does that change the game for journalists? I have some ideas, but mainly I want to put that question on the table. “Conflict makes news,” it is often said. But when gridlock becomes the norm the conflicts are endless, infinite, predictable and just plain dull: in a way, the opposite of news. This dynamic has already ruined the Sunday talk shows. Who can stand that spectacle anymore?
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How many of you are reading this because of a link you clicked on Facebook? In the online publishing industry (which WIRED obviously is part of), Facebook’s influence on site traffic—and therefore ad revenue—is difficult to overstate. Over the past year especially, “the homepage is dead” has become a standard line among media pundits. And more than anything else, it’s Facebook that killed it.
Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all.
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Censorship
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The BBC has rejected a demand from the Green party to be included in the proposed TV leader election debates, saying that it, unlike Ukip, has not demonstrated any substantial increase in support.
The broadcasters have proposed three debates, one including Ukip, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives, a second involving the Lib Dems, Labour and the Conservatives, and finally one between Ed Miliband and David Cameron.
The Green Party was infuriated that they had been excluded and won support in online petitions.
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Privacy
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British intelligence services can access raw material collected in bulk by the NSA and other foreign spy agencies without a warrant, the government has confirmed for the first time.
GCHQ’s secret “arrangements” for accessing bulk material are revealed in documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the UK surveillance watchdog, in response to a joint legal challenge by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. The legal action was launched in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations published by the Guardian and other news organisations last year.
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Yet more evidence has come to light to show that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) is woefully out of date.
It has been revealed that GCHQ, has the ability to request large amounts of un-analysed communications from foreign intelligence agencies without first obtaining a warrant. The documents, obtained in the course of a case brought before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), show that the use of a warrant was not necessary if it is “not technically feasible” for GCHQ to obtain one.
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If you are using a Sony Xperia device running either Android 4.4.2 or 4.4.4 it’s advised (by me) that you install a custom ROM on your device. Several reports have appeared online that the stock firmware on these devices contains Baidu spyware that is discreetly sending data back to servers in China, you do not need to have installed any software on your phone as it’s bundled into the firmware.
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Adequate oversight is impossible when even diligent members of the Senate Intelligence Committee can’t get basic facts about surveillance.
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Congress should quickly restore whistleblower rights for government contractors who work in the intelligence community (IC), 49 ideologically diverse organizations and the Make It Safe Coalition told lawmakers in a letter today.
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The National Security Agency might not have only collected personal information belonging to millions of Americans. It may very well have shared it too – with at least one foreign government.
A report released yesterday by the U.K.-based human rights organization Liberty reveals Britain’s intelligence agencies can access information which the NSA has already collected whenever and wherever it wants – and without a warrant.
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Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.
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Brazil is moving ahead with plans to build an “anti-NSA” internet cable to Europe, even though it won’t make the slightest difference to spying efforts.
Francisco Ziober Filho, president of state-run telecoms company Telebras, announced earlier this week that the company will form a joint venture with Spain’s IslaLink to run the submarine connection between Fortaleza at the northern tip of Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal. Filho also strongly suggested that the cable will not include any equipment from US manufacturers – take that, NSA.
Despite the rhetoric, however, one expert in cable infrastructure told The Register that not only does the cable not make economic sense but it amounts to little more than “a $185m propaganda statement” on the part of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
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Admiral Michael Rogers is preparing a coalition of government, military and commercial interests to fight a global cyber war if necessary.
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In two speeches this month, US National Security Agency (NSA) Director Admiral Mike Rogers called for a further integration between the NSA and major technology and communications companies.
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No serious defense of the surveillance state can ignores its anti-democratic abuses, its lawbreaking, and its record of punishing whistleblowers.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking more powers to hack into a suspect computer no matter where it is located, and carry out surveillance.
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Today, we’re releasing a new set of documents concerning Executive Order 12333 that we — alongside the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School — obtained in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. EO 12333 hasn’t received much public attention to date, but the government’s prior disclosures in our suit have shown that the executive order in fact governs most of the NSA’s surveillance. In the NSA’s own words, EO 12333 is “the primary source of the NSA’s foreign intelligence-gathering authority.”
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A few weeks ago, we wrote about how VPN company Golden Frog had quietly revealed in an FCC filing that an unnamed mobile broadband provider had been (even more) quietly blocking people from sending encrypted emails — basically blocking users from making use of STARTTLS encryption. The Washington Post has now revealed that the mobile operator in question was Cricket — a subsidiary of AT&T, and that it stopped blocking such encryption a few days after our post was published.
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Some customers of popular prepaid-mobile company Cricket were unable to send or receive encrypted e-mails for many months, according to security researchers, raising concerns that consumers may find that protecting their privacy is not always in their hands.
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The Swedish Telecoms Regulator PTS has threatened Kista-based ISP Bahnhof to continue storing records of its customer communications, even though the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled the 2006 Data Retention Directive invalid [PDF] in April of this year.
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The sales pitch for automatic license plate readers is how great they are at helping cops solve crimes. From hunting down stolen cars to tracking pedophiles across jurisdictions, ALPRs supposedly make policing a breeze by gathering millions of time/date/location records every single day and making it all available to any law enforcement agency willing to buy the software and pay the licensing fees.
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Over the past five years, law enforcement agencies in Vermont have invested more than $1 million in technology that gathers millions of data points every year about the whereabouts of vehicles across the state.
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A billboard challenging Amazon to fully disclose the terms of its $600 million contract to provide cloud computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency has been unveiled at a busy intersection near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
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Another tool supposedly “crucial” to the War on Terror is just another lowly footsoldier in the War on Drugs. Some long-delayed reports on Section 213 “sneak and peek” warrants have finally been released by the US government, providing more detail on the constantly-expanding use of delayed-notification warrants by the FBI.
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The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was adamant Section 213 was needed to protect against terrorism. But the latest government report detailing the numbers of “sneak and peek” warrants reveals that out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism. Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties.
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Civil Rights
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Republicans stand to gain as many as eight seats in the Senate this election. But America’s spies stand to gain much, much more.
If the Nov. 4 elections deliver a GOP-controlled Senate, the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee is likely to go to a North Carolinian whose unwavering support for the CIA and NSA could radically transform the committee’s oversight agenda.
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One of the numerous issues being carefully avoided by the political establishment in the US midterm elections, now less than one week away, is the constitutional crisis surrounding the plot to cover up torture carried out by the CIA.
All of the institutions of government are complicit in the cover-up, which is centered on preventing the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee summary detailing US torture practices far exceeding in scope and brutality those made public so far. The logic behind the cover-up is simple: the report details crimes so harrowing that its publication would prove politically explosive.
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When Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took to the Senate floor earlier this year to allege that the CIA had spied on the U.S. Senate, she confirmed the existence of a secret document.
That document, she said, could further validate a scathing report on the spy agency’s torture practices that is expected to be unveiled in the next few weeks.
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A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticises the CIA under President George W. Bush of conducting torture of Al Qaeda suspects. However, it doesn’t assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney.
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman Dianne Feinstein the 6,000 page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US.”
The report shows that the CIA did not provide accurate information to Congress and also provided misleading information. The report also concludes that the CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. While the report was being prepared the CIA penetrated the Senate Committee’s computers, arousing the fury of its members.
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Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.
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The Central Intelligence Agency is firing back at allegations that it is responsible for delaying the release of the Senate report on the controversial post-9/11 interrogation program, insisting that lawmakers themselves are to blame.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday for the fourth time asked a court to delay the release of a 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into a Bush-era CIA rendition, detention and interrogation program.
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Valerie Plame says former Vice President Dick Cheney is a traitor for allegedly having outed her in 2003 as an undercover CIA operative overseas.
It’s now been more than a decade since Plame found herself in the center of a political firestorm.
The incident began when Plame’s husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, was sent to Niger by the George W. Bush administration to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to buy and import uranium from Niger. Wilson reported to Bush that Iraq had no such program.
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For decades, the CIA and the FBI reportedly employed and protected at least 1,000 Nazis, using them as spies and later shielding them from prosecution, the New York Times reports.
According to Eric Lichtblau,who reviewed declassified reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the two intelligence agencies recruited at least 1,000 Nazis to operate as spies and informants—a number experts say is probably a lowball estimate.
Historians say they were recruited under a “cold war mentality” that the Nazis’ ability to gather intel on the Russians outweighed their war crimes.
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One such spy was involved in the Lithuanian massacre of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust; another worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, according to the book.
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The CIA and other U.S. agencies hired at least 1,000 ex-Nazis to serve as spies during the Cold War and took pains to conceal the suspected war crimes of those informants living in America, according to a New York Times report published Monday.
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One serious shortcoming of American democracy is our perennial failure to properly police the CIA. Over the decades, no federal agency has been caught up in more scandals: democratically elected governments overthrown, the rendition of prisoners, torture, spying on Congress.
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Recently disclosed government records and interviews reveal that after World War II, the FBI and CIA recruited 1,000 ex-Nazis as informants during the Cold War.
According to the New York Times report, which was adapted from Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, not only did the government agencies recruit ex-Nazis of all ranks as anti-Soviet “assets,” but the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and CIA’s Allen Dulles also helped these spies immigrate to the U.S. This was done in a bid to conceal their participation in the war or their “moral lapses,” so that they could be shielded from the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi pursuers.
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The U.S. government often went to great lengths to protect its use of former Nazis in the global fight against communism. Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that, as recently as the 1990s, spy agencies “concealed the government’s ties” to Nazi war criminals still living in America.
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The U.S. government used about 1,000 Nazis as spies during the Cold War, according to a new report, including one who was among the highest-ranking members of the Hitler’s Third Reich.
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In the decades after World War II, the CIA and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
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The Times piece also revealed that the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted.
[...]
More alarming still is the description of von Bolschwing’s panic when Mossad agents snatched Eichmann from Argentina, to bring him to trial in Israel in 1961. The CIA, it seems, assured him he would be safe in America. No Nazi hunters would come make him pay for his crimes – or “embarrass the US” – not while the agency could use Bolschwing to presumably win the Cold War.
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In the waning days of World War II, Waffen SS general Karl Wolff, made a deal with the American intelligence operative Allen Dulles that he would surrender his men in Northern Italy in exchange for immunity from war crimes. With the imminent collapse of the Third Reich, Wolff had more to gain from this understanding than Washington, but Dulles kept his promise, protecting Wolff from prosecutors at Nuremberg.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Who doesn’t want to have their own tech site these days? According to the Daily Dot, Verizon’s recently launched SugarString will have two very conspicuous holes in its tech coverage: U.S. government surveillance and net neutrality. What a big fat coincidence that Verizon is embroiled in both.
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They’re positioning the new site “Sugar String” as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).
Cole Stryker, Sugar String’s editor-in-chief, sent recruiting letters to reporters last week offering them jobs at the site on the condition that they pretend that the major investor’s major embarrassments — which have made headlines all over the world on a virtually daily basis — didn’t exist.
Reporters are, however, permitted to write about net neutrality violations and mass surveillance by governments not allied to the US, particularly China.
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A couple of years ago, we wrote about an effort by the big broadband players to push the FCC away from using M-Lab to measure basic network diagnostics on the internet. M-Lab is a very interesting project, focused on collecting a huge amount of data about internet performance, and making that data widely available. In the past, for example, we’ve highlighted an M-Lab project showing which ISPs were throttling BitTorrent.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A couple years ago, then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk explained why the negotiating text of trade agreements like the TPP needed to be kept secret: because if the public debated it, the agreement probably wouldn’t be approved. He used, as an example, a failed trade agreement where the text had been public. Beyond the “small sample size” problem of this explanation, the much more troubling aspect is the obvious question of recognizing that if public debate would kill the agreement, perhaps it’s the agreement that’s the problem and not the public.
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The EU Ombudsman is running a consultation on how to improve the transparency of the TTIP negotiations. This shouldn’t be hard, since there is currently vanishingly small openness about these secret talks.
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Trademarks
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Trademark, while generally one of the better forms of intellectual property as used in practice and in purpose, can certainly still be abused. It can also fall victim to an ever-growing ownership culture that seems to have invaded the American mind like some kind of brain-eating amoeba. And that’s how we’ve arrived here today, a day in which I get to tell you about how there is currently a trademark dispute over the flavor of pizza.
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Copyrights
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Gottfrid Svartholm has today been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court. The Swedish Pirate Bay founder and his 21-year-old accomplice were found to have been involved in illegally accessing systems operated by IT company CSC. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in Denmark.
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One of the co-founders of the notorious Pirate Bay website was convicted (Google Translate) Thursday in a major hacking case in Denmark, and could face up to six years in prison.
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Send this to a friend
10.30.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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China have announced a new time frame in which they will move to a new operating system. It will consist of 15% of government computers being switched to Linux per year. The report by Ni Guangnan outlining the transition won government approval and by 2020 the Chinese Government’s transition to Linux should be complete.
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Many Linux users out there dual-boot with a Windows system, or they just use the two operating systems separately. An interesting thing happens when you’re in Windows and you try to do something that you think is normal, but that feature doesn’t exist.
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Server
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I’ve been researching OpenStack deployment methods lately and so when I got an email from Canonical inviting me to check out how they deploy OpenStack using their Metal as a Service (MaaS) software on their fantastic Orange Box demo platform I jumped at the opportunity. While I was already somewhat familiar with MaaS and Juju from research for my Official Ubuntu Server Book, I’d never seen it in action at this scale. Plus a chance to see the Orange Box–a ten-server computing cluster and network stack that fits in a box about the size of a old desktop computer–was not something I could pass up.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel is finally being optimized for use of solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) that follow the ATA 3.2 standard.
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Here is a video I’ve been waiting for by Jike Song from Intel. The KVM Forum 2014 was held in conjunction with the recent LinuxCon Europe and someone (from the Linux Foundation or the KVM Forum) has been processing and posting presentation videos to YouTube in a staggered fashion. About 13 hours ago this video appeared. When I noticed the topic on the KVM Forum schedule (along with the slide deck [PDF]) a week or two before the event, I was really looking forward to learning more.
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This is not the first initiative of its kind. In fact, a similar website was released just a couple of weeks ago, asking users to support forking Debian because it adopted systemd. Now, the Linux kernel is the target and the website claims to be the work of multiple users (developers?).
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If you are new to Linux tracing and/or LTTng, go no further. Head on to the new and awesome LTTng Docs to know what this stuff is all about. I wrote an article on basics of LTTng and then followed it up with some more stuff a few month back too.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that X.Org Server 1.17 RC1 has been released with a focus on improving GLAMOR and integrating the xf86-video-intel DDX, Keith Packard has written a blog post about the work that has gone on so far since GLAMOR’s inception for optimizing and cleaning up this 2D-over-OpenGL acceleration method.
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Benchmarks
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For those curious how the latest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver is performing against Intel’s newest closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, we’ve put Ubuntu 14.10 (including a second run with the latest Linux kernel / Mesa) against Microsoft Windows 8.1 with the newest Intel GPU driver released earlier this month.
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Applications
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I got a note a little less than a month ago from pouet, pointing out a text editor called slap. pouet said I might like it, if I wasn’t fond of bizarre double-control-key command sequences or arcane letter combinations for controls.
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Russian Phoronix readers can rejoice that Yandex Browser is finally available for Linux after it’s already come for Windows, OS X, Android, and iOS. Yandex Browser is powered by Google’s WebKit-forked Blink layout engine and based on the Chromium code-base. The Yandex Browser checks web page security against its systems and has other additions on top of the vanilla Chromium code.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Transistor, a game made by the developers of the well-received Bastion, is finally available on Linux.
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Surprise! Hello everyone it’s been a while since I wrote anything here, so how about a chance to win some Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel keys?
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One of the annoyances that may come with people using SteamOS is buying games from the store they cannot use a game-pad controller with, and Valve are taking steps to improve this.
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Art of War, the newest expansion to the popular Europa Universalis IV has been released. There’s a lot of content to go around this time, prominently including an overhauled reformation mechanic that promises to spice up the religious wars in Europe.
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Animal Gods is top-down action adventure game now on Kickstarter inspired by classics from the 90′s brought to the 21st century with full HD, dynamic lighting and high-res textures.
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The Last Dogma is a dark comedy adventure set in the year 1999 of an alternate reality world, where US actively campaigns for world domination, UK is ruled by the dictator from Iran and Yugoslavia is being invaded by several countries.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell has shared that “Kubuntu Vivid”, a.k.a. Ubuntu 15.05 for the Vivid Vervet, will use Plasma 5 by default.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The first development snapshot for the GNOME 3.15 cycle is now available, which will end up being GNOME 3.16 come next March.
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GNOME development continues apace; here is the first snapshot of the GNOME 3.15 development cycle, the 3.15.1 release.
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It’s Halloween week, and the big names in Linux are determined not to disappoint the trick-or-treaters. No less than three mainline distributions have released new versions this week, led by perennially-loved-and-hated crowd favourite Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 14.10, better-known by its nom de womb “Utopic Unicorn”, hit the streets last Thursday. It appears to be a mostly update release, with more of the release announcement’s ink devoted to parent-company Canonical’s “Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu Openstack” than to Utopic’s “latest and greatest open source technologies”. Among those, the v3.16 kernel has been included, as well as updated versions of GTK, Qt, Firefox, LibreOffice, Juju, Docker, MAAS, and of course, Unity. Full details can be found in the official release notes.
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New Releases
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Zentyal, developer of server technology natively interoperable with Microsoft® server products, today announced a new release of the Zentyal Linux small business server. Zentyal Server 4.0 aims at offering small and medium businesses (SMBs) a Linux based Small Business Server that can be set up in less than 30 minutes and is both easy-to-use and affordable.
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4MLinux Rescue Edition, a special distribution that includes a wide set of system maintenance and recovery applications, has advanced to version 10.1 Beta and is now ready for testing.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Enterprise users who rely on SUSE Linux now have access to a new and updated version of the platform: SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, announced Monday. SUSE says the key benefits this update offers to customers are increased uptime, improved operational efficiency and accelerated innovation.
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The newest enterprise edition of the Suse Linux distribution allows administrators to go back in time, for instance, to immediately before they made that fatal system-crippling mistake.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has released their third update to their “Software Collections” that provide updated development tools/packages to RHEL6/RHEL7 users as an alternative to their default packages.
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Application testing and development has traditionally been one of the chief drivers of public cloud usage, as it presents extremely little real risk to a company. Because critical information — customer data, credit card numbers and so on — isn’t being stored, the benefits of cloud computing are more apparent and immediate. Now, Red Hat Inc. wants to make it’s even easier, by offering a version of its OpenShift platform specifically for software startups.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Linux has already enjoyed the distinction of being the most popular platform for hosting OpenStack clouds. But now, Canonical has taken its commitment to OpenStack a step further with the announcement of its own OpenStack distribution.
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Canonical is drawing a lot of attention after unveiling its own Ubuntu OpenStack distribution, and part of the reason is that Ubuntu is already the most popular platform of all for building OpenStack deployments on. That fact was reported in the OpenStack Foundation’s survey findings and has been bolstered elsewhere.
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Flavours and Variants
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ARM has unveiled a toolkit for university students who wish to learn embedded systems design and programming.
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Phones
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Tizen
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All around it was a great event, with additional keynotes from luminaries in the Chinese government and industry, sessions from Intel, Samsung, and the community, and a well-attended DevLab where attendees learned how to write and deploy their first wearable Tizen app. I spoke to one person who had written a complete sketchpad app in the 1.5 hour session, who had never used the Tizen wearable platform before. All around, we were very pleased with the event and the attendees were as well.
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Samsung’s Gear S smartwatch will launch in the United States on November 7th, the company announced today. All four major US carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) will carry the device, and you’ll also be able to purchase it from Samsung’s store-in-a-store shops at Best Buy locations across the US. The Gear S will be available in black or white, but Samsung’s not revealing any pricing details; it’s leaving that task to the carriers. Just don’t expect the Gear S, with its built-in cellular radio and curved OLED screen, to come cheap.
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Samsung as a company is not the most open at times, but they are trying to change their ways with Open Source initiatives within the company, and also them trying to take onboard Open Source projects like Tizen. It looks like the Samsung KNOX team also wants their customers, partners, and basically anyone to know that they value the quality of Samsung KNOX that they are offering, and welcome you to contact them regarding any concerns you might have or information you want to contact to share publicly or privately.
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Android
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With the new YouTube WatchMe for Android project, developers can now integrate live streaming into their apps. Thanks to this new open source project, more third-party devs will be able to offer video streaming features similar to Sony’s Live on YouTube by – Xperia and HTC’s upcoming RE camera.
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This list of essential Android apps are the ones you must have apps you need every day. They help with email, weather, music, and handful of other essential tasks.
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Spare a thought for Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the mobile making business, after Redmond completed its $7.2BN+ acquisition of former European mobile making powerhouse Nokia earlier this year. If Microsoft was hoping to see quick marketshare wins in Europe once its hands were fully on the levers of production that has not come to pass.
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Puppy Linux has long been one of the more prominent lightweight Linux distributions. This time around it’s up to version 6.0 and it has been dubbed “Tahrpup” by the Puppy Linux developers. Puppy Linux 6.0 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 and uses Linux kernel 3.14.20.
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It looks like KDBUS, the Linux kernel D-Bus implementation, is posed to be added to the next kernel release after Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out its patches today.
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Systems administration isn’t a simple job — and being able to respond to issues quickly is a definite plus. Not long ago, server problems meant receiving a phone alert followed by a trip to the data center to fix whatever was wrong. Today, having full-powered computers such as smartphones or tablets literally in your hand is a tremendous help when doing sysadmin. Load Android with a few key applications and you can remotely monitor servers and services, get alerts and warnings as they occur, and solve problems without any travel at all.
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In today’s Android roundup: Windows Phone is in deep trouble in Europe as Android reigns supreme. Plus: LG sells 16.8 million Android phones, and Android 5.0 Lollipop’s security features
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The engineers behind Project Ara are trying to make the last smartphone you’ll ever need. Their design for a modular device has users slotting components — a camera, extra storage space, a Wi-Fi connector — into their phones, as and when they need them. It’s an ambitious scheme, but engineers working at NK Labs in Boston have already produced a working prototype, which they showed off to modular smartphone evangelist Dave Hakkens during a recent visit.
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I wonder how many other businesses are experiencing the same problem. I’m keen to start a conversation about how others fair when selling FOSS solutions and whether its time to get together again and think again about a re-branding that will have my prospective customers asking, “OK tell us more” rather than “open sounds insecure”. To that end I would like to nominate a brand new name that I have seen used in FOSS communities as a suitable candidate… Community Software.
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Both developers and organizations are adopting open-source software based on merit rather than ideology, according to the findings of the report. A full 80 percent of the more than 1,200 coders from tech firms and traditional companies that participated in the survey said they use free tools because they’re functionally superior to commercial alternatives in the same category, while 72 percent said the broad participation in open-source projects can make the code more secure.
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What can the world learn from Google, Twitter and Facebook – apart from how to make millions through ads flinging? How to run a successful open-source project.
The trio in September announced TODO, to make open-source project “easier.” Joining them are Dropbox and Box and code-site GitHub, payment providers Square and Stripe, US retailer WalMart Labs and a body called the Khan Academy.
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Arpaia is a security engineer, but he’s not the kind who spends his days trying to break into computer software, hoping he can beat miscreants to the punch. As Sullivan describes him, he’s a “builder”—someone who creates new tools capable of better protecting our computer software—and that’s unusual. “You go to the security conferences, and it’s all about breaking things,” Sullivan says. “It’s not about building things.”
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The tool is designed to expose what’s going on inside an OS. Osquery, Facebook’s new open-source framework, could give enterprises new security insight.
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Events
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Schmidt thinks it’s a waste of time for companies to build these same foundations again and again, which is why he founded Meteor, which builds an open source web programming framework that anyone can use to build complex, desktop-style applications in the browser. “The idea of Meteor is that everyone should have that stuff,” he says. “It shouldn’t take a couple years to get to the market.”
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As I look back in the rear view mirror at the conferences now, the key takeaway for me is that KVM use is rapidly expanding. From first being used to virtualize Linux servers, it has now evolved to form the basis of the open cloud, being used for emerging new uses such as network function virtualization, and running on many more processor architectures.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The built-in profiler for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser now has the ability to provide GPU profiling information.
Mozilla graphics team has added GPU profiling support that so far will show how much GPU time is spent when compositing. The GPU profiling support has already proven useful for debugging issues and optimizing Firefox’s GPU usage.
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SIMD.js will accelerate a wide range of demanding applications today, including games, video and audio manipulation, scientific simulations, and more, on the web. Applications will be able to use the SIMD.js API directly, libraries will be able to use SIMD.js to expose higher-level interfaces that applications can use, and Emscripten will compile C++ with popular SIMD idioms onto optimized SIMD.js code.
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SIMD for JavaScript continues to be worked on by Mozilla, Google, Intel, and others for better accelerating particular workloads in the web.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Earlier this year, Kyle Mestery posted an article on his blog outlining some common misconceptions about contributing to the Neutron project and how to contribute effectively upstream. Kyle is a Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems where he works on OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Open vSwitch. He is also Program Technical Lead (PTL) for the OpenStack Neutron project, the networking component of OpenStack handling the complex task of connecting machines in a virtual environment.
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DreamHost has now taken its DreamCompute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) OpenStack cloud platorm out of private beta testing. The company, with a platform that comes from the creators of Ceph, is set to compete with Amazon and other players in the cloud game.
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With almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and series A funding of $37.2 million in the bank, cloud hosting firm DigitalOcean is a suitable company to look up to for VirtKick.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is enjoying some serious adoption. CloudOn, a US-based company has launched a document editor for Apple’s iPad which is based of free and open source LibreOffice. The company says in a press statement that the app offers a, “…new experience for creating and editing mobile documents with a gesture-first doc editor that removes all the clutter, overload and lag of yesterday’s tools. Now people can intuitively create and collaborate on thoughts, ideas and information in ways that fits with the way they work.”
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A new minor release of the hugely popular open-source office suite LibreOffice has been made available for immediate download.
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Healthcare
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According to PWC’s Dan Garrett, who heads the firm’s Health IT practice, the VistA solution makes sense in the short term because of existing interoperability between DOD and VA, and in the long term because the open architecture of VistA gives DOD the ability to modernize at its own pace.
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Business
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Funding
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SwiftStack CEO Joe Arnold delves into new Series B funding, competition, customer trends and the firm’s future direction.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.9.2 was released today as the latest point release in the GCC 4.9 series for the compiler originally released earlier this year.
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Version 7.8.1 of the GNU Debugger is now available and it brings various bug fixes over the major GDB 7.8 release.
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Public Services/Government
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The French capital is pushing for the use of free and open source software solutions to extend its smart city project to the city region. Making databases and applications interoperable and creating smart city grids requires tools to be as open as possible, and the use of open source provides many advantages over proprietary tools, says the city’s Deputy Mayor Jean-Louis Missika.
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Openness/Sharing
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When Iron Man set foot on stage at the Red Hat Halloween party last year, my jaw dropped. A huge applause erupted. It was like the real Iron Man stepped out of the Hollywood big screen and was right in front of us. I was waiting for it to start flying.
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Programming
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While I’ve pointed out the importance of hiring exceptional writers to help craft and articulate meaningful stories about why a product matters, the reality is that strong writing skills matter just as much for developers as for marketers. In part this is a matter of developers doing a better job of marketing their projects to rally contributors, but it’s actually much more fundamental.
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Standards/Consortia
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The W3C announced this week that the HTML5 specification is now an official recommendation. While I was an avid supporter of the HTML5 effort in the early days, seven years ago, you can count me among those that aren’t all that excited by the W3Cs announcement.
[...]
As I see it, web standards are now evolving every six to eight weeks and the W3C is merely a bystander in the process.
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With no funeral, retrospectives, accolades, or notes of sadness, the Windows 7 era has come to an end.
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Perhaps freedom won’t turn on like the flick of a light-switch. It will be a gradual process that’s been going on for a while but it will be faster now. People I meet are still wondering what to do about XP. “7” or “8*” or Wintel are not on their radar any longer. They are thinking that if Android/Linux is what I like, why do retailers only offer Wintel on retail shelves? They are thinking that something must be available and they are finding GNU/Linux. On their own. That’s the game-changer. That’s the shift in mind-share.
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Security
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Hackers thought to be working for the Russian government breached the unclassified White House computer networks in recent weeks, sources said, resulting in temporary disruptions to some services while cybersecurity teams worked to contain the intrusion.
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An American Airlines flight from Los Angeles International Airport to London was delayed Sunday after concerns over the name of a WiFi hotspot.
A passenger saw the WiFi connection, named “Al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork,” and expressed concern to a flight attendant.
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America: land of the ass coverage policy and home of “better safe than sorry.” Free and brave? Not so much. If anyone wants to know if the terrorists have won, here’s another one to file under “Exhibit A: Yes, At Least A Sizable Partial Victory.”
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In his career-ending extramarital affair that came to light in 2012, General David Petraeus used a stealthy technique to communicate with his lover Paula Broadwell: the pair left messages for each other in the drafts folder of a shared Gmail account. Now hackers have learned the same trick. Only instead of a mistress, they’re sharing their love letters with data-stealing malware buried deep on a victim’s computer.
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There are many potential sources for security specifications. Some of them are government standards. For example, in the United States, HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, specifies requirements for administrative safeguards, physical safeguards, and technical safeguards of medical records and personally identifiable information. Anyone dealing with Protected Health Information must comply with HIPAA.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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To date, only the US, Britain and Israel have used armed drones in an overt, operational environment in which they killed opponents. But the reason why other nations have not used drones is political, not technological, for almost every government is developing an offensive UAV capability.
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A bill that would criminalize the outfitting of drones with weapons was advanced by a state Assembly committee today.
The bill, introduced in January, primarily limits the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles by law enforcement and fire departments to certain situations where search warrants have been obtained, or where there is a clear emergency, such as an Amber Alert or an active fire, according to the legislation.
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The eighth Low Rate Initial Production contract includes 19 F-35As, six F-35Bs and four F-35Cs. “It also provides for the production of the first two F-35As for Israel, the first four F-35As for Japan along with two F-35As for Norway and two F-35As for Italy. The United Kingdom will receive four F-35Bs. The contract also funds manufacturing-support equipment as well as ancillary mission equipment.”
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From “The Terminator” to the Avengers’ upcoming battle with Ultron, pop culture’s parade of killer robots has long expressed fears that modern technology’s marvels might turn against us.
In fact, the killer robots are already here – in the form of military drones and missiles, for now – and so is a movement to ban them by such organizations as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. So says physicist Mark Gubrud, who appears tonight at a Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition meeting to speak about the “robot arms race” and the growing possibility of “robot armies fighting a war and humans playing no role.”
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Elon Musk, a chief advocate of cars smart enough to park and drive themselves, continues to escalate his spooky speech when it comes to the next level of computation — the malicious potential of artificial intelligence continues to freak him out.
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We hear a lot about the nasty realities of modern drone usage — the targeted strikes that kill indiscriminately and the surveillance operations that concern privacy advocates. The side of the story we hear far less often is that of the large, military aircraft’s smaller brethren: the UAVs that have demonstrated significant advantages with disaster relief, search and rescue, conservation, forest fire detection and scientific research efforts. Unfortunately, myths persist publicly and in Congress there is no middle ground between libertarian-leaning privacy advocates who oppose drones and those who are in favor of them.
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A passenger plane was just 75ft from a mid-air crash with an unmanned drone, an official report has revealed.
The quadcopter drone was deliberately flown towards the turbo-prop plane as it came into land, according to the co-pilot. He feared there was a high risk of a collision with the plane, which holds up to 74 passengers.
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A suspected US drone strike killed at least five militants in a Pakistani tribal region today, with local villagers saying the dead included a senior Arab commander.
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Todd Chretien argues that the imperial state doesn’t just defend oil industry thieves, but the system of competitive capitalism worldwide–the so-called “free market.”
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The Lancaster University Careers Fair was again the venue for a protest against the inclusion of BAE Systems. A Group of Lancaster University Students and activists staged a “die-in” at the careers fair in the university’s Great Hall this afternoon. The group lay on the floor to symbolise the death and destruction caused by arms manufacturer BAE Systems, who were represented at the fair.
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The US-led coalition has carried out fresh air strikes against jihadists in Syria and Iraq as Washington called for the battle against the Islamic State group to be taken to the Internet.
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Since 25th September, the Thales Watchkeeper has been cutting its teeth in Afghanistan. From the British Army base in Helmand province, in the south of the country, the tactical UAV has conducted regular monitoring and reconnaissance missions to protect the estimated 10,000 British soldiers stationed there since 2001 as part of the International Security Assistance Force.
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Western enthusiasm for Malala Yousafzai overshadows the fact that western policies deny children in Pakistan their most basic rights. The short-term memory of the media cycle, coupled with political self-interest and selective attention continue to marginalise the trauma of CIA drones.
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The press pick and choose which of Malala’s messages are amplified ― and which are silenced. They can hardly get enough of her insistence on the importance of “the philosophy of nonviolence I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa”.
[...]
In March last year, Malala sent this message to a congress of Pakistani Marxists: “First of all, I’d like to thank The Struggle and the IMT [International Marxist Tendency] for giving me a chance to speak last year at their Summer Marxist School in Swat and also for introducing me to Marxism and socialism.
[...]
When the courageous activist speaks of the importance of education and non-violence, the West shouts her words loudly from the mountain tops. When that same activist criticises predator drones and, that most sacrosanct entity of all, capitalism, the silence is deafening.
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The database of names is built on over two years of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.
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Transparency Reporting
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Sweden’s chief prosecutor said on Tuesday she was seriously considering an invitation by the British government to question Julian Assange in London, before a court ruling in Sweden on whether to lift the warrant for his arrest.
The Foreign Office said on Tuesday it would welcome a request by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to question Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy and would be happy to facilitate such a move, which is seen by Assange’s lawyers as an important step towards breaking the deadlock surrounding the case.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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On the second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, Fox News promoted a plan called the “Hurricane Slayer,” which works to cool ocean temperatures through geoengineering, without mentioning climate change or the role it played in exacerbating the devastating storm.
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Finance
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The Department of Justice and its underlings (the FBI and nearyl every law enforcement agency in the nation) have turned the ideal of asset forfeiture (defund drug dealers; return money to the defrauded, etc.) into a free-roaming, many-tentacled opportunistic beast, one that “liberates” any amount of “suspicious” cash from tourists, legitimate business owners or anyone else who just happens to have “too much” cash in their possession.
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The State of Michigan is ordering a Detroit man to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or go to prison. The reason? He owes back child support for a child that everyone agrees is not his.
“I feel like I’m standing in front of a brick wall with nowhere to go,” said Carnell Alexander.
He says he learned about the paternity case against him during a traffic stop in Detroit in the early 90s. The officer told him he is a deadbeat dad, there was a warrant out for his arrest.
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Censorship
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A rally to block a planned tax on Internet use in Hungary swelled into one of the largest anti-government demonstrations since Prime Minister Viktor Orban came to power in 2010.
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It’s not just the City of London Police demanding that websites be taken offline without any due process. It appears that the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is getting in on the game as well. The Wall Street Journal recently published a detailed article about how angry the FDA is with ICANN (there’s also a corresponding blog post which may not face the same paywall restrictions) for not simply killing domains that the FDA deems “rogue pharmacies.” That’s not to say that there aren’t reasonable concerns about rogue pharmacies. There are clearly some concerns about those sites, but it seems like there are better ways to deal with those than just barging in and saying that ICANN and registrars need to take down sites based solely on their say so.
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Privacy
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A year ago, we noted a rather odd statement from President Obama, concerning some of the Snowden leaks. He more or less admitted that with each new report in the press, he then had to go ask the NSA what it was up to.
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The court documents didn’t detail how the FBI managed to install the weaponized payload on Glazebook’s computer. The emails obtained by the EFF, however, expose the electronic paper trail.
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A new book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, apparently details how the FBI and CIA hired over 1,000 Nazis during the height of the cold war, forgiving them their past sins, so long as they might help spy on the Soviet Union.
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The NSA’s newly-developed concern for “optics” is being tested by employees both former and current. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s longtime leading man, took his snooping show on the road, offering his expertise to banks for $1 million/month. But he couldn’t leave it all behind, attempting to drag the current NSA CTO along with him by offering him an interesting — but conflicting — part-time position with IronNet Security. The NSA said, “That’s fine.” Then it said, “We’re looking into it.” Then it said nothing while Keith Alexander pulled the plug on the deal while simultaneously denying any sort of impropriety.
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The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.
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The government appears to have located the “second leaker.” Snowden obviously still remains out of reach in Russia, but the other leaker — one hinted at over the past few months and confirmed in Laura Poitras’ Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” — seems to have been identified by the FBI. Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News breaks the news.
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The potential destruction of terrorism is infinitesimally smaller than the damage done to our rights by a disproportionate attempt to prevent it.
Please. Please remember this. It’s even more important now, when that fact is so easily forgotten in the wake of the attack on our Parliament and the tragic deaths of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.
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On Tuesday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here,” and it begins with an anonymous senior administration official calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickenshit.”
Now, White House damage control is officially in effect. Press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration does not think that Netanyahu, as Goldberg reported, is in fact a “chickenshit.”
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THE THURSDAY before Homeland’s season premiere, I wrote an article for the Washington Post calling Homeland “the most bigoted show on television.” While I am not the first person to present many of the arguments I laid out in the article, the moment was right and the article went viral.
[...]
The only male Muslim character who’s allowed to be something other than a terrorist–an innocent victim–is Issa, Abu Nazir’s young son, who’s killed in a drone strike that mistakenly targeted his school.
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For Twitter, old news is bad news. On Monday, the company once again had to tell investors that its strenuous efforts to attract new users met with only middling results in the third quarter. The market reacted much as it did upon receiving similar news in February and May, lopping more than 10% off Twitter’s share price upon the open of trading Tuesday amid a handful of analyst downgrades.
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What needs to be in your tool belt if you plan to report on a massively funded and ultra-secret organization like the NSA? In the credits of her newly released CITIZENFOUR, director Laura Poitras gives thanks to a list of important security resources that are all free software. We’ve previously written about CITIZENFOUR and Edward Snowden’s discussion of his motivation to release closely guarded information about the NSA. Here’s a closer look at the seven tools she names as helping to enable her to communicate with Snowden and her collaborators in making the film.
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If you’re using Apple’s latest desktop OS, Yosemite, you might want to adjust your iCloud settings to avoid unsaved documents ending up on Apple’s servers.
Apple’s latest desktop OS, OS X Yosemite, and its latest mobile update, iOS 8.1 are designed to make work across multiple Apple devices a lot more convenient, courtesy of syncing features rooted in iCloud Drive (Apple’s answer to Dropbox) and “continuity”.
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Apple’s OSX 10.10 – aka Yosemite – is silently uploading users’ unsaved documents and the email addresses of their contacts to Apple’s iCloud, according to security researcher Jeffrey Paul.
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A security researcher claims that Apple’s latest desktop software secretly and silently uploads unsaved documents and email addresses to the company’s servers without a user’s knowledge.
According to Berlin-based hacker and security researcher Jeffrey Paul, changes made in Mac OS X Yosemite causes sensitive and private data to be automatically uploaded to Apple’s servers.
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Civil Rights
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The signatories of the letter are Desmond Tutu, Jose Ramos-Horta, Mohammad ElBaradei, Leymah Gbowee, Muhammad Yunis, Oscar Arias Sanchez, John Hume, F.W. De Klerk, Jody Williams, Carlos X. Belo, Betty Williams and Adolfo Perez Esquivel. One hopes that this would help drive things forward on actually releasing the report, except that the CIA seems dead set against it.
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Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates have written to President Barack Obama asking the US to close the dark chapter on torture once and for all. Please add your voice in support of their message below. It will be forwarded to the President. And please share widely.
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Sometimes it’s difficult to maintain any faith in our legal system, particularly when it comes to intellectual property, and perhaps even more particularly when it comes to publicity rights. Then, some former drug-running dictator comes along to sue a video game and the system actually manages to do right. Yes, the case brought by Manuel Noriega against Activision over the game’s depiction of the dictator in the Call of Duty franchise has been tossed out by the judge.
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Noriega did work as a CIA informant before the agency broke ties with him.
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The reason for police involvement — beyond the slim chance that it could net them some cheap child porn busts, thanks to existing laws being applied badly — is left unstated. Apparently, the discovery of suggestive and/or explicit photos couldn’t be left up to the students and their parents to handle. Instead, somebody will need to be punished for something that appears to be incredibly common and often wholly voluntary.
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On my flight out to LA, I dealt with the same issue with an imperious and stupid TSA supervisor who tried to take the buckle under the same pretenses at DCA until I protested long enough for her to get the top level supervisor in the terminal.
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Graphic footage has emerged showing a homeless man being shot and killed by police in the US who fired a barrage of 46 bullets as he held a penknife.
Milton Hall, who was mentally ill, was surrounded by eight officers training their guns in a shopping centre car park in Saginaw, Michigan, in July 2012.
The 49-year-old had been arguing with police after an alleged altercation with a shop assistant for several minutes and the video shows him refusing an officer’s demand to put down the knife.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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AT&T — a company with one of the most powerful DC lobbying operations around — is not having a very good month. Just weeks after being fined by both the FTC and the FCC for SMS cramming, the FTC has also filed a lawsuit against AT&T for lying to consumers about “unlimited” data plans, and then… throttling those same plans. The issue was that, while AT&T stopped offering an unlimited data plan, it did promise to grandfather in those users, so long as they didn’t change plans. However, it didn’t take long for AT&T to start throttling just those users on unlimited plans in an effort to get them to switch away from an unlimited data plan. From the complaint:
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Patrick O’Neill, over at The Daily Dot, has a scoop about Verizon getting directly into our game: tech blogging. It’s launched a brand new tech news website, called SugarString, which apparently is supposed to compete with other tech news sites.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Gottfrid Svartholm has today been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court. The Swedish Pirate Bay founder and his 21-year-old accomplice were found to have been involved in illegally accessing systems operated by IT company CSC. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in Denmark.
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Gottrid Svartholm Warg and his 21-year-old Danish co-defendant were found guilty on Thursday morning, with the Dane released on time served and Warg to be sentenced on Friday.
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Sweden’s Pirate Bay Founder Gottrid Svartholm Warg was found guilty of hacking crimes in a Danish court on Thursday.
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It was a place where Kim Dotcom loved doing business but it took just 13 minutes for a Hong Kong court to authorize the seizure of $42 million of his assets in 2012. Now the tycoon wants his cash back, with his legal team arguing that justice officials misled the courts.
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We’ve written in the past about the EFF’s Who Has Your Back rankings, in which it looks at various internet companies to see who protects your privacy against governments and lawsuits. Now, the EFF has come out with an offshoot chart, looking at who has your back when it comes to bogus copyright and trademark demands. The only two companies that get a perfect score are Automattic/WordPress and NameCheap, as you can see on the full chart. The worst, somewhat surprisingly, is Tumblr, which scored a big fat zero out of the five listed items.
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This article has been out for a few weeks now, but I’ve finally had a chance to read through the whole thing. Louis Menard, over at the New Yorker, has a long piece on just how messed up copyright laws are today, going over many of the same grounds we have (for nearly two decades). The piece itself is a sort of book review of Peter Baldwin’s new The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, but basically repeats the main point: copyright law as it is today really doesn’t make much sense. The first half of the article is a great look at the problems of copyright law, but unfortunately, the second half of the article goes off the rails by leaping on familiar and misleading tropes about why people feel the way they do about copyright. Still, the first half covers a number of copyright’s problems quite well.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.29.14
Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The truth is, Linux — and the ecosystem of Free and Open Source software around it — isn’t perfect. Heck, I regularly give Linux a hard time for its shortcomings, myself. But the reality is… it’s absolutely fantastic for both end users and companies building software/hardware solutions alike.
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According to Schestowitz, although the site continues to be under fire, he and his team have developed methods to deal with the attacks.
“The DDOS attacks against both sites are still going on,” he wrote last night in an email in response to our query. “There’s now an aggressive filtering software in place banning a lot of machines which it suspects to be part of the attacks. It helps reduce the frequency of downtime.”
That’s good news. Although we have no idea of the traffic figures for TechRights, it’s certainly a popular free software site. Tux Machines is probably even more popular, with thousands of visitors daily depending on it for links to the latest news on Linux and FOSS. It’s nice to know it’s seemingly dependable again, even as it continues to come under attack.
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To me, this is quite an important period because the only reason I migrated to GNU/Linux was to be free of crashes. Later I was glad I did because of performance, lack of malware, avoidance of the EULA from Hell, easy back-ups and installation, easy management, etc. Many other famous migrations happened around the same time and I would bet stability was an issue for them too. Certainly cost, flexibility, and independence from M$ were issues. Many businesses were spending ~$1000 per seat per annum just to keep things running, so it’s not just about licences or being “cheap”. FLOSS is the right way to do IT.
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That’s a heck of a long way from Steve Ballmer proclaiming back in 2001 that “Linux is a cancer.” In the years since then Microsoft certainly attacked Linux like it was a cancer — doing everything from sponsoring SCO’s copyright attack on Linux to claiming that Linux violated unnamed Microsoft patents to endless FUD assaults.
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Server
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Containerization technology has been a game-changer, powering Docker and other transformative software solutions. It’s also garnered its share of criticisms about performance, security, and resiliency.
But one of the creators of Parallels, a key containerization technology on Linux, is pushing back against what he feels are pervasive myths about containers — many of which, he argues, are rooted in misunderstandings of how to use them and what they’re for.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation recently announced its 2014 Linux training scholarship winners.This year marked the strongest demand we’ve ever seen for this program with more than 1,000 applications received. Reading through the submissions it became clear that learning Linux is widely recognized as a smart strategy for building a successful career. From every corner of the world, up and coming developers and sysadmins want to be able to tap into this massive opportunity. This is also represented in our Intro to Linux MOOC as well with nearly 300,000 registrations from more than 100 countries.
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Many new features, even more bugfixes!
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Lennart Poettering announced the release today of systemd 217 and it’s quite a big update.
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Graphics Stack
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While there hasn’t been much to report on lately with regard to major OpenGL 4.x advancements, the OpenGL 4.0+ support is still being worked on by the open-source developers wishing to expose GL4 compliance within the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau Linux graphics drivers, among other potential Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.
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For those stuck running on the R300g driver, which supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series and older GPUs, you really should consider upgrading your graphics card and likely your system. But if you’re set on using the R300g driver going into the foreseeable future, you might as well upgrade Mesa.
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Here’s the first RC for X server 1.17.
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Keith Packard has made available the first test release for the upcoming X.Org Server 1.17 release. This release is coming a bit late but Keith is still hoping to have xorg-server 1.17.0 ready for release at the end of the year or around early January.
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While there hasn’t been much to report on lately with regard to major OpenGL 4.x advancements, the OpenGL 4.0+ support is still being worked on by the open-source developers wishing to expose GL4 compliance within the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau Linux graphics drivers, among other potential Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.
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Benchmarks
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As a follow-up to last week’s Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 AMD Performance Comparison and yesterday’s Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison, here’s taking things further in looking at the performance of the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver in several configurations while compared against the closed-source AMD Catalyst graphics driver as found on Ubuntu 14.10.
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These results are much more interesting than the earlier two-disk HDD benchmarks now using solid-state storage and having bought four Intel Series 530 120GB SSDs for making this an interesting RAID comparison. Four of the Intel SSDSC2BW120A4K5 solid-state drives were used in their 120GB capacity. Each of these solid-state drives retail for $75~80 USD and features sequential reads up to 540MB/s and sequential writes up to 480MB/s with its Serial ATA 3.0 interface. The 2.5-inch SSD 530 Series drive is rated by a five-year warranty and uses 20nm Intel NAND MLC memory.
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Applications
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When people hear about Linux and terminals they usually cringe, especially if they are new to the platform. That doesn’t have to be the case and the terminal is usually your friend and you can even enhance it. This is where Guake comes into play, and what a truly a marvelous tool it is!
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The newest Humble Bundle is live and this time around features quite a few Linux débuts. Currently there’s a total of 8 games in the bundle with more to come.
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OpenMW, an open source implementation of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind game engine and functionality, has been updated yet again and is now at version 0.33.0.
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Aspyr Media are starting to be fan favourites with their open communication. They can’t give full details of course, but they have given us hints about more games coming to Linux.
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The Halloween-themed Humble Indie Bundle 13 is now available for the next two weeks where you can pay-what-you want for a collection of cross-platform royalty-free games.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Since LXQt is finally came on 0.8.0 to Qt5, and we’re actively working on Fedora 21, Qt5 builds and KDE Frameworks, and there are needs to jump and do at least the first usable state of the project, i jumped the wagon.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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For some time I’ve been considering what to do about Jovie which was previously known as ktts (KDE Text To Speech). Since before the first KDE Frameworks release actually, since kdelibs used to host a dbus interface definition for the KSpeech dbus interface that ktts and then Jovie implemented. I have a qt5 frameworks branch of Jovie, but it didn’t make much sense to port it, since a lot of it is or could become part of the upcoming QtSpeech module. So Jovie has no official qt5 port and wont be getting one either.
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The exiting news is that following some discussion and some wavering we will be switching to Plasma 5 by default. It has shown itself as a solid and reliable platform and it’s time to show it off to the world.
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So, i was “politely” annoying people on kde channels last days because i found some interconnected pieces of KDE software that is not really integrated, but are screaming to do that.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Reviews
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In the past I have reviewed MakuLinux MATE Edition, which came with a very polished and beautiful interface, but also bundled in the ISO a big number of applications to be installed. At the time the MATE edition made a very good impression on me, so I kept a close eye on the development of Makulu.
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New Releases
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Linux is pretty darn awesome when used on super-powerful machines. However, where the kernel really shines is when operating systems leverage it for less powerful computers. In other words, Linux can breathe new life into old computers thanks to lightweight distributions.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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More than five years after its last major release, SUSE has made available version 12 of its enterprise operating system. The release, on Monday, comes, as usual, with a host of changes.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is looking to lure startups to its web of services with a new program that gives budding businesses free access to OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public cloud app development platform.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of the OpenShift Startup Program. This free program uses OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public cloud application and development platform, to help startups build and grow their business.
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Fedora
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Sunday, October 26th, 2014, at Nha Trang university, Nha Trang, Vietnam, the Nha Trang IT Day 2014 was taken place. During that day, the Fedora Join workshop was held to introduce about Fedora Project to professors, teachers and students who work and study at NTU and nearby universities and to help them to join into.
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makuluToday in the Linux newsfeeds is Sean Michael Kerner’s coverage of a newly reported Wget Symlink Vulnerability. MakuluLinux 1.0 Cinnamon was released today and two community reviews give users a nice introduction. The Systemd debate continues and The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack was announced. And finally today, Bryan Lunduke shares “what it’s like living on a Chromebook.”
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Instead of relval (for a change) I spent some of my non-work time today working on ownCloud packaging (I’m the owner/’primary contact’/whatever for the ownCloud package, these days).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity 8, seen in the Ubuntu Desktop Next images and Ubuntu Touch phones, removes a controversial feature branded “spyware” by some and fixes one of Ubuntu’s most long-standing complaints. When Unity 8 is stable and ready, Ubuntu won’t send your local searches over the web and show you Amazon product results anymore, quelling some longstanding fears in the open-source community.
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Kristian’s latest patches being made public are enabling support for vertex shaders to be generated using Intel’s SIMD8 scalar back-end for Broadwell hardware and newer. “With Broadwell we have the option to run vertex shaders in scalar (SIMD8) mode which potentially gives us better throughput and more vertices per thread dispatch. This patch series implements this by repurposing our [fragment shader] backend to also work for vertex shaders.”
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Today we’ve received some information a device dubbed the “UT One” that is an Ubuntu Touch tablet powered by an Intel Bay Trail processor and aims to ship in December.
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The makers of the Ubuntu Linux operating system for notebooks, desktops, and servers have been working on a version for phones and tablets… and hope to see the first of those devices ship later this year or early in 2015.
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A couple of months ago, Canonical released Ubuntu Developer Tools Center (UDTC), a project to “enable quick and easy setup of common developers needs on Ubuntu”.
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The Windows operating systems is going out the front door in China and its place will be taken by a Linux distribution that will be used by the authorities and the governing body. The problem is that there is no real alternative, although at least one OS might be ready for the task, and that is Ubuntu Kylin.
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Unity is the desktop that just can’t get much respect in the Linux world. It has been criticized since the day it first appeared, with many Linux users being quite vocal in their disgust at Canonical’s decision to include Unity instead of GNOME. But is Unity really that reviled? A new survey by OMG Ubuntu indicates that most Ubuntu users actually seem to like Unity.
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One week and 15,000 responses later, the results of our Ubuntu at 10 Reader Survey are finally ready to serve up. And they make for some fascinating mid-morning coffee-break reading.
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Inverse Path is readying a tiny, open-spec “USB Armory” SBC that runs Linux or Android on an i.MX53, and offers Trustzone, secure boot, and USB emulation.
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Ittia announced a design win for its lightweight embedded DB SQL database in Wasserbauer’s uClibc Linux based “Butler Gold” robot designed to feed cattle.
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Phones
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So Apple gave its Q3 results (talking calendar quarter of course so its July-September numbers) and this includes the first few days of sales of the new iPhone 6 models. How was it? 39.3 million units. Thats up 12% from Q2 and up 16% from the same period one year ago. That is not good enough, as the market is growing far faster, so iPhone market share is again down (year-on-year). Because of the iPhone launch pattern of one launch date per year, the quarterly sales move up and down a lot, so the Apple view should always be considered with the annual view. But yes, market share now in Q3 is about 12.4% which is down from 13.3% a year ago same period. Apple’s iPhone market share year-on-year has now fallen 8 consecutive quarters, down from the peak market share of 23.9% in Q1 of 2012 to essentially half of that, 12.4% today.
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Tizen
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We previously reported that the Tizen based Samsung Gear S was looking at a release date of 24th October, which happened to be last week by many of the major UK online tech retailers. Well, as what happens quite often in the Tech world the release has been delayed, and we are now looking at the week commencing 11 November 2014 for its UK launch. No specific reason has been given by Samsung to the delay.
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Android
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Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.
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YouTube has been in the news recently based on reports that it plans to launch paid subscription services, but there is another bit of interesting news about the popular video hosting and streaming company: It has launched an open source project called YouTube WatchMe for Android, available on GitHub, that offers an app designed to facilitate YouTube Live Streaming Events on Android devices.
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In today’s Android roundup: Twelve of the best features in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Plus: Google releases its Google Fit health app, and popular music app djay 2 is now available for Android
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Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.
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Why? The majority of them have switched to open source because they perceive open source development programs as having better performance and reliability. This, as Hammond observed, is a change. “Open source used to be popular because of the lower cost. Now the cost of tools is the least important element for developers.”
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Apache has seen amazing success over the last 15 years. Not only do ASF projects impact almost every area of computing, but the Apache License, our Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), and our pattern of open, collaborative development (often known as “The Apache Way”) continue to influence Open Source projects outside of the ASF. Many Apache projects have gone on to build huge, successful ecosystems around themselves, and other established projects have joined the ASF to grow and diversify their community.
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Events
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Now that the mega-conference week that was is in the books — Ohio LinuxFest, All Things Open and Seattle GNU/Linux Conference are all history for this year — generally the Linux/FOSS world catches its collective breath and starts thinking about shows in 2015.
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So today’s challenge for hackers, I think, is putting that advice into practice by writing a new generation of free software programs with strong crypto baked in as a matter of course. That means strong crypto in connectivity software (more things like OpenVPN, TOR, Commotion); in communications programs (MailPile, Cryptocat, RedPhone), and in content applications (FreeNet, GNUnet).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Distinguished Engineer Robert O’Callahan reports that the Spidermonkey JavaScript engine, used by the Firefox web browser, has surpassed the performance of Google’s V8 engine (used by Chrome) and Apple’s JavaScript Core (used by Safari) on three popular benchmarks: Mozilla’s own Kraken, Webkit’s SunSpider and Google’s Octane.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Sage Weil, founder and chief architect of Ceph and a speaker at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Paris.
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OpenStack is powering the next generation of cloud services – are you ready to work with them?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Those who know me know that I am partial to OpenOffice, an open source project that I contribute to. So I am extremely pleased to see it continue to advance in all fronts. Since coming to Apache, OpenOffice’s name recognition has grown from 24% to 39% and the user share has grown from 11% to 18%, while keeping user satisfaction constant. This is a testament to the hard work of the many talented volunteers at Apache.
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Comparing LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice is like comparing identical twins. Even people who know them well have trouble distinguishing one from the other, and, when you find a difference, it is often trivial. All the same, the differences are growing, and LibreOffice has at least eleven advantages over OpenOffice – see the list below.
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Funding
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SwiftStack, one of the lead contributors to the open-source Swift OpenStack storage project, this week announced that it has raised a new Series B $16 million round of funding. Total funding for SwiftStack now stands at $23.6 million.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Center for International and Intercultural Communication (ZiiK) at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) has been helping with the reconstruction of academic organizations in Afghanistan since 2002. Under the supervision of the Berlin IT lecturer, Dr. Nazir Peroz, Director of the ZiiK, computer centers have been established at five college locations in Afghanistan.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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A new open-source GPU design has been published designed to run on FPGAs… What makes this “open hardware” project more interesting than past designs is that their compute unit was designed around AMD’s public “Southern Islands” instruction set architecture.
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Programming
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For the first time, Zend Server is now also available on IBM’s Power Linux platforms. Zend has been available for years on IBM i, but has not been available for Linux running on IBM’s Power servers. IBM has had a busy year for Power, launching its Power8 server systems portfolio and doubling down on Linux.
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Standards/Consortia
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The U.K. government employee added, “Yet we still have a huge .pdf mountain which we hate, and do our best to segment and slice. But to stop the remaining .pdf mountain getting any higher requires that Word documents stop being the default way government communicates with itself. We’ve made a start with HTML and Open Document Format becoming our adopted open standards for documents.
Levels of inter-departmental and inter-agency alignment and agreement will need to be be Herculean…to…agree on standards,” he said.
Nathaniel Heller, founder of the transparency and ethics nonprofit Global Integrity, said it’s important to figure out “how to get away from PDF ghettos as a way of transmitting information.” He added, “what’s really needed for this sort of dense information — and IG reports are a classic example — to be made more useful to, say, my mother is context, analysis, and summaries…My gut is that it takes someone, whether an IG office itself or other infomediaries, to tell us a bit about why a particular case should matter.”
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In-browser Skype calls are on the horizon after Microsoft backs ORTC and WebRTC technology
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After nearly 10 years of development, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has promoted the HTML5 specification to Recommendation status, its highest level of maturation, effectively making the markup language a formal web standard.
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It was the summer of 1994, and WIRED had been covering the digital revolution for nearly a year and a half. Personal computers were linking up, people were logging on, and the whole thing was crashing through society like a “Bengali typhoon,” as WIRED founder and editor-in-chief Louis Rossetto famously described it.
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Science
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sHere, NASA photographer Joel Kowsky captures the moment of a “catastrophic anomaly” on the Antares rocket just after it lifted off from Pad-0A at the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The rocket’s upper half is clearly visible here, with what appears to be an explosion near its aft. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states — in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.
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Finance
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The identity of the sole bidder in the auction to sell more than 6,000 of Detroit’s foreclosures is no longer a mystery. Herb Strather, a local casino and real estate developer, won the lot for just under $3.2 million. “This is more than just an acquisition of parcels. It’s an opportunity to redevelop the city I was born in and I plan to die in,” Strather said in an interview.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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People don’t like Congress, and yet most members of Congress get to keep their jobs.
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Privacy
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When I first heard about Jeffrey Paul’s claim [NSFW] that OS X 10.10 Yosemite was leaking data to Apple’s servers, my first reaction was “yeah, yeah – that’s the way autosave is supposed to work.”
But I was wrong.
Yes, some people that have upgraded to Yosemite directly from Snow Leopard are being caught out by the way autosave works, something that the rest of us have got used to.
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Civil Rights
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A new book published Tuesday, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, by New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau, details the close relations developed by the US government with Nazi war criminals during and after the Second World War.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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AT&T is being sued by the US government over allegations it misled millions of smartphone customers who were promised unlimited data plans but instead experienced slow speeds while browsing the Internet or watching streaming video.
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The Federal Trade Commission is suing AT&T because the second-largest US carrier throttles speeds of its unlimited data customers, a policy that the FTC describes as “deceptive” and “unfair.” In a press release, the FTC said AT&T has “misled millions of its smartphone customers” by slowing down their data speeds after they’ve used up a certain amount of data in a single month. AT&T has failed to make its throttling policies clear enough, according to the complaint. “The issue here is simple: ‘unlimited’ means unlimited,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. The Commission’s filing blasts AT&T for slowing customers down to the point where common tasks — watching video, streaming music, etc. — become “difficult or nearly impossible.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In a case of improbable timing, Led Zeppelin has simultaneously scored a new hit with the album containing Stairway to Heaven while firing back against allegations that it ripped off the opening notes of the legendary song.
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The new release of the alternate “Sunset Sound” mix, however, provides no new clues to the controversy—even if it does shed new light on the song itself. If you listen very hard, you’ll notice the picked guitar intro once had a more haunting feel, with a reverb-like sound that makes it seem distant. And at the end, Jimmy Page momentarily restarts his guitar solo at a point when the familiar mix instead winds down into an anticlimax. While fans might debate the relative merits of these versions, one thing is certain: With the album climbing the charts, ever-more money is at stake in the legal battle.
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The RIAA has just submitted its latest list of “rogue” websites to the U.S. Government. The report includes many of the usual suspects and also calls out websites who claim that they’re protecting the Internet from censorship, specifically naming The Pirate Bay. “We must end this assault on our humanity and the misappropriation of fundamental human rights,” RIAA writes.
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