08.22.14
Posted in FUD, Microsoft, Security at 4:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
TJ Maxx all over again?
Summary: UPS is the latest victim of Microsoft’s shoddy back door with software on top of it (Windows); attempts to blame FOSS for data compromise actually divert attention from the real culprit, which is proprietary software
A boycott against UPS, based on my bitter experiences, is nothing too prejudiced. Their system does not work well. That’s an understatement actually. It’s dysfunctional. In fact, it’s an utter mess. I wasn’t the only one who was utterly screwed, reputedly, and made deeply upset by them. I tried to accomplish something so simple and spent a huge amount of time achieving nearly nothing. They are badly coordinated and their system is crap. They’re using an utterly flawed system, especially when it comes to exchanges with clients, including financial exchanges. Last year I was upset enough to produce some memes like the following:
Now it turns out that UPS was foolish enough to be using Microsoft Windows. Consequently, in many countries (not just one) it got “infected with credit card stealing malware” and customers are going to pay dearly (customers, not UPS):
Grocery shoppers nationwide probably had credit card data stolen
Coast-to-coast: Albertsons, Acme Markets, Jewel-Osco and more were hit.
Dozens of UPS stores across 24 states, including California, Georgia, New York, and Nebraska, have been hit by malware designed to suck up credit card details. The UPS Store, Inc., is a subsidiary of UPS, but each store is independently owned and operated as a licensed franchisee.
“Windows, again,” says our reader. “See the annotations in the update…”
Notice how the Microsoft-friendly Condé Nast fails to even name Microsoft. Total cover-up, maybe misreporting. Disgusting. It’s like naming an issue in some car model, stating that it is chronic, dangerous and widespread, but still not naming the car maker or the model. Recall also the biggest credit card-stealing incidents in recent history; it is almost always due to Microsoft and Windows.
There is a bunch of reports circulating right now which blame an OpenSSL bug (that Microsoft likes to hype up) for patients’ data compromise.
A reader of ours who lectures on computer security explains: “The real problem was that, as seen in other articles, they used a VPN in place of real security. Oh, and the VPN was closed source, not OpenVPN.”
“This is no surprise as when given internal access to any computer network, it is virtually a 100% success rate at breaking into systems and furthering access,” says one report.
“They admit to having no security for their services and relying on a VPN to provide the illusion of security,” our reader explains. “They also misuse the marketing term ’0-day’.”
Anything to keep the term “Heartbleed” in headlines, creating a FOSS scare…
You can count on the likes of Condé Nast covering Microsoft-induced disaster without mentioning Mirosoft at all while at the same time shouting “Heartbleed” from the rooftops, as Condé Nast so regularly does. █
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Posted in Fraud, Microsoft at 3:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft role in writing of laws by proxy, via groups such as ALEC
Several years we saw ALEC getting exposed, thanks in part to activists around the Web. We then saw the faces of people and corporations that were attacking the people of the world by corrupting politicians and writing laws by proxy.
Bill Gates was funding ALEC, one of the most notorious lobby groups in the US. It turns out now that Microsoft too has been funding ALEC, but no more. Microsoft “is no longer a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and has stopped funding the group.”
ALEC has been incredibly notorious for a number of years. What drove Microsoft to ALEC’s arms and why did it take Microsoft so much time to stop funneling money into this systemic corruption? The negative publicity was probably outweighed by benefits that Microsoft got (tomorrow we will provide an example of massive tax evasion by Microsoft). This is not an exception by the way; Microsoft has funded other ugly groups that even help deny climate change, so this whole thing is no reason for surprise or even a cause for shock. Two crooks get along.
In other news, Opera steps into bed with the crook. “Opera Mini will become the default web browser for Microsoft’s existing feature phones and Asha phones portfolio, as part of a new deal announced today,” says a report. While it means MSIE is dying, this also means that the company which once complained about Microsoft’s abuses to European authorities is now selling out. Why? Money.
Corruption is systemic and those with the money typically manage to get away with everything, including crimes. If the rich write our laws (sometimes by proxy), then it’s expected that they will almost never be sent to prison. Impunity is attained this way. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 3:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some news from the UK showing how Microsoft uses politics to extract money out of taxpayers, irrespective of their preferences
AS one who works with the British public sector, I personally happen to know some of Microsoft’s very dirty (if not criminal) tricks. There are all sorts of ways by which one games these systems, especially by “lobbying” (to put it politely) those who make decisions. I have heard stories and also seen incidents, some of which I cannot share publicly. Microsoft simply refuses to play by the rules. To obey the law is some kind of a joke to Microsoft. Tomorrow we will give examples from Chile and Germany, but today we’ll focus on the UK.
Microsoft just loves to exploit British taxpayers. The UK is a relatively rich country that is most notorious for its excessive spendings on public IT. It is no wonder that Microsoft worked so hard to impede ODF adoption in the UK.
Microsoft is now trying to impose its surveillance ‘cloud’ (proprietary software with NSA access) on British transportation. How amazing is that? They label lock-in “modernisation”:
MICROSOFT HAS TEAMED with British internet systems installation company Telent and IT consulting company CGI in a bid to modernise London’s tube network using the Internet of Things (IoT).
Announced in a UK government blog post, the partnership will look to modernise the London Underground monitoring systems, which oversee critical rail assets with data from thousands of devices and sensors, by integrating Microsoft’s Azure Intelligent Systems Services software.
Why does the British government continue to throw away so much money, giving it to foreign companies with such a poor privacy record that they resemble moles with back doors and espionage tendencies? Local SMEs could do far better. This should be causing outrage, but there is apathy.
The NSA’ partner wants to conduct mass surveillance in London’s Tube and technical problems are sure to come. Just see LSE. Look what Microsoft had done to it before it moved to GNU/Linux.
A reader asks: “Is this just a bid or has a contract been signed?”
The article above merely links to a Microsoft marketing-esque blog.
In other news from the UK, some euphemistically-named “Microsoft Ventures” (for “the children” of course, just like the Microsoft- and Bill Gates-bankrolled Intellectual Ventures) is preying on children when not spying on them. Interestingly enough, this was posted under “Politics” by the Microsoft-friendly Condé Nast.
“Microsoft will provide funding, mentorship and workspace through its London startup accelerator, Microsoft Ventures. It will also develop a dedicated open skills badge for iDEA,” says this report. Got that? Open. Yes, lock-in is “open”.
When will Microsoft finally get out of the UK and stop pretending that it helps “the children” and “modernisation”? Lock-in in sheep’s clothing is all it is, and adding insult to injury, this is mass surveillance on British travelers (not a choice) and children who must attend schools. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More good news regarding the demise of patents as Microsoft’s leading patent proxy is collapsing more rapidly than anyone ever imagined and software patents too are collectively doubted
Not only Microsoft is laying off nearly 20% of its staff after years of gradual (but mostly concealed) layoffs. Intellectual Ventures, the world’s biggest patent troll that Bill Gates and Microsoft created, is not quite managing to survive, not even with extortions coordinated and perpetrated en masse. We heard about Intellectual Ventures’ financial issues before, but this is a pleasant surprise:
Intellectual Ventures, the company Silicon Valley loves to despise, is laying off about 20 percent of its employees, Bloomberg Businessweek has learned.
On Tuesday, IV sent a memo to its workers, notifying them of the cuts. The company has been employing 700 people, which means about 140 will be let go. “We are making operational changes that are consistent with this reduction and will enable us to maintain and expand our leadership in the market for invention,” the company said in a statement. “Our assets—both people and intellectual property—are among the best in the industry.” Now, let me try to translate that.
Not too long ago Microsoft threw it a lifeline. This uber-troll, the world’s biggest and most vicious troll, is finally announcing layoffs and it is a major deal because it might come to show what will happen to other trolls like it. This Microsoft- and Gates-funded nuisance cannot go far without Microsoft subsidies, apparently.
Times are tough for a patent troll, apparently. A year ago, we noted that Intellectual Ventures — the world’s largest patent troll, who brought in billions of dollars by getting companies to pay up a shakedown fee to avoid lawsuits over its giant portfolio of patents (mostly cast off from universities who couldn’t find any other buyers) — was running out of cash. While IV did convince Microsoft and Sony to dump in some more cash, IV’s litigation strategy is in shambles. Various lawsuits are dropping like flies without any of the big wins that IV promised.
Now that SCOTUS sheds doubt on a lot of software patents things definitely improve. As one lawyers’ site put it a few days ago:
The Supreme Court has not attempted to “delimit the precise contours of the ‘abstract ideas’ category.” In other words, the Court is essentially saying “we will know it when we see it.” This presents a significant problem to inventors and patent attorneys working in the software industry.
In effect, the Supreme Court is proposing a syllogism such as the following:
- Patents shall not be granted on abstract ideas.
- X is an abstract idea.
- Therefore, a patent shall not be granted on X.
The problem is that the Court has not defined “abstract idea.” Furthermore, “abstract idea” is not self-defining and is not a term that is agreed to by everyone. In fact, an endless chain of assumptions must be followed in arriving at a definition. For example, a court might say: “A general purpose computer executing this software is an abstract idea.” A patent applicant then challenges this statement by saying, e.g., “how is this computer with a claimed memory, processor, input/output unit, and a specific software program “general purpose?” The Court then points to the holding in Alice that the particular claimed computer (system claim) is merely carrying out a method that is an abstract idea and the patent attorney is just re-writing the same general purpose method as a system claim and that including hardware elements does not transform the system claim from an abstract idea. This is circular reasoning.
What patent lawyers wish not to accept or even to grasp is the simple fact that, as we have explained before on numerous occasions, all software patents are inherently abstract. Patents do not cover code but only algorithms, which are conceptual. Code is covered by copyright law. As this gets realised by more judges and they make rulings based on this realisation we are likely to see software patents ebbing away. But don’t expect patent lawyers to give up easily, especially not Microsoft and its extortion strategists. Extortion with patents is Microsoft’s last hope. Here is alawyers’ publication publishing propaganda by a “registered patent agent”:
The Supreme Court has declared abstract ideas unpatentable, but there are structural and other ways around the restrictions, writes Christopher Hall.
Christopher Hall is a registered patent agent in the Silicon Valley office of Womble Carlyle. He has 17 years of industry experience as a professional engineer and is named as sole inventor or co-inventor on 15 granted patents.
Pointless self promotion and not even any content in this article, just an advertisement of vapourware. A bit like Intellectual Ventures… █
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08.21.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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While Internet connectivity in the home is now mainstream, gateway security to protect users is not. It’s a gap that startup Itus Networks is aiming to address with a Linux-powered home gateway device called the iGuardian. Before Itus can deliver the iGuardian though, the company needs to raise $125,000 on crowdfunding site Kickstarter in order to build the device. The Kickstarter campaign ends on Sept. 12, and as of Aug. 19, $61,000 has been raised.
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Desktop
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With all of that said, how then to deploy NX technology to tablets? Users want to use their own tablets to connect to our GNOME desktops, but we cannot touch the hardware. Users can download the Nomachine/NX client, but do not have the right key pair and there are settings and optimizations that would difficult for them to do on their own. So we can’t touch them, and it’s not secure to email them the settings and keypair. We kicked around some ideas and decided the best approach was to allow users to connect their Apple and Android tablets to City Workstations via USB and then initiate a small amount of software that mounts and then installs the .nxs and .cfg files needed to make the device work as expected. This process is initiated by them via icon, and they accept the dialog alerting that there is no support in the event of problems or failure.
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In the LinuxCon keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that Linux now runs everything, everywhere. He’s right. From supercomputers to stock markets to smartphones, Linux dominates most computing markets the way Germany did Brazil in the 2014 World Cup. But, during the Linux kernel panel, Linux’s founder, Linus Torvalds, admitted that he still regrets that Linux doesn’t rule the desktop.
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Linux may be dominating the world – powering super computers, infrastructure of stock exchanges and sites like Amazon, Facebook, Google, space missions of NASA , air traffic controls or airlines and much more. In consumer space Linux, via Android, controls over 85% of the market and its fast capturing the casual laptop market through Chromebooks. In a nutshell Linux has become omnipresent in today’s world. As Jim Zemlin said during his keynote Linux is one of the greatest shared technologies in the world.
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Acer, which has been rapidly gaining popularity as a portable computing hardware manufacturer, has been placing some heavy bets on Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform. The company has a fleet of portable computers based on Chrome OS, and is taking Chrome OS to the desktop form factor with a new system.
Acer’s Chromebox CXI system, announced on Thursday, is seen back-mounted in the photo and runs an Intel Celeron 2957U dual-core 1.4GHz processor. It also has a 16GB solid-state drive, and–like other systems based on Chrome OS–offers a fast boot-up time that Acer claims takes only eight seconds.
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Kernel Space
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The nonprofit Linux Foundation announced a new Linux Certification Program to help systems administrators show off some credentials and get jobs based upon them. There are two certifications – one for early career admins and one for engineer-level admins.
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It’s a common story: Businesses desperately want Linux savvy employees. Programmers and system administrators who cut their teeth on the gcc and the BASH shell want jobs. But, between them rises the wall of human resources, which wants degrees and certifications. The Linux Foundation introduced an answer at LinuxCon: a new Linux Foundation Certification Program for both early-career and engineer-level systems administrators.
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As LinuxCon 2014 kicks off this week in Chicago, the Linux Foundation has announced that it has won new support from across the technology industry, including several hardware companies.
The nonprofit organization said on Wednesday that SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital have become Linux Foundation members, all three of which are interested in using Linux and open-source software to power storage systems.
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One problem with Linux has been its implementation of system calls. As Andy Lutomirski pointed out recently, it’s very messy. Even identifying which system calls were implemented for which architectures, he said, was very difficult, as was identifying the mapping between a call’s name and its number, and mapping between call argument registers and system call arguments.
Some user programs like strace and glibc needed to know this sort of information, but their way of gathering it together—although well accomplished—was very messy too.
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Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, talks about Linux a lot. During his keynote at the LinuxCon USA event here, Zemlin noted that it’s often difficult for him to come up with new material for talking about the state of Linux at this point.
Every year at LinuxCon, Zemlin delivers his State of Linux address, but this time he took a different approach. Zemlin detailed what he actually does and how the Linux Foundation works to advance the state of Linux.
Fundamentally it’s all about enabling the open source collaboration model for software development.
“We are seeing a shift now where the majority of code in any product or service is going to be open source,” Zemlin said.
Zemlin added that open source is the new Pareto Principle for software development, where 80 percent of software code is open source. The nature of collaborative development itself has changed in recent years. For years the software collaboration was achieved mostly through standards organizations.
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The Linux Foundation’s CII Adds Hitachi and NEC to Roster of Companies Working to Identify and Fund Open Source Projects in Need of Assistance
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What is a zombie shuffling desk? What does the d in systemd stand for? Test your knowledge of these Linux trivia questions and watch your fellow Linux community members, including kernel developer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman, attempt to answer in our annual LinuxCon and CloudOpen Live Linux Trivia video. This year the video opened the conference, playing to the live audience before the morning keynote sessions.
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Graphics Stack
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Earlier this month at SIGGRAPH Vancouver we were surprised yet delighted by the news of Khronos developing a next-generation graphics API following OpenGL 4.5. All of the Khronos Group slides about OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL-Next, and their other industry-standard APIs have now been published from their SIGGRAPH track.
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Besides the recent work to support OpenGL Geometry Shaders for Sandy Bridge in Mesa, users of Intel “Sandy Bridge” HD Graphics can also be thankful for the forthcoming Linux 3.17 kernel. Early testing of Linux 3.17 has revealed that for at least some Intel Sandy Bridge hardware are OpenGL performance improvements with the newer kernel code.
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NVIDIA put out version 6.5 of their Compute Unified Device Architecture today and it is a big step ahead, including better development tooling for CUDA Fortran.
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Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.6.
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Yesterday I shared some benchmarks showing Intel Sandy Bridge HD Graphics performance increasing on Linux 3.17 for this several year old architecture. This came as a surprise but the good news is the performance improvements on this new Linux kernel don’t stop with OpenGL but extend to CPU performance too.
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Benchmarks
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Tests I carried out last month with a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air showed Linux largely smashing OS X 10.9 with the latest open-source graphics driver code on Linux over Apple’s OpenGL driver. Today I’m testing the latest OS X 10.9.4 state against the newest Linux kernel and Intel Mesa driver code on Ubuntu while this time using an older Sandy Bridge era Apple Mac Mini.
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Applications
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Yorba is pleased to announce the release of Geary 0.6.2 (All users are adviced to upgrade to this version) and 0.7.1, Yorba’s next-generation mail client for GNOME 3.
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Geary, a lightweight email program designed around conversations and built for the GNOME desktop by the Yorba software group, is now at version 0.7.1.
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Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.23.3.
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Audacity’s been around for a long time—since mid-2000—and for good reason. It’s a relatively lightweight, open-source, and completely free audio editor that can handle pretty much every task you throw at it. Need to edit together a podcast? No problem. Looking to do some simple noise reduction? Looking to turn your PC into a music computer? Audacity’s got you covered.
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Orca 3.13.90, a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via speech and refreshable Braille, is now available for download and testing.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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4MLinux Game Edition, a special Linux distribution based on Busybox, Dropbear, OpenSSH, and PuTTY, which also happens to feature a large number of games, is now at version 9.1 Beta.
The 4MLinux distributions are among the smallest ones in the world, but that doesn’t mean the developers can’t add a ton of interesting games into the mix.
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This SparkyLinux game edition builds in access to a large collection of popular games compiled for the Linux platform. It brings the latest game fare via the Steam and Desura platforms. It provides handy access from a quick launch bar to a dozen plus emulators to let you run top-line games from leading gaming boxes and platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Version 1.11 of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) has been released and it represents a huge milestone for those depending upon the library as part of their desktop.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Community has announced the latest major updates to KDE Applications delivering primarily improvements and bugfixes. Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Development Platform are frozen and receiving only long term support; those teams are focused on the transition to Plasma 5 and Frameworks 5. This 4.14 release is dedicated to long time KDE contributor Volker Lanz who passed away last April. The full announcement has more information and details.
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We start the next in our little test series of different icon sets. Please, again, participate in our little game and help us to learn more about the usability of icon design.
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The KDE Applications stack has been updated for KDE 4.,14 while the Plasma Workspaces and Development Platform are transitioning to Plasma 5 and Frameworks 5.
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Almost a year has passed since the last release of the Wacom Tablet KCM. A lot has happened on my side but I finally found the time to to some hacking on the code again.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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WebKitGTK+, a version of the WebKit open source web engine that uses GTK+ as its user-facing frontend, has reached version 2.5.2.
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Cheese, a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam that also includes graphical effects based on the gstreamer backend, has reached version 3.14 Beta 1.
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I’ve recently been hard at work on a new and updated version of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, and am pleased to announce that this will be ready for the upcoming 3.14 release.
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HandyLinux is a newer operating system and its developers have tried to provide a clear and familiar desktop interface. It might feel like it has a Windows 8 vibe, which is probably an effect of the theme used, but the OS is actually quite interesting.
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Arch Family
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The Linux desktop community has reached a sad state. Ubuntu 14.04 was a disappointing release and Fedora is taking way too long between releases. Hell, OpenSUSE is an overall disaster. It is hard to recommend any Linux-based operating system beyond Mint. Even the popular KDE plasma environment and its associated programs are in a transition phase, moving from 4.x to 5.x. As exciting as KDE 5 may be, it is still not ready for prime-time; it is recommended to stay with 4 for now.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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For those curious about what’s going on with “Fedora.Next” in revolutionizing the Fedora Linux distribution, Matthew Miller — Fedora’s new Project Leader — is presenting at LinuxCon Chicago today covering the ongoing working for the Red Hat sponsored distribution.
Matthew Miller’s presentation is entitled “How Linux Distros Became Boring (and Fedora’s Plan to Put Boring Where It Belongs).” It doesn’t look like I’ll make it over to LinuxCon Chicago due to the weather over here in Indiana today, but fortunately for all those outside of Chicago, you can already find Matthew’s slides online.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced that quite a few OpenJDK 7 vulnerabilities have been found and corrected in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
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That news is being augmented today with a joint announcement from VMware and Canonical that Canonical’s open source operating system, Ubuntu, is now certified on vCloud Air. This is important since Ubuntu is the most popular operating system in the cloud. It is estimated that 70% of public cloud workloads run on top of Ubuntu. A tested and optimized Ubuntu image sitting on top of vCloud Air is a non-negotiable requirement for many enterprises.
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Canonical closed a few Oxide vulnerabilities that have been found in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
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Canonical’s specific involvement with the Khronos Group isn’t listed and we haven’t seen Canonical names closely associated with any major specs out of the different working groups to date. However, Oliver Ries, the Head of Engineering Product Strategy at Canonical, wrote into Phoronix that they joined the group for pushing their display server agenda with trying to work towards an underlying driver standard for Mir/Wayland. Oli noted in his email, “Canonical has joined Khronos in order to help establish the necessary driver standard that is required for Mir (and Wayland) to succeed. We have specifically contributed to the current standard proposal/draft.”
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When Canonical decided that Ubuntu would no longer sport the extremely comfortable GNOME 2 desktop and, instead, switch to the newly conceived Unity environment… I jumped ship faster than a screen door on battleship. (Okay, I know that doesn’t really work there. But I just watched “Back to the Future 2” and can’t seem to think of a single other metaphor. Heh. That Biff. He kills me.) Suffice to say that I jumped ship “really, really fast.”
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Flashing pins are spinning tens of feet into the air on a pitch dark stage. It’s a juggling performance. All of the pins are perfectly synchronized to flash different colors in time to the music. It’s part of the magic of theater and a special night out with friends to enjoy a distraction from daily life. Part of the magic—and why it’s called magic—is that the audience doesn’t know how these secrets are made backstage.
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Instead of commercializing the product and with the intention of contributing to the community, Sanjeev posted a blog explaining how his ‘Smart Cap’ can be built by anyone using opensource hardware such as a Rasberry Pi computer, an Arduino board and Android software.
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We can hear this heartbeat by listening to what the environment tells us through sensors and testing. I proposed that we build low cost sensors using open source hardware and software. In recent years there has been quite a disruption in computing ability as a result of the prevalence of smartphones. Increasingly small and powerful components and processors have created an opportunities that we would have never thought possible. One of the results of that is the single-board Raspberry Pi computer. Originally, the Raspberry Pi was created to enable students to learn hardware and software development. For the Okavango Wilderness Project, we are using them to take environmental readings and send those to us for inclusion into the Into The Okavango website. Jer will cover this more in his expedition post. We are using them to measure water temperature, pH, conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and specific gravity.
So I built three prototype units to take readings and send them to the website using simple text messaging on a local cellular network. We deployed the three prototypes near base camp, with the plan to build a network of these for the 2015 expedition. The field-testing and deployment was not without issues, which lead me to do some programming out in the delta. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first time Linux and Python coding was used out here. Once this network is deployed, local baYei people and volunteers from Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation will maintain and repair them (which Gregg will cover more in his post).
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Stealth.com has launched four rugged mini-PCs based on 3rd Gen. Intel Core CPUs, featuring four gigabit ports, Ubuntu, and optional PCI and PCIe expansion.
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Phones
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Android
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Photos and specs of the forthcoming Moto 360 smartwatch from Motorola appeared briefly on a Best Buy Web page this week, sparking increased chatter about the device.
Concerns about price — the watch was listed at US$250 on the page — tempered the usual gasps of delight from geeks. Amazon lists a Samsung Galaxy Gear for $150, a Gear Live for $180, a Gear 2 Neo for $200, a Pebble Steel for $230, and an LG G Black Titan for $233.
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Gizchina yesterday received leaked images from what they call “a high level employee at Elephone”. The images are of Elephone’s newest device the P1000 which is remarkably similar to the OnePlus One. Now it is no secret that companies within China quickly copied and cloned the OnePlus one on other devices but (if the images and specs) are true than this will be the most all-round and highest-spec clone to become available.
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Elephone, most known for their every expanding range of Mediatek phones and as being one of the first manufacturers in China to offer an Android 4.4 Kitkat update, are preparing a 2014 Flagship killer of their own.
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MapmyIndia released an Android-based IVI and navigation system called the IceNav 701 with a dual-core processor, a 6.2-inch WVGA touchscreen, and NaviMap.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I have children. My children go to school. The schools that my children go to teach ICT. To do so, they need computers. At two of those schools, there’s currently a drive to fund a bunch of iPads. Currently, said schools use a mix of desktop and laptop computers, and each has access to a bunch of interesting software tools that we parents can also get to play around with remotely in some cases. Granted, when one of my children comes home and asks if we can get a copy of said program for home it gets a bit awkward, not least when I check the prices, but there’s something useful, I think, about continuing to develop and teach keyboard and mouse skills.
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We use a lot of open source software within Untappd daily, from MongoDB to jQuery. It’s what powers software evolution, and without it, we would have a hard time developing solutions effectively and efficiently. With every library that we develop for use on Untappd, we try to open source it, including our PHP Library For Amazon CloudSearch, UntappdPHP, and MemcacheJS. We hope that other developers can use these libraries to save some time and help them focus on building great projects. Any library we use, we try to think about how to build it with “openness” in mind, for re-usability by all.
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Regardless of the reason, this isn’t about you. Not really. For open source to succeed, much of the planning has to be about those who will use the software. As I wrote in 2005, if you “want lots of people to contribute (bug fixes, extensions, etc.,” then you need to “write good documentation, use an accessible programming language … [and] have a modular framework.”
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Events
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Ken had mentioned this in a email a few months back, I believe, but I’d put it on a back burner, where it fell off and landed hidden behind the stove. If Larry Cafiero, better known as the free software and CrunchBang guy, hadn’t made mention of the fact on Google+ the other day, I probably wouldn’t’ve remembered until it was way too late.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is in the process of adding the ability to “cast” videos from Firefox to Chromecast devices, and you can try it now if you have the right hardware.
As announced in a post on Google+ post by Mozilla developer Lucas Rocha, “Chromecast support is now enabled in Firefox for Android’s Nightly build.”
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Funding
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Alfresco, an open source, enterprise content management startup, is today announcing a new round of funding of $45 million — a Series D round that is more than twice as big as all of its previous rounds put together.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU community members and collaborators have discovered threatening details about a five-country government surveillance program codenamed HACIENDA. The good news? Those same hackers have already worked out a free software countermeasure to thwart the program.
According to Heise newspaper, the intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, have used HACIENDA to map every server in twenty-seven countries, employing a technique known as port scanning. The agencies have shared this map and use it to plan intrusions into the servers. Disturbingly, the HACIENDA system actually hijacks civilian computers to do some of its dirty work, allowing it to leach computing resources and cover its tracks.
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Project Releases
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G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) is a framework for image processing that comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (almost 400, with an extra 300 testing filters). There are several interfaces for G’MIC: a command line tool, a web service, a Qt based interface for real-time webcam manipulation, a library and a GIMP plugin.
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Public Services/Government
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Last year, the NHS said open source would be a key feature of the new approach to healthcare IT. It hopes embracing open source will both cut the upfront costs of implementing new IT systems and take advantage of using the best brains from different areas of healthcare to develop collaborative solutions.
Meyer said the Spine switchover team has “picked up the gauntlet around open-source software”.
The HSCIC and BJSS have collaborated to build the core services of Spine 2, such as electronic prescriptions and care records, “in a series of iterative developments”.
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Lessons learnt from NPfIT suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach for EPRs has its limitations, as every trust made the case, rightly or wrongly, that it was somehow different. This is why we believe that open source provides another way of delivering those clinical benefits; trusts can take ownership of the code and develop it alongside clinicians to their requirements.
But open source is not for everyone. Each healthcare provider has varying degrees of IT maturity; some may be close to becoming paperless or have systems in place that just need to be built on, some may decide that a new approach is right for their organisation.
For our trust, the timing and opportunity of open source just came together and made it the logical choice. Open source fits with our culture and our approach, clinicians liked the IMS Maxims software, and it was particularly affordable for us, giving us the ability to manage change from our current system – it lets us control our own IT requirements.
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Licensing
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With the upcoming Qt 5.4 release, LGPLv3 is now an optional license alongside the existing LGPLv2.1 license and the commercial combination for Qt Enterprise.
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Openness/Sharing
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Ten years have passed since the launch of the big, talkative, landmark show called Massive Change, which went on a tour that eventually took it from Vancouver to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, then on to Chicago. Organized by designer Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries, a Toronto work-study design program, the exhibition and the accompanying book showcased gadgets, systems and ideas that promised to heal some of contemporary humankind’s most urgent maladies – slums, starvation, economic under-performance and much else.
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Open Data
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Such is promise of “open data”—the massive troves of public information our governments now post to the net. The hope is that, if governments share enough of this data with the world at large, hackers and entrepreneurs will find a way of putting it to good use. But although so much of this government data is now available, the revolution hasn’t exactly happened.
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Open Hardware
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Open source software has been around for years, and for obvious reasons — all it takes is a PC to churn out code. And developers can make anything — operating systems, networking systems, administration systems, databases.
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Though Local Motors was the first car company to produce an open source vehicle, Founder Jay Rogers says it is not an open source car company. It’s a hardware company.
Traditional car companies have long product cycles, intricate assembly processes, and high production and distribution costs. Local Motors’ approach is instead akin to a software or microelectronics company that’s iterative, fast and lower cost.
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Programming
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Programming the Web, Pt. III The most revolutionary aspect of all the changes that have taken place in web development over the last two decades has been in the web browser.
Typically we think of web browsers as driving innovation on the web by providing new features. Indeed this is the major source of new features on the web.
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Health/Nutrition
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If the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tells us something indisputable, it is this: GMO food products from corporations like Monsanto are suspected to endanger health. On the other hand, an individual’s right to genetically modify and even synthesize entire organisms as part of his dietary or medical regimen could someday be a human right.
The suspicion that agri-giant companies do harm by designing crops is legitimate, even if evidence of harmful GMOs is scant to absent. Based on their own priorities and actions, we should have no doubt that self-interested corporations disregard the rights and wellbeing of local producers and consumers. This makes agri-giants producing GMOs harmful and untrustworthy, regardless of whether individual GMO products are actually harmful.
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Did you know that your Heinz ketchup, which the company claims is ‘all natural,’ is really full of toxic, genetically modified ingredients? It’s bursting with GM corn, which contains at least 5 things that really shouldn’t be in a food condiment.
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Governments do not dictate major policy, major multinational corporations do. We’ve seen this time and time again, and one of the best examples out there is Monsanto. This time, the United States government wants to force GMO seeds on El Salvadorian farmers.
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Security
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The fight against cybercrime continues with the news that a London police force is getting outside help to become a bit more security savvy.
The City of London police is teaming up with Russian cybersecurity specialist Kaspersky Lab, in an effort to help educate both the police, and businesses around the UK, on dealing with the growing menace of cybercrime.
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Someone just like me had the ability to push up whatever they wanted to the DNS server. This is usually fine: only the Authoritative DNS server for a site is allowed to replicate changes. It did mean, however, that anyone that was looking at this particular DNS server would be directed to something they were hosting themselves. I’m guessing it was a Phishing attempt as I did not actually go to their site to check.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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ASIO boss David Irvine has tried to explain how and why Australians join foreign armies, and allay concerns about the Coalition’s proposed anti-terrorism laws. But given its murky past, ASIO’s reassurances should be taken with a grain of salt, writes freelance journalist Andrea Glioti
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“According to our soldiers’ information, the Ukrainian forces are using chemical ammunition on DPR territory.”
“Once a shell bursts, a gas affecting sense organs is emitted. We have this information.”
In early June, Southeastern Ukrainian freedom fighters said Kiev forces attacked Semyonovka near Slaviansk with an unknown chemical weapon.
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sraeli airstrikes killed three senior commanders of the armed wing of Hamas early Thursday in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, Israeli and Palestinian officials said, the most significant blow to the group’s leadership since Israel’s operation in Gaza began more than six weeks ago.
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Foreign forces’ drone strike killed three Taliban commanders, two alleged Pakistani insurgents and wounded five others in eastern Kunar province, Afghan officials said on Wednesday.
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The UK right wing government wished to recall passports and citizenship for any UK citizen who went to fight for the Islamic State (IS) militants in the Middle East. One of the first of many letters of this nature to be sent was to a Mr. Mohamed Sakr, who had been stripped of his citizenship after arriving at the estate owned by his family in London in 2010.
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Besides human spotters on the ground, the main U.S. intelligence assets in Iraq include armed surveillance drones fitted with cameras, radar and communications eavesdropping gear. Jet fighters also carry camera pods under their wings. The intelligence-gathering effort includes the most high-tech ground-based and space-based communications eavesdropping equipment. Drones and camera-equipped jets were the first surveillers to return to Iraq after 2011. The Air Force had pulled its 21 Predator drones from Iraq that year, redeploying them to Kuwait for patrols over the Middle East.
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What have we accomplished in Iraq? And isn’t it time we left them alone?
We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a U.S. attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congress of a young Kuwaiti woman claiming that the Iraqis were ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The woman turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and the story was false, but it was enough to turn U.S. opposition in favor of an attack.
This month, yet another U.S. president — the fifth in a row — began bombing Iraq. He is also placing U.S. troops on the ground despite promising not to do so.
The second Iraq war in 2003 cost the U.S. some two trillion dollars. According to estimates, more than one million deaths have occurred as a result of that war. Millions of tons of U.S. bombs have fallen in Iraq almost steadily since 1991.
What have we accomplished? Where are we now, 24 years later? We are back where we started, at war in Iraq!
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American journalist James Wright Foley was allegedly brutally murdered on video by terrorists of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). The development would at first appear to portray a terrorist organization openly declaring itself an enemy of the West, but in reality, it is the latest attempt by the West itself to cover up the true genesis of the current region-wide catastrophe of its own creation now unfolding in the Middle East.
As early as 2007, the stage was being set for the regional genocide now unfolding from Syria and Lebanon along the Mediterranean to northern Iraq. The “sudden” appearance of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, otherwise known as ISIS, betrays years of its rise and the central part it played in Western-backed violence seeking to overthrow the government of Syria starting in 2011 amid the cover of the so-called “Arab Spring.”
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Many reports speak of airstrikes in the Libyan capital Tripoli as being launched by an unknown party against Islamist militia from Mistrata on Monday August 18.
Actually there should be no mystery ab
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Even though CIA-linked General Haftar claims his bombing of Misrata militia in Tripoli was a joint effort with the international community there seems little attention let alone analysis in the media of what is happening in Libya
On Monday, Libyan air force units loyal to General Kahlifa Haftar struck positions of the Misrata militia in Tripoli. The militia has been in a prolonged battle at and near the Tripoli international airport with allies of Haftar, the Zintan brigades. The battle has moved closer to the center of Tripoli now as unidentified militia have fired Grad rockets into two upscale districts killing three people according to local residents. The area is home to many foreign brand outlets including Marks and Spencer, and Nike and fancy cafes.
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At a town hall Tuesday with Raytheon Missile Systems employees, Arizona’s senior senator said the cut would have been to “probably the best and most-proven missile system ever.” McCain also spoke in support of a modernization program for the Tomahawk that would make the weapon threat-relevant through about 2040.
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David Barron now sits on the bench of the First Circuit Court of Appeals despite having given President Barack Obama the legal justification for killing an American citizen overseas without a trial.
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Not so, however, if the killing had come at the hands of the military or the CIA. In that case, the soldier or the CIA agent would be immune from criminal prosecution and civil suit, so long as they claimed that the killing took place as part of a “national-security” operation. Once their lawyers cited those two magical words, every judge in the land, both state and federal, would immediately slam down the gavel and declare “Case dismissed.”
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The investigation uncovered incontrovertible, if unsurprising, proof of involvement in the operation by the Mob (in this case, the Chicago Outfit) by Texas oil interests, Saudi financiers, and, of course, the CIA.
But unearthing new evidence about the CIA’s role in the drug trade for the past 50 years no longer provides much grist for the gossip mill. Time marches on. Gary Webb was right. Everybody knows it.
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Transparency Reporting
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The drone campaign in Pakistan, which is conducted by the CIA, remains an official secret. In June 2012, Obama declassified the campaigns in Yemen and Somalia – but details of the attacks remain shrouded in mystery. The US has declined to release even the most basic details about the strikes, such as when or where they take place. As a result we also rarely know who or what they hit. But a growing number of voices have been calling for transparency.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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10,000 people are expected to attend the musicians’ “Harvest the Hope” concert.
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Finance
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Hewlett-Packard Co posted a surprise increase in quarterly revenue after sales from its personal computer division climbed 12 percent, but a flat to declining performance from its other units underscored the company’s uphill battle to revive growth.
HP sales rose a mere 1 percent to $27.6 billion in its fiscal third quarter from $27.2 billion a year earlier. Wall Street analysts had forecast a modest drop in revenue to $27.01 billion.
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Every time Apple releases a new iPhone there’s a dramatic spike in the number of Google searches for the phrase “iPhone slow”. Does this give credence to the conspiracy theory that Apple intentionally slows down iPhones to encourage you to buy a new one?
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(1) Use the pound anyway
Even if the Westminster government does not agree to share the pound, Scotland could use it anyway, without a say in monetary policy
Ecuador and Panama, for example, have adopted the US dollar
(And, I should add, Tasmania uses the Australian dollar … There, that should get me in trouble for today …
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(2) Join the euro
It would not be an immediate option
(3) Launch a Scottish currency
Without its own borrowing history, an independent Scotland might find the currency quickly loses value when traded and markets could demand a higher interest rate on its debt
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Welcome to globalization. Wasn’t it supposed to make up all richer?
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Despite the economic recovery, more than 46 million Americans — or 1 in 7 — used a food pantry last year. And a surprisingly high number of those seeking help were households with military members, according to a new survey by Feeding America, which is a network of U.S. food banks.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has long been the leading advocate in condemning the prominence of “he said/she said” journalism in the mainstream media. This kind of journalism is driven by a complete distortion of what it means to be an “objective” journalist. Bad journalists seem to think that if someone is making a claim, you present that claim, then you present an opposing claim, and you’re done. They think this is objective because they’re not “picking sides.” But what if one side is batshit crazy and the other is actually making legitimate claims? Shouldn’t the job of true journalists be to ferret out the truth and reveal the crazy arguments as crazy? Rosen’s latest calls out the NY Times for falling into the bogus “he said/she said” trap yet again. This time it’s on an article about plagiarism and copyright infringement charges being leveled from one biographer of Ronald Reagan against another. We wrote about this story as well, and we looked at the arguments of both sides, and then noted that author Craig Shirley’s arguments made no sense at all, as he was trying to claim ownership of facts (something you can’t do). Furthermore, his claims of plagiarism were undermined by the very fact that he admitted that competing biographer Rick Perlstein’s quotes were different. Shirley claimed that “difference” in the quotes showed that Perlstein was trying to cover up the plagiarism, but… that makes no sense.
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If the weight of the evidence allows you to make a judgment, but instead you go with “he said, she said,” you’re behaving recklessly even as you tell yourself you’re doing the cautious thing.
It’s my job to notice when a piece of standard brand pressthink “flips” around and no longer works as intended. I have one.
For a very long time, the logic behind “he said, she said” journalism, and “get both sides,” as well as, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to leave it there” was that operating this way would reduce risk to a news publisher’s reputation. (See my 2009 post.) When you have both sides speaking in your account, you’re protecting yourself against charges of favoring one or the other. By not “choosing” a side — by not deciding who’s right — you’re safer.
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Censorship
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According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.
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Google has removed a total of 12 BBC News stories from some search results since controversial EU “right to be forgotten” laws came into force in May.
The stories range from coverage of a court case on bomb-making in Ireland 13 years ago to a dispute over a lost dog.
Google notified the BBC of each of the removals, but it did not disclose who had made the removal requests.
The stories will no longer appear in the results of certain search terms.
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The New York Times will comply with an order from the Afghan attorney general’s office ordering correspondent Matthew Rosenberg to leave the country after he published an article stating that high-ranking officials were discussing the formation of an interim government, a spokesperson told POLITICO.
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“Instead of seeking out the beheading video of James Foley, seek out his work, he died in the service of telling stories from dark places,” said a fellow journalist. “Share this instead,” said another, citing this article that he wrote for the Global Post in the month prior to his capture. Others called for people to watch a talk he gave at Medill University, or a BBC interview, both filmed in 2011.
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It says in a statement “We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under Terrorism legislation.”
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The events of Ferguson, Missouri are still unfolding, and as they do the Internet seems to get more dark. Then there was Robin Williams’s death, and amongst the outpouring of love, there was of course a couple of rotten apples who scared Williams’s daughter off social media altogether by tweeting a fake picture of Williams’s corpse.
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After the clampdown by Twitter and YouTube on Islamic State (Isis) propaganda, the social media war has spread to open-source social network Diaspora – where the content is impossible to remove.
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As Mike recently mentioned, there is a heated debate throughout the internet and the country over whether or not social media and content sharing sites like Facebook and YouTube should be actively taking down videos of American journalist James Foley being beheaded by ISIS/ISIL. The issue, which I’ve chosen to write about here before, is even more important and serious than perhaps it appears on the face for most people. Mathew Ingram’s post dealt with many good aspects of the debate, some of which we’ll discuss, but I think he leaves out a large part of the equation. More on that in a moment.
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Privacy
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The federal government has been left red-faced following revelations that law-enforcement agencies have been accessing Australians’ web browsing histories without a warrant.
Access to phone and internet data held by telecommunications companies has been the subject of much debate recently, as the government seeks to extend the power of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to fight terrorism and crime. It has proposed telcos retain customers’ metadata for up to two years for investigation.
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The broad definition of a ‘network’ in new national security legislation could give Australia’s top spy agency access to just about every computer on the internet, according to legal experts.
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Reset the Net has a privacy pack that is designed to slow the NSA…
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Federal watchdog of Canada’s top-secret electronic spy agency gives Communications Security Establishment a clean report card with some recommendations for improvement.
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If the knowledge that the NSA collects and stores indefinitely all of your email, cell, online transactions—as well as tracking your whereabouts at any given moment—does the thought of 18 year-old voyeuristic NSA employees leering at pictures of your daughter, and finding their amusement in shared intimacies meant only for the eyes of friends cause you outrage?
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Please note that this is not intended to be — nor should it be — considered as legal advice. This is my humble opinion based on the current state of the law and technology today.
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The anonymous browser is making a push for mainstream acceptability. But to hit the mainstream scale, it may need help
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Today I did an interview on RT on the subject. Intriguingly, it appears this information was part of the cache of documents an alleged mole in the BND sold to his US spymasters.
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Civil Rights
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19 Beheaded in 17 Days; 8 for Nonviolent Offenses
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I wish I had retained more from my college Latin American politics class. The banana republics, juntas, civil wars and CIA interventions have all faded, but there’s one concept that stuck in my head and it has been haunting me ever since – the four key components necessary to make a healthy democracy.
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We’ve been covering some of the more troubling details of police militarization across the US, and specifically what’s going on in Ferguson, Missouri over the past couple of weeks. However, we knew fairly little about the actual military equipment being used there. And we know that sometimes scary looking military equipment isn’t necessarily so scary when put to use. So it’s interesting to read a former Marine’s analysis of the military equipment being used in Ferguson, which more or less confirms that it not only looks scary but absolutely is scary. Much of the discussion is about how all those “non-lethal” “riot control” weaponry is actually quite dangerous and potentially lethal.
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The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department released cell phone footage Wednesday of the police shooting of Kajieme Powell, a 25-year-old black man killed on Tuesday in St. Louis, according to St. Louis Public Radio.
A convenience store owner called 911 on Tuesday when he suspected Powell stole drinks and donuts from his shop, according to a recording of the call. Another woman called to report Powell was acting erratically and had a knife in his pocket.
Two officers in a police SUV responded to the calls, the cell phone video shows. When the officers got out of their vehicle, Powell walked in their direction, yelling and telling them to shoot him already.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said Tuesday that both of the officers opened fire on Powell when he came within a three or four feet of them holding a knife “in an overhand grip.”
But the newly released cell phone footage undermines the statement, showing Powell approaching the cops, but not coming as close as was reported, with his hands at his side. The officers began shooting within 15 seconds of their arrival, hitting Powell with a barrage of bullets.
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A menagerie of armed state and federal agents have filtered in and out of Ferguson, Missouri for more than a week as unrest has grown there, and now even a private military company is joining the mix. Asymmetric Solutions, a PMC that claims to be “capable of deploying highly qualified former special operations personnel” to “anywhere on the globe in a moments notice” will be providing a security detail to an unnamed individual visiting Ferguson.
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“We need automatic transparency, rigorous external oversight, and a statutory framework that explicitly prohibits abuses . . . When the government knows everything about its citizens, we become subjects,” Crockford told Truthout.
“But the future is ours if we claim it, if we reject fear and embrace our own power. If we want our children to have anonymity in a crowd, privacy at home, and the possibility for freedom in their world, we must make it so.”
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Police assaulted peaceful, nonviolent protesters, arrested Antonio French, an alderman in nearby St. Louis, and tear-gassed Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal.
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Shame on those in government and media, those who trample others underfoot and then claim more of the same is the way to our “greater good”. May the Great Spirit who dwells above and within us all convict you of shame, which seems to be of the only two arrows in your quivers: shame and fear.
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Reporters Without Borders condemns the closures of Mogadishu-based Radio Shabelle and Sky FM and arrests of 19 journalists and employees on 15 August, and the continuing detention and reported torture of the directors of the two radio stations and their owner.
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The civilized Western World has always shown double standard of human rights in the modern era of open diplomacy, economic development and maintenance of fundamental rights of various peoples. But, it is regrettable that major powers like the US and some European countries have continuously been acting upon duplicity regarding human rights violations. In this regard, their silence over the massacre of the Rohingya Muslim community at the hands of the Rakhine extremist Buddhists in Burma (present Myanmar), perpetual bloodshed of Kashmiris in the Indian occupied Kashmir and unending genocide of several Palestinians in Gaza might be cited as example. In these cases, US-led Western World which was overtly or covertly supporting the state terrorism of Myanmar’s military junta, Indian and Israeli regimes was strongly condemned by the Islamic Word’s intellectuals. In wake of Muslim tragedy, it was also exposed that world’s apex body, the UNO has also been following double standard of human rights, and has become instrument of America and its allies at the cost of the Muslim World.
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Hair-brained, if not totally moronic, theories emerged. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was the culprit. while others thought the military-industrial complex hatched the plan. The mob (pick one) paid a trigger man, while the CIA was viewed as the guilty party. The Soviets were thought capable of killing our president. Even Cuban exiles were targeted with unfounded accusations. In the end, a discontented Oswald, alone or in concert with others, eventually became the fall guy. Or was he a patsy? In any event, nobody came up with a specific reason for why the president had to be killed.
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A collaboration between governments and organized crime is nothing new, of course, with corruption being a characteristic of their operations in whichever field of criminality they pursue. Pay offs and backhanders, considerations and favors have all played their part in sealing a relationship between criminals and government officials, with some government agencies seeking to use the mafia in order to further their goals. The CIA asking the mafia to knock off Castro might seem a bit wild-eyed and optimistic, but it was hardly unthinkable.
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This autobiography was written eight years ago, and then self published overseas and secured. The reason for this subterfuge was the autobiography contained my dealings with ASIO and covert agencies in the UK and the United States of America while working in China.
Since these events took place I have been gagged by ASIO “Dire consequences would befall me should I ever speak of these events.” I had organised for my autobiography to be released after my death so as my family would finally know the reason why our lives were irrevocability devastated by the aforementioned covert agencies.
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The CIA’s objection to releasing the report seems strange because in 2012 Attorney General Eric Holder announced that there would be no prosecution of CIA interrogators. The CIA’s fear must be that whatever conduct the report blames them for is so terrible that it could ignite another round of intelligence “reforms” like those of the 1970s Church Committee which obstructed intelligence-gathering for many years.
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“If a 19-year-old had hacked into the Senate computers the way this was done, that person would be sitting in jail right now.”
Although they were CIA computers, Wyden said the agency had stipulated they contained Senate Intelligence Committee files. CIA staffers launched the search to discover if the committee had obtained an internal CIA study while investigating a now-defunct detention and interrogation program for terrorism suspects. The Senate report is pending.
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First, CIA officials broke into computers that were being used by the committee — a clear constitutional violation — and then, using false information, tried to have committee staffers prosecuted. CIA Director John Brennan apologized for spying on the senators’ activities. President Obama, in a news conference on Aug. 1, said the Intelligence Committee was free to issue its report, “the declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee.”
But Brennan’s apology must not have been sincere, and the committee, to its displeasure, learned that the CIA has “redacted” — read: censored — key elements of the report. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the committee, said she couldn’t release the report because the CIA had attempted to redact key details that “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.”
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He asks: “Did any CIA agent get indicted for torturing people? No.
“Did any CIA agent get indicted for destroying the videotapes that showed the torture? No.
“Did any CIA agent get indicted for murdering prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq? No.”
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But in Sri Lanka there were no torture committed against the terrorists. There were no torture of the terrorists for the simple reason that in the war against terrorism in Sri Lanka the Armed Forces knew where exactly the terrorists were and there was no necessity to interrogate terrorists taken as prisoners under tortured to get information with regard to; movements of terrorists or where they were hiding. There were also Tamil civilians who gave information of meeting sites of terrorists to enable the Sri Lanka Air Force use precision bombing.
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Beginning in the 1990s, and accelerating after September 11, the CIA flew terrorism suspects to secret police custody in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Libya. Many of them were tortured. Starting in 2002, the CIA began operating secret prisons all over the world: Thailand, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Afghanistan, Djibouti, briefly Guantanamo Bay.
There, the agency subjected detainees to torturous “enhanced interrogation techniques,” in a program designed and implemented by two contractor psychologists named James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) authorized a great deal of this brutality—but the CIA made false factual representations to OLC in order to obtain that authorization, and tortured detainees in ways that were never authorized. Two CIA detainees, Manadel al-Jamadi and Gul Rahman, died as a result.
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Once again, the CIA is concealing information that Americans have a right to know, and once again President Obama should ensure its release.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is set to release a landmark report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. But Obama allowed the CIA to oversee redactions, and it predictably went to town with the black marker. According to committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the redactions “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.”
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation will honor former U.N. Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, and artist Trevor Paglen during its annual EFF Pioneer Awards in San Francisco. The award ceremony will be held the evening of October 2 at the Lodge at the Regency Center in San Francisco. Keynote speakers will be Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, better known as the Yes Men, who are known for their elaborate parodies and impersonations to fight government and corporate malfeasance
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WikiLeaks documents prove that the United States has known for quite some time (years) that the fictitious pseudo-state of Qatar bankrolls Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan. While Iran is the world’s major facilitator of terror, Qatar is their bank. The US Administration knows this well.
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At an Aug. 14 news conference in Washington, D.C. press freedom organizations rallied to support New York Times reporter and author James Risen, who faces prosecution for refusing to disclose his sources. In advance of the press event, held at the National Press Club, organizers presented a petition to the U.S. Justice Department with more than 100,000 signatures, demanding that the federal government stop its six-year prosecution of Risen.
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President Obama entered office vowing to run a transparent government. But instead he has clamped down on leaks, prosecuted whistleblowers and threatened truth-telling journalists with jail if they don’t reveal sources, as Marcy Wheeler recounts.
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The Great Horn of Africa Famine started at the beginning of 2011 and lasted about 2 years. 250,000 dead in Somalia from starvation equals 10,000 dying a month, 300 or more dying a day on average. And this just in Somalia where there was aid being distributed. Next door in the Ogaden, with a population of almost as many as in Somalia the same famine was raging and no aid what so ever was being allowed.
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The use of CCTV for handing out traffic fines is something that has raised concerns from a number of sources, for example Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who accused councils of “bending the law as a means of filling their coffers with taxpayers’ cash.” The Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC) also published guidance on this practice, stating that cameras should only be used “when other means of enforcement are not practical”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data should be freely exchangeable. Applications such as YouTube and Skype have been introduced without the need to seek permission of any Internet service provider or government. Nearly 3 billion users enjoy myriad mobile apps and other Internet-based services thanks to the open standards, common interfaces, and rich connectivity that permissionless innovation has delivered.
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Earlier this year, we shared our own comments to the FCC on the issue of net neutrality and keeping the internet open. The key, as we noted, is that if this issue is left to the FCC (as appears to be the case), it should use Title II reclassification in combination with forbearance to narrowly tailor rules for broadband access providers that maintain an open internet. As with so many things related to net neutrality, this gets a bit down in the weeds, and is a bit wonkish, but it’s important to understand. Even the EFF — a longtime critic of Title II reclassification — changed its position in light of other factors, but made sure to emphasize forbearance as a key part of this. Forbearance, in short, is effectively a statement from the FCC that it’s using certain rules, but has committed to not enforcing parts of what it’s allowed to do under those rules.
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In the ongoing fallout Comcast is facing due to the high-pressure sales tactics of their non-sales employees, the company has consistently indicated that these employees are not behaving in a manner consistent with the company’s wishes. The common thread in most of these stories consists of customer service duties being handled by customer retention reps as often as not and complaints or attempts to cancel service being met with sales pitches instead of service. Comcast has specifically indicated that these examples are outside of the way they train employees to conduct their business.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As rights holders have made clear time and time again, your digital purchases are never truly yours. If someone decides to shut down a service, it’s likely your purchases will vanish into the ether along with the service itself. If you want to resell your mp3s or ebooks, you’re facing any number of unsettled legal questions and various industries pushing the assertion that your money was exchanged for a limited use license, rather than the acquisition of a product.
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Copyrights
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We received an email from Thomson Reuters last evening, informing us that unless we write back to them in 14 days denying them the use of our articles, they will take the lack of refusal, as an indication of consent to use them. What’s more, they will presume that we have given them the “right to use, incorporate and distribute the Content in its Services to its subscribers and to permit such subscribers to use and redistribute the Content.”
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Kim Dotcom’s battle to regain control over millions in seized assets has received another setback. Today the Court of Appeal overturned a ruling by the High Court by extending the restraining orders against the entrepreneur’s property until at least April 2015.
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In a world where people are always pushing the idea of “intellectual property” over just about everything, is it really any surprise when people assume all sorts of property-like rights in things that clearly shouldn’t have any such thing? In a slightly bizarre lawsuit over the control of a Facebook fan page for the TV series The Game, the creator of the page, Stacey Mattocks, argued that BET effectively appropriated the approximately 6.78 million “likes” the fan page got. The details of exactly how this happened aren’t worth getting into, but suffice it to say it was a contract negotiation gone wrong, as BET sought to bring the fan page under its official control. All that matters here is that among the other charges in the lawsuit, Mattocks claims that BET got Facebook to transfer those likes to its official page, which she alleged is a form of unlawful conversion.
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In the wake of a controversial move by Wikipedia to distribute a monkey ‘selfie’ for free, against the wishes of the photographer whose camera was used, the US has issued new guidance that says animals, ghosts and gods are all banned from owning copyright
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Send this to a friend
08.20.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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I was trying to write this blog post for quite a long time, and it become so, so big that I’ll have to split it in three posts, It is like a ‘people of kde’ but different, the focus is not to show someone that works for KDE, but someone that tried to use KDE to work – being it a non-tech person. Since I spend most of my days helping people that is struggling with Free Software to pass the hate feeling, I feel that I have lots of things to say being that I’m activelly maintaining over 5 laptops from different friends that lives on different states.
I also like to study humans, this very strange animal that has so many different ways of expressing himself that it’s so, so hard to get it right.
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Reader Oliver wanted to make his Linux Mint desktop look as much like a Mac as possible so others would find it easy to use. Given some of our previous Linux featured desktops, we know it wasn’t tough, but the end-result still looks great. Here’s how it’s all set up.
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Sometimes the direct sell method isn’t the best way to close the deal. How do you think the whole “play hard to get” thing got traction throughout the years? That method is successful in any number of applications.
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Server
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This is the summer of Docker’s ripening as it begins to mature into stable, enterprise-worthy software. The release of version 1.0 coincided with the first annual DockerCon, and finally moves Docker from an experimental state into a production-capable application. The pace of development is not slowing down after these successes, but rather appears to be ramping up as Docker adoption continues to grow and more companies get involved in the development process.
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Kernel Space
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Similar to the kernel states of having a tainted kernel for using binary blob kernel modules or unsigned modules, a new tainting method has been proposed for warning the user about potentially adverse kernel performance.
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Memfd is a mechanism similar to Android’s Ashmem that allows zero-copy message passing in KDBUS. Memfd effectively comes down to just a chunk of memory with a file descriptor attached that can be passed to mmap(). The memfd_create() function returns a raw shmem file and there’s optional support for sealing.
Memfd is needed by KDBUS for message passing and now the code — after being public but out-of-tree for several months — is finally mainline. As a result, the KDBUS code has been updated to take advantage of the mainline Linux 3.17 state.
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Lennart Poettering announced the systemd 216 release on Tuesday and among its changes is a more complete systemd-resolved that has nearly complete caching DNS and LLMNR stub resolver, a new systemd terminal library, and a number of new commands.
The systemd 216 release also has improvements to various systemd sub-commands, an nss-mymachines NSS module was added, a new networkctl client tool, KDBUS updates against Linux 3.17′s memfd, networkd improvements, a new systemd-terminal library for implementing full TTY stream parsing and rendering, a new systemd-journal-upload utility, an LZ4 compressor for journald, a new systemd-escape tool, a new systemd-firstboot component, and much more.
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The Linux faithful gathered today at LinuxCon to hear core Linux developers, especially Linus Torvalds—and the audience wasn’t disappointed. In a keynote panel session, Torvalds spoke of his hopes and the challenges for Linux in 2014.
Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman moderated the discussion and commented that Linux already runs everywhere. He asked Torvalds where he thinks Linux should go next.
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The new certifications mark the first time the Linux Foundation has offered formal certification after years of success with training programs.
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With an eye toward deepening the global Linux talent pool, the Linux Foundation today announced that it will offer two new certifications for engineers and administrators.
The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator, or LFCS, and the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer, or LFCE certificates will be granted to applicants who pass an automated online exam. The cost will be $300, although the foundation will hand out 1,000 free passes to attendees at LinuxCon, where the announcement was made.
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Today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen we’re making an announcement that signifies the natural next step in helping to build a qualified talent pool of Linux professionals worldwide:The Linux Foundation Certification Program.
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With LinuxCon starting today in Chicago, the Linux Foundation has announced their latest sponsorship recruits for some major organizations that are now backing the foundation.
Adapteva, GitHub, SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital are the latest organizations joining the Linux Foundation. Nearly all Phoronix readers should now GitHub along with storage companies Seagate and Western Digital. Adapteva is the start-up Parallella super-computing board.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s proprietary Catalyst Linux driver installer is interestingly being prepared for an environment without an X.Org Server.
While there’s no announcement out of AMD indicating any future support directions for their Catalyst Linux driver, it seems their Catalyst driver will soon be equipped with an option for building the driver packages without X.Org Server support, a.k.a. no building of the fglrx DDX driver.
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For those living on the Mesa 10.2 stable series rather than the experimental Mesa 10.3 code, there’s a new point release out today.
Carl Worth of Intel released Mesa 10.2.6 as the latest bug-fix update. Mesa 10.2.6 has at least 28 bugs fixed, including many affecting core Mesa, some AMD RadeonSI fixes (affecting Hawall and Tahiti hardware), and various other fixes. Anuj Phogat contributed the most fixes at 15 followed by Marek Olšák at 4.
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Early benchmarking of the Linux 3.17 kernel have indicated faster performance for AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver thanks to Radeon DRM improvements.
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Applications
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If the habit on reading books on electronic tablets is still on its way, reading books on a computer is even rarer. It is hard enough to focus on the classics of the 16th century literature, so who needs the Facebook chat pop up sound in the background in addition? But if for some reasons you wish to open an electronic book in your computer, chances are that you will need specific software. Indeed, most editors agreed with using the EPUB format for electronic books (for “Electronic PUBlication”). Hopefully, Linux is not deprived of good programs capable of dealing with such format. In short, here is a non-exhaustive list of good EPUB readers on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dead Island is a action role-playing game developed by Techland for all major platforms and is based on a zombie-infested open world island. There’s been talk of a potential Linux port and it looks like it might finally be materializing for Linux gamers.
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Brian Fargo’s Wasteland 2 game that’s the successor to the original Wasteland from two decades ago now has an official release date…
Wasteland 2 was scheduled to ship in August but its official release date is now 19 September due to delaying the game a few weeks to allow the studio to manufacturer the related game merchandise.
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Linux gamers owe a debt of gratitude to kernel developer Andy Lutomirski for his recent work getting 32-bit programs to run faster on a 64-bit kernel, said Greg Kroah-Hartman during the Linux kernel panel today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Fans of LXQt, the merge of the Qt version of LXDE along with the Razor-qt desktop project, will soon see out a big update.
LXQt 0.8.0 is being readied for release as the latest of this next-generation lightweight desktop environment. Heavy development continues on LXQt and recently the most important bugs have been addressed for the upcoming LXQt 0.8 milestone. Holding back the LXQt 0.8 release is finishing the language translations and figuring out what to do about their RandR utility.
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Desktop environments for Linux are not released ready-made. Behind each is a set of assumptions about what a desktop should be, and how users should interact with them. Increasingly, too, each environment has a history — some of which are many years old.
As you shop around for a desktop, these assumptions are worth taking note of. Often, they can reveal tendencies that you might not discover without several days of probing and working with the desktop.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In preparation for Akademy I wanted to swap out the drive from my laptop — which is full of work-work things — and drop in a new one with stuff I actually want to have with me at Akademy, like git clones of various repositories.
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Two years have passed since the reality of the first Latin American meeting of KDE contributors in 2012 in Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Now we are proud to announce that the second LaKademy will be held August 27th to 30th in São Paulo, Brazil, at one of the most important and prestigious universities in the world—the University of São Paulo.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.14 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of Plasma Desktop to 4.11.11.
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I recently finished adding documentation (man pages) to the project and also finished improving upon the add command and it’s test cases. And I beleive this completes all the tasks that I had planned for in my GSoC proposal.Features of AkonadiClient
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The Oxygen icon set performs very well in general. Most icons are quickly and reliable identified with the corresponding term. As found in previous studies there is a minor setback for Add/New, Undo/Redo, and especially Copy/Paste which are mutually mistaken. Also the Search icon shows quite a high number of missing values. Perhaps the field glasses are not such a good metaphor.
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So I have coded three features for Calligra Sheets.
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I wrote it for kde 4.0 but it was not perfect. I took time to fix it last week end.
What does it do ? It allows to remove not necessary forward declaration. It’s very useful during kf5 migration because we change a lot of code. So sometime we keep some “class foo;” which will not create a compile error, but it will keep an unused code line.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Florian Müllner has announced that Mutter 3.14 Beta 1 has been released, featuring a number of changes and improvements.
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For the upcoming GNOME 3.13.90 release are updates to GNOME Shell and Mutter that bring a few notable last-minute changes.
The GNOME 3.13.90 Beta release is scheduled to happen today and as such the Mutter and GNOME Shell updates were checked in this week. With the Mutter 3.13.90 comes an enforcement that XSync() is only ever called once per-frame, the GLSL support is optional, gesture and touch events are now handled on Wayland, and there’s a variety of other fixes/changes. The Mutter 3.13.90 changes can be found via its release announcement.
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Red Hat Family
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They now have a $70.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $57.00. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eighteen have issued a buy rating to the company’s stock. Red Hat has an average rating of “Buy” and an average price target of $63.50.
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Red Hat, Inc. RHT, -1.58% the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Open Virtual Appliance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, enabling organizations with VMware-based infrastructures to easily and rapidly deploy and evaluate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for proof of concept deployments. Designed to meet growing interest in Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform from users, Open Virtual Appliance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is designed to enable users to have a working deployment of OpenStack in mere minutes.
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Fermilab’s intention is to continue the development and support…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 Test 1, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, has been released and is now ready for testing.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For good or bad, it sure seems like time flew by the past few months of the Ubuntu 14.10 development cycle; the feature freeze for the Utopic Unicorn is this week.
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“The Utopic kernel has been rebased to the first v3.16.1 upstream stable kernel and uploaded to the archive, ie. linux-3.16.0-9.14. Please test and let us know your results,” says Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury, after the latest Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting.
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Flavours and Variants
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Martin Wimpress updated the current development status of Ubuntu MATE in the distro’s blog today. In addition to the regular update, he has confirmed that the MATE variant is going to be recognized as an official Ubuntu flavor. Rejoice, MATE lovers!
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The Linux Foundation wants an open source platform in the pole position. The nonprofit consortium already has a fully functional Linux distribution, called “Automotive Grade Linux,” or AGL. It is a customizable, open source automotive software stack with Linux at its core.
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Cloud Media launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Linux-based “Stack Box” home automation hub with cloud services and Raspberry Pi expansion compatibility.
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According to a new DigiTimes report, sales of credit-card sized Raspberry Pi devices, which run Linux, remain very strong. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says that 3.5 million units have sold worldwide, with demand from China and Taiwan staying strong. The devices are helping to teach children basic programming skills and are arriving in educational systems all around the world.
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Ruth Suehle and Tom Callaway are presenting at LinuxCon 2014 Chicago tomorrow about many different Raspberry Pi hacks and other Linux capabilities of these low-cost, low-performance single board computers.
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Phones
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Android
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Microsoft released OneNote for Android tablets today with handwriting input, bringing Android users closer to the OneNote experience the company envisioned for the Microsoft Surface.
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How big do you like your tablet? If you’re designing a kid-friendly device that can be used as an easel, learning resource and game platform, the answer is probably: roughly Monopoly-board big.
No, 10 or even 12 inches isn’t going to do it for you. You’re going to want a device with a 20- or 24-inch display, like nabi’s new Big Tab tablets, made by Fuhu. The Big Tabs are the biggest Android slates we’ve ever seen for sale (although there have been demos of significantly bigger models).
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It is likely I will buy an iPhone 6, but there are many things I like about Android that I doubt we will see come to an Apple flagship smartphone any time soon.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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I would encourage other Mozillians to support the push for opening this data by sharing this blog post on the Social Media as an indicator of supporting Open Diversity Data publishing by Mozilla or by retweeting this.
I really think our Manifesto encourages us to support initiatives like this; specifically principle number two of our manifesto. If other companies (Kudos!) that are less transparent than Mozilla can do it then I think we have to do this.
Finally, I would like to encourage Mozilla to consider creating a position of VP of Diversity and Inclusion to oversee our various diversity and inclusion efforts and to help plan and create a vision for future efforts at Mozilla. Sure we have already people who kind of do this but it is not their full-time role.
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SaaS/Big Data
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As the OpenStack cloud storage ecosystem grows more and more diverse, how can enterprises ensure compatibility between their OpenStack distribution and their database of choice? Tesora hopes that providing a solution to that quandry can help win it customers through a new certification program.
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Mesosphere is bringing its Mesos clusters to Google Compute Engine, enabling Google’s (GOOG) cloud users to launch Mesos clusters on the public cloud. This provides customers with the ability to abstract basic devops, simplifying the data center so it looks to developers more like a single piece of hardware.
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As the OpenStack cloud computing arena grows, a whole ecosystem of tools and front-ends are growing in popularity as well. And, one of the most notable tools in the ecosystem is the database-as-a-service offering focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove.
Tesora recently announced that it has open sourced its Tesora Database Virtualization Engine, and now it is offering the Tesora OpenStack Trove Database Certification Program, which provides “assurance that the most widely used databases can be deployed with Trove into the most popular OpenStack environments via the Tesora DBaaS Platform.”
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OpenStack is the most popular open source cloud project, followed by Docker and KVM, according to a survey of more than 550 respondents conducted by Linux.com and The New Stack and announced today at CloudOpen in Chicago.
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With the growing potential of Docker, it’s becoming clear that the future of at least some of the data center is going to be containerized. But there are still challenges in getting containerized applications deployed and managed across real and virtual hardware.
To learn more about one of the available options for performing this management and deployment, yesterday I attended a Google Hangout which was part of the OpenStack Online Meetup series. This month’s topic was centered around providing information and a walk-through of a new open source project called Clocker. Much as the name might suggest, Clocker is a tool designed for spinning up a cloud out of Docker containers.
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Databases
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Enterprise-class PostgreSQL database vendor EnterpriseDB has launched a free turnkey development environment designed to make it easier for coders to build web applications using PostgreSQL’s new NoSQL capabilities.
The open source PostgreSQL project has been adding NoSQL-like features for the past couple of versions, most notably support for the JavaScript-friendly JSON data format and the JSONB binary storage format.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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We’ve been reading a lot about the desktop lately and we’re not stopping tonight. We have three stories tonight on the desktop. In other news, the kernel repositories beef-up security and Alienware says Steam Machine users will “sacrifice content for the sake of Linux.” The new Linux version of Opera is making progress and CNet has a review of LibreOffice 4.3. This and more in tonight’s Linux news.
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Oracle has always had a rather touch and go relationship with the open source community, to say the least. The company has never been shy about doing whatever is necessary to earn a profit, even if it means alienating people in the open source community. A redditor asked why Oracle is hated by so many and got quite an earful of responses.
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Healthcare
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On the topic of source code liability, Greer suggests that eventually software developers, including medical device development companies, will be responsible for the trouble their software causes (or fails to prevent). I think it’s fair to say that it is impossible to guarantee a totally secure system. You cannot prove a negative statement after all. Given enough time, most systems can be breached. So where does this potential liability end? What if my company has sloppy coding standards, no code reviews, or I use a third-party software library that has a vulnerability? Should hacking be considered foreseeable misuse?
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Olivier Roth, Community Manager at Clinovo, has grown an open source community around the open health platform ClinCapture, an open source Eletronic Data Capture (EDC) system.
Opensource.com caught up with Olivier, who was tasked with not only marketing an open source product but building genuine and natural interest around it to help move it forward. In this interview, we explore the importance of a community to an open source project with tips for how to create and maintain one.
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BSD
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OpenSSH 6.7 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a big release containing a number of features, a lot of internal refactoring and some potentially-incompatible changes.
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Public Services/Government
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Yes, the government — one U.S. federal government employee told me that government IT tends to be “stove-piped,” with people “even working within the same building” not having much of a clue what their peers are doing, which is not exactly the open source way.
That’s changing. One way to see this shift is in government policies. For the U.S. federal government, there is now a “default to open,” a dramatic reversal on long-standing practices of spending heavily with a core of proprietary technology vendors.
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About this time last year, I laid out some trends I saw for the coming year in government take up of open source software. Looking back now, it appears those trends are not only here to stay, they are accelerating and are more important than ever.
In particular, I wrote that “open source will continue to be the ‘go to’ approach for governments around the world” and that “increasingly, governments are wrestling with the ‘how tos’ of open source choices; not whether to use it.”
Recent developments in the United States highlight these points.
First, the White House (via OMB and the Federal CIO) has issued a Digital Services Playbook—described in some quarters as “something of a marvel for an official government policy: it’s elegantly designed, has clear navigation, and is responsive to any device you choose to view it upon.” It is well worth a read.
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Licensing
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The KDE Free Qt Foundation is a legal entity, set up by KDE e.V. and Trolltech, the company originally developing Qt. It aims to safeguard the availability of Qt as Free Software and already fulfilled an important role. Trolltech was bought by Nokia, who sold Qt later to Digia. The contracts stayed valid during all these transitions.
The foundation has four voting board members (two from Digia, two from KDE e.V.) and two non-voting advisory board members (the Trolltech founders). In case of a tie, KDE e.V.’s board members have an extra vote.
Through a contract with Digia, the KDE Free Qt Foundation receives rights to all Free Qt releases “for the KDE Windowing System” (currently defined as X11 – we plan to extend this to Wayland) and for Android. As long as Digia keeps the contract, the KDE Free Qt Foundation will never make use of these rights.
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Today Qt announced some changes to their licence. The KDE Free Qt team have been working behind the scenes to make these happen and we should be very thankful for the work they put in. Qt code was LGPLv2.1 or GPLv3 (this also allows GPLv2). Existing modules will add LGPLv3 to that. This means I can get rid of the part of the KDE Licensing Policy which says “Note: code may not be copied from Qt into KDE Platform as Qt is LGPLv2.1 only which would prevent it being used under LGPL 3″.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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When most of us think of 3D printers, we typically imagine the desktop machines that are used for creating small plastic objects, or the larger scale industrial level machines used for prototyping, and in some cases the printing of production ready parts. Then there are the extremely large 3D printers that have been created for the printing of concrete structured buildings and other large objects. Perhaps the printers which have the most intriguing uses are those which can print food. These printers, which are still only in the early stages of development, allow those with minimal food preparation experience to print out meals using specially designed software. All of these 3D printers have the potential to bring resources to countries and people who typically don’t have access to traditional means of manufacturing. Yet, none of them ensure massive food production that could help feed the world’s hungry.
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Fed up with the limitations of current computer chips and their related intellectual property, a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, is pushing an open source alternative. The RISC-V instruction set architecture was originally developed at the university to help teach computer architecture to students, but now its creators want to push it into the mainstream to help propel emerging markets such as cloud computing and the internet of things.
One of the researchers leading the charge behind RISC-V is David Patterson, the project’s creator and also the creator of the original RISC instruction set in the 1980s. He views the issue as one centered around innovation. Popular chip architectures historically have been locked down behind strict licensing rules by companies such as Intel, ARM and IBM (although IBM has opened this up a bit for industry partners with its OpenPower foundation). Even for companies that can afford licenses, he argues, the instruction sets they receive can be complex and bloated, requiring a fair amount of effort to shape around the desired outcome.
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Programming
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Like many nine-year-olds, Stanley Strum spends a lot of time building things in Minecraft, the immersive game that lets your create your own mini-universe. The game has many tools. But Stanley is one of many players taking the game a step further by building entirely new features into the game. And, more than that, he’s also learning how to code.
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No, BYOD has not been dealt a death blow by a California Court of Appeals ruling that says employers must reimburse a reasonable part of employees’ cellphone bills when use of their personal phone is required to do their work. But it will kill the practice of using BYOD as an excuse to make some employees buy personal equipment and pay for personal cell plans to do their jobs.
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Health/Nutrition
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Hypospadias, a birth defect where the urethral opening is abnormally placed, is becoming a more common case among Sweden’s new-born boys.
Researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinksa Institute have published results from a 40-year study in which they collected data from all males born between 1973 and 2009.
They found that before 1990, cases of hypospadias were recorded in 4.5 boys out of every thousand. After 1990, the figure increased to 8 per 1,000 boys.
The study looked into factors that are known to cause the defect, such as low-birth weight, being born a twin, or parents who used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive, but researchers stated that the increase did not correlate with these factors.
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The RoboBee is a mechanical bee in the design stage at the Microrobotics Lab, housed in a well-appointed building at Harvard University. The RoboBee project’s Intelligence Office declares that the robotic inventors are inspired by the bee. The RoboBee project’s website and press releases use the imagery of the golden bees that we remember from our love of the cuddly buzzy honey-maker.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The US government today added the Mujahidin Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem (MSC) to the foreign terrorist organization list and labeled the group a specially designated global terrorist entity.
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The wife and infant son of Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif were killed in an Israeli airstrike, the Islamist group said on Wednesday, after the collapse of a weeklong cease-fire sparked a sharp escalation in Gaza attacks.
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If Hamas is toppled, the reasoning in the Israeli defense establishment goes, it may be replaced by an assortment of jihadist militias…
[...]
Nevertheless, the IDF destroyed all of the attack tunnels – 32 it knew about – taking two weeks to complete the mission. It took Hamas five years and a great deal of treasure to build up its underground warfare capability, but this was ruined by the Israeli army in little time.
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Just hours after the United States announced it would begin air strikes on militants in the north of Iraq, a propaganda video from the Islamic State emerged online with the warning: “We will drown you in blood.”
That was on August 17 and by Tuesday, after more than 70 air strikes from US fighter jets and drones – launched, President Barack Obama said, to protect besieged minorities trapped by Islamist militants as well as its own strategic interests in Iraq – the Islamic State appeared to have made good its threat.
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American fighter jets and drones continued to pound Islamic State militants in Iraq Wednesday, and military planners weighed the possibility of sending a small number of additional U.S. troops to Baghdad, U.S. officials said, even as the insurgents threatened to kill a second American captive in retribution for any continued attacks.
The airstrikes came in the hours after militants released a gruesome video Tuesday showing U.S. journalist James Foley being beheaded and underscored President Barack Obama’s vow Wednesday afternoon to continue attacks against the group despite its threats.
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When you do something again and again, placing great faith in it, investing enormous amounts of money in it, only to see indifferent or even negative results, you wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a neutral observer questioned your sanity or asked you if you were part of some cult. Yet few Americans question the sanity or cult-like behavior of American presidents as they continue to seek solutions to complex issues by bombing Iraq (as well as numerous other countries across the globe).
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One of the basic requirements of fighting wars and the many battles that make up a war is to gain asymmetric advantage over the enemy.
Put in English, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan well.
Winning is about unfair advantage at four levels – political, strategic, theatre, and tactical – of any conflict.
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The Yemeni government paid the families of those killed or injured in a U.S. drone strike last year more than $1 million, according to documents that provide new details on secret condolence payments seen as evidence that civilians with no ties to al-Qaeda were among the casualties.
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Yemen’s government has paid more than $1 million in compensation to the families of civilians killed in a 2013 U.S. drone attack on a wedding convoy, according to documents released Monday.
The revelation shows that Yemen acknowledges civilian deaths and therefore contradicts repeated claims by the Obama administration that U.S. strikes spare the innocent. Experts with UK-based charity Reprieve, which obtained documents showing evidence of the compensation, say that the relatively high dollar amount from one of the poorest governments in the region indicates that the U.S. may not only know about the civilian deaths, but could be secretly funding the payouts.
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Historically, violators of international law are not only the countries branded as evil and belligerent but also countries that preach democracy and human rights. That undermines the efforts of the United Nations to maintain law and order.
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New documentary evidence has emerged indicating that the families of those killed in a controversial December 2013 U.S. strike in Yemen received upwards of $1 million dollars in compensation for their losses. The documents were obtained by Reprieve, an NGO at the forefront of efforts to promote accountability for U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, and were reported by the Washington Post last night.
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US authorities have been told to show restraint in dealing with the racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri – by the Egyptian government. In a bizarre turnaround, authorities in Cairo used language similar to that offered by Washington when Egypt was facing its own protests from Islamist demonstrators in 2013 – an uprising that led to the deaths of hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
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An overseas Uighur rights organization has protested the Chinese government’s use of drones in a security crackdown in the ethnic group’s home region of Xinjiang, saying it would intensify tensions that have left dozens of people dead this year.
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Instead of alienating Russians, we should be pulling them in
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Finance
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Two months after it was taken into conservatorship by the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) after a catastrophic bank run, Bulgaria’s CorpBank is still closed.
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Censorship
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Yesterday, the Prime Minister David Cameron announced his latest effort to take a ‘big stand on protecting our children online’. In a three-month pilot, that starts in October, online music videos will be given an age classification by the British Board of Classification. This rating will be displayed when the music videos are uploaded to YouTube or the music video site Vevo. Cameron claims that such a rating system will bring music videos in line with offline media such as films.
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This very public display of stupidity may cost the City of Peoria, along with the many other defendants named in the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Twitter account owner (Jon Daniel) by the ACLU. Obviously, the First Amendment was all but forgotten in the mayor’s quest to make this account — one that was only seen by Mayor Jim Ardis and a handful of others — disappear.
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Forget confusing, this is yet another inch down the slippery slope in the war on humor and me-getting-to-make-fun-of-people, and I won’t stand for it, damn it. People I haven’t seen since high school getting fooled by The Onion has been one of the great pleasures in my life and it’s just not right for Facebook to chip away at that fun just because it appears to have finally acknowledged that its users are, by and large, idiots.
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Privacy
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On August 15rd 2014, our student Nicolas Benes gave a talk on “panicd: An approach for home routers to securely erase sensitive data” defending his almost finished Bachelor’s Thesis at GHM 2014 hosted at TUM. The goal of his work is to ensure that secrets (especially key material) stored on your hardware (especially in memory) remain secret even if an adversary attempts to take physical control over the device. You can now find the video below.
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I don’t want to get into an argument about whether al Qaeda is altering its security in response to the Snowden documents. Its members would be idiots if they did not, but it’s also clear that they were designing their own cryptographic software long before Snowden. My guess is that the smart ones are using public tools like OTR and PGP and the paranoid dumb ones are using their own stuff, and that the split was the same both pre- and post-Snowden.
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Whistleblower William Binney recently made headlines when he told the German parliament that the NSA, his former employer, had become “totalitarian.” DW spoke to him about NSA overrreach and the agency’s power.
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More than four years ago, we wrote about all the buzz that you were hearing about “cyberwar” was little more than an attempt to drum up FUD to get the government to throw billions of dollars at private contractors. We noted that Booz Allen Hamilton (yes, the last employer of one Ed Snowden) had hired former NSA director and also Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as its Vice Chairman. He was the leading voice out there screaming about the threat of “cyberwar” getting on TV and having lots of opinion pieces in big name publications — all of which mentioned his former government jobs, but almost none of which mentioned that his current employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, stood to make billions selling “solutions” to the government. And, indeed, Booz Allen has been raking in the cash on “cybersecurity.”
This is worth keeping in mind as you read this fascinating interview with NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, in which he lays this out plain and simple. The real reason for all this NSA surveillance is about money and power. “Stop terrorism” is secondary.
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Making things easy means making them transparent. It means pushing the crypto away from the user. That’s how we end up with our lolcats and dogecoins all mixed up together. Maybe some things should be hard, to remind us that they are important.
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Behold the cascade of baby photos, the flood of funny kid anecdotes and the steady stream of school milestones on Facebook.
It all makes Sonia Rao, a stay-at-home mother of a 1-year-old in Mountain View, California, “a little uncomfortable.”
“I just have a vague discomfort having her photograph out there for anyone to look at,” says Rao. “When you meet a new person and go to their account, you can look them up, look at photos, videos, know that they are traveling.”
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Politicians from Germany have come up with a unique way of safeguarding documents that even the NSA would have trouble in breaching. Far from a cutting-edge online security measure, the idea has been floated of once again breaking out the typewriters for the scripting of the most sensitive documents of all.
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Political tension between Turkey and Germany has been continuing since the German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has been spying on its NATO ally, Turkey, since 2009. Even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel is no stranger to spying since she discovered her cellphone had been tapped by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), she refused to comment on the work of BND when questioned about the surveillance of Turkish targets.
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For politicians in Washington, the German uproar over allegations that the NSA had spied on Merkel and collected the data of millions of Germans was remarkable. The usually calm Chancellor Angela Merkel angrily rejected American explanations and forced the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country after further allegations were made public. German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble went even further, saying publicly that he wanted to cry over “such stupidity.”
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Deutsche Welle: One of the goals the German government has set in its “Digital Agenda” is increasing trust in the internet. Do you think complete digital safety can be achieved?
Sandro Gaycken: At this point, definitely not. The internet is inherently unsafe. At its inception, we simply didn’t include a whole lot of factors that would have been needed to guarantee security. That list starts with computers but includes web mechanisms. Wanting to create security by spouting off a few nice words, and even wanting to become the safest nation in the world is illusionary. And so far, we haven’t heard any more than these phrases.
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When news broke last summer that a certain NSA contractor had “leaked” an inordinate amount of secret data to various media outlets, global public opinion suddenly realized that the world we live in today does resemble the Orwellian dystopia 1984.
The National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made material available to journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the British broadsheet The Guardian published its first Snowden-related article on 5-6 June 2013. Greenwald laconically wrote then that the “National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers,” revealing the tip of the surveillance iceberg that was made public by the contractor. Edward Snowden outed himself as the NSA leaker on 9 June 2013 “in a video interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.”
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German journalists and academics have criticised Britain’s intelligence service GCHQ for scanning servers round the world, and maintaining a database of open ports which could be used in attacks.
British intelligence agency GCHQ has been cataloguing open TCP ports across entire countries as part of a secret programme codenamed ‘Hacienda’, reports German publication Heise Online.
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The nation’s top spy office is publicly defending a controversial executive order that authorizes some types of foreign snooping.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) civil liberties protection officer, Alexander Joel, wrote an op-ed in Politico Magazine on Monday arguing that the Reagan administration order is covered by “extensive and multi-layered” oversight and includes multiple protections for Americans and foreigners alike.
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Private companies and governments track everything you do online. While these intrusions on your freedom and privacy may seem benign, for many anonymity is a matter of life and death. People living under repressive regimes, political activists, spies, journalists and even the military all need to access the internet and remain truly anonymous and impossible to track.
[...]
It is odd then that the technology behind Tor was originally developed by the US Navy in an attempt to develop a secure way of routing traffic over the internet. In fact the US government is still the single biggest financial supporter of Tor and donated over $2.5 million to the project in the past two years. Despite that the NSA and its UK equivalent GCHQ have made several determined attempts to break open Tor’s encryption and unmask its users. An old bug in Tor’s browser software let spooks identify 24 users in a single weekend, according to The Washington Post while the NSA has also looked for patterns in entry and exit points on the Tor network to try and spot individual users. But despite best efforts Tor remains secure and there is no evidence that the NSA or any other agency is capable of unmasking Tor on a global scale.
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The U.S. government on Monday asked a Washington, D.C., federal judge to dismiss one of three lawsuits filed by a former U.S. Department of Justice antitrust attorney who is challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s collection of phone and online data records.
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Next week, the new term begins and I’ll be teaching an undergraduate philosophy course called, “Technology, Privacy, and the Law.” The first order of business will be to explain why thinking critically about privacy—determining what it is, deciding when it should be protected, and pinpointing how it ought to be safeguarded—means doing philosophy. Given the practical stakes of these issues, you might not realize that getting into them involves philosophical thinking. But if you’ve got a principled bone to pick with corporate, peer, or governmental surveillance, or if you’ve good reasons for being displeased with the activists who are taking stands against it, you’ve got your philosopher’s cap on.
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Earlier this week, EFF told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that Ethiopia must be held accountable for its illegal wiretapping of an American citizen. Foreign governments simply do not have a get-out-of-court-free card when they commit serious felonies in America against Americans. This case is the centerpiece of our U.S. legal efforts to combat state sponsored malware.
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A little more than a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the federal government was collecting and storing the telephone records of millions of Americans, Congress is poised to end the program and provide significant protection for a broad range of personal information sought by government investigators.
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For all its limitations, Leahy’s USA Freedom Act testifies to the importance of informed public debate. Snowden’s disclosures brought into the open a dramatic expansion of government power. As a result, liberal Democrats in Congress joined libertarian Republicans in pushing back against an overweening national security establishment.
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US and Chinese tech companies are not the only ones profiting from the “Snowden effect.”
Since news broke that former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed alleged U.S. government surveillance methods worldwide, secure messaging and so-called ‘NSA-proof’ products and companies have sprouted across Germany and Switzerland, two countries who take their privacy laws very seriously.
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Facebook Inc., which sends billions of notification emails to users each day, said it has discovered a rapid rise in email programs using secure connections.
Facebook said in a blog post that the number of third-party email providers who hold strict security certificates and deploy encryption of outbound notifications jumped from roughly 30 percent in March to 95 percent in mid-July.
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The way John Tye tells it, we’ve all been missing the forest for the trees.
Over the course of two phone calls, the former State Department official told Ars that anyone who has been following the government surveillance discussion since the Snowden disclosures has been too concerned with things like metadata collection. Since last summer, journalists, politicians, and the public have been inundated with largely-unknown terminology, like “Section 215” and “Section 702.”
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Civil Rights
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There is no video of the death of Michael Brown; there are only two diametrically opposed stories.
Police in Ferguson, Mo., say an officer killed Brown after the teenager tried to take the officer’s gun. Witnesses say Brown never assaulted the cop and was actually waving his hands in the air before being shot six times. More than a week after Brown’s death, still nobody knows exactly what happened, because no cameras were rolling. In 2014, with HD video neither costly nor scarce, is this acceptable?
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How is whether or not Brown was a “regular guy” relevant to the question of whether the police officer was justified in shooting him to death? We do not have one set of laws for “regular guys” and another for everyone else.
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He “was doing his job, presented a threat to no one, and clearly identified himself as a member of the press,” Glenn Greenwald’s news organization says
A reporter for Glenn Greenwald’s news agency, the Intercept, is the latest to be targeted by police in Ferguson, Mo.
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A summer of global turmoil has culminated in nightmarish scenes from Ferguson, Mo., a St. Louis suburb torn apart by protests after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
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In a matter of minutes, members of the media, who had been objectively and effectively reporting on a protest greeted with a militarized crackdown worthy of a war-torn country, suddenly agreed to become embedded journalists–just like in a war-torn country. Embedded journalism, as FAIR has often written (e.g, Extra!, 9/03), is one of the worst practices of media if you want independent and accurate reporting.
[...]
Johnson didn’t think Ferguson police were getting positive enough coverage, so he asked Tapper and Lemon to join him the next day and report alongside him.
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The ridiculous police response in Ferguson, Mo., has provoked plenty of reactions from other countries, some of whom seem to be reveling in the chance to troll the U.S. (while seemingly forgetting their own records on human rights).
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If you’ve been watching what’s going on in Ferguson, Missouri, lately, you’re quite well aware that the police have been basically spraying tear gas almost everywhere they can. Suddenly, articles are springing up all over the internet about the use of tear gas — which, it turns out is technically banned for use in warfare as a chemical weapon. The history of how that came about, however, is a bit complicated, as this State Department notice on tear gas discusses. Basically, there was a dispute over whether or not tear gas violated the Geneva Conventions. Here’s a snippet:
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Let’s get this right out in the open. I don’t have any particular animosity towards this administration. I just don’t find it to be an improvement over the last one (which I found to be pretty much terrible from all angles). This wouldn’t be notable except for the fact that this administration definitely considers itself to be a vast improvement over the last one and has made several proclamations advancing that theory. (“Most transparent administration,” anyone?)
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The United States is “deeply disturbed” that Afghanistan’s attorney general has blocked a New York Times reporter from leaving the country, the State Department said Tuesday.
Times journalist Matthew Rosenberg said Tuesday that he was questioned after writing a story alleging that unnamed Afghan officials were plotting to seize power if the country’s electoral crisis continued.
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Dick George claimed that he was pulled from his car in Flatbush after cops realized he was recording them as they searched three youths and overheard him advising the youths to get cops’ badge numbers in June 2012.
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Jason Kottke of the always informative and entertaining kottke.org just posted a very interesting look at the genesis of UK law enforcement. In 1829, the UK government shifted policing from a paramilitary force comprised mainly of volunteers to an organized force comprised of citizens. But it made it very clear that UK police derived their power from the consent of the people, rather than from a government mandate.
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In yet another case in which police illegal arrested someone for filming the police, the police have been forced to pay up. Unlike the big Simon Glik case, it appears that the NYPD (under new management!) decided to do its best to settle the case and get it off the books. They’re paying $125,000 to Dick George, who recorded police doing one of its infamous stop-and-frisks.
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In the continuing furor that is Ferguson, Missouri, someone is finally asking, “Won’t anyone think of the poor police officers?” Naturally, the person raising this question is a police officer — a 17-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. And the question isn’t so much being raised as it is being thrown in the reader’s face.
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The Catholic Church denies buying off sexual abuse victims for a modest sum to avoid being sued, but says it understands why people believe it did.
Hundreds of victims of paedophile priests signed away their rights to sue the church for compensation payments under its Melbourne Response scheme for handling clergy sex abuse complaints.
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Without whistelblowers working in immigration centers, we would not know the devastating conditions that refugees, including children, suffer under
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Reporters Without Borders condemns the closures of Mogadishu-based Radio Shabelle and Sky FM and arrests of 19 journalists and employees on 15 August, and the continuing detention and reported torture of the directors of the two radio stations and their owner.
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If you blinked at the end of June, you may have missed one of the best pieces of journalism in 2014. The New York Times headline accompanying the story was almost criminally bland, but the content itself was extraordinary: A top manager at Blackwater, the notorious defense contractor, openly threatened to kill a US State Department official in 2007 if he continued to investigate Blackwater’s corrupt dealings in Iraq. Worse, the US government sided with Blackwater and halted the investigation. Blackwater would later go on to infamously wreak havoc in Iraq.
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A Luxembourg computer hacking group has called on the Luxembourg government to offer asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In an open letter, the Chaos Computer Club (C3L) said that such an invitation would be a “long overdue” political action.
“Both (Assange and Snowden) have taken significant risks and consequences around the world to expose the intentions of power-hungry institutions and demonstrate their activities. Threats, lawsuits and denunciations were the responses of the States concerned; and only very little attention from those who could provide political and institutional changes.”
The letter referred to C3L’s “Freedom Not Fear” initiative, on which a round table discussion was held with all Luxembourg political party representatives, excluding the ADR and PID.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Internet has already changed how we live and work, and we’re only just getting started. Who’d have thought even five years ago that people would be streaming Ultra HD 4K video over their home Internet connections?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A public discussion forum centered on new copyright proposals will go ahead without Australia’s main Hollywood-affiliated studio. In an email just made public, Village Roadshow Co-CEO Graham Burke said his company would be boycotting the event due to it being dominated by “crazies” with a pro-piracy agenda.
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New research reveals that BitTorrent swarms can be slowed down significantly by malicious peers. Depending on the number of seeders and the clients they use, download times can be increased by 1000%. The attacks are possible through an exploit of the BitTorrent protocol for which the researchers present a fix.
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Prenda’s recent devastating defeat in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was a result of Dan Booth’s / Jason Sweet’s titanic work and John Steele’s / Paul Hansmeier’s incurable hubris. Trolls’ hubris made them foolishly believe that they had more than a “between slim and zero” chance of prevailing on appeal despite the compelling evidence of not so laundry-fresh financials.
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Back in April, we wrote about a really enraged John Steele (famous for his likely leading role in the Prenda scam) angrily hitting back against a sealed motion for contempt against him, arguing that he was lying and hiding assets in his attempt to plead poverty, after a court ordered Team Prenda to file detailed financial statements. They did not do so.
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We all know that Nintendo wraps itself in copyright law like some kind of really boring security blanket. Every once in a while, the company will make some noise about being more open and accommodating to its biggest fans and the like, but that noise is usually followed up by a rash of takedowns and C&D letters. The most recent battlefront Nintendo has entered in the war against its own fans is the floral planter arena. One woman, admittedly inspired by her love of the Pokemon game series, shared her design for a 3D printed planter on a commerce website.
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Today’s copyright-induced stupidity is brought to you by… a whole host of regulatory institutions. An anonymous Techdirt reader sent in a pointer to this ridiculous warning that greets those accessing the National Association of Legal Assistants practice tests.
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TorrentFreak has the exceptionally troubling story of a federal district court in Oregon issuing an incredibly broad and questionable order, effectively wiping a bunch of websites out, without ever letting the websites in question know that they were being “tried” in court. The request came from ABS-CBN, a giant Filipino entertainment company arguing infringement, of course. But the argument against these sites is somewhat questionable already, made worse by the demand that the whole thing be done under seal (without alerting the site operators). Then Judge Anna Brown granted the temporary restraining order, basically deleting these sites from the internet, without even a sniff of an adversarial hearing.
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 12:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is systematically attacking migrations to GNU, Linux and Free software, using dirty tricks, as always
Windows, the common carrier of Microsoft, is such a sordid mess that it suffers regular glitches and conducts mass surveillance on users. Microsoft knows that without Windows it cannot survive, so dirty tricks resume in a very big way. This is not a beep on the radar but somewhat of a surge.
Bribing politicians in numerous countries is not enough for Microsoft (it got caught), so moles too seem to be rolled into action. Microsoft Peter says that the chief criminal (behind bribes to officials) is distancing himself from Microsoft, but the corruption itself is not stopping:
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that he’s stepping down from the company’s board, effective immediately.
Don’t think for a second that it means the crimes will stop. Under his leadership Brazil was attacked by proxy for its ODF policy and many other nations that are cheap to bribe or corrupt suffered from Microsoft intervention. It is digital imperialism. Consider the Philippines, which has been the victim of colonialism for hundreds of years. In 2008 we wrote about what Microsoft had done in the Philippines to derail a Free software policy and bill. Now Microsoft does something similar in Santiago, writing or changing legislation by proxy, if not bribing people as well (the modus operandi of Microsoft against public officials). In 2008 we wrote about what Microsoft had done in Chile and Ernesto Manríquez tells us that it is happening again. “Microsoft bought local politician Daniel Farcas to neutralize a resolution forcing Chilean gov’t to use FLOSS,” he told me, adding that “Farcas was involved in a corruption scandal with his university, UNIACC (controlled by Apollo Group)”.
Finally he shows an article where, according to him and his translation “Vlado Mirosevic reveals sabotage by MS to res promoting FLOSS usage in Chielan gov’t. “MS RAPED us””.
The article from Renato Garín says (in English): “To understand the debate is necessary to observe the sequence of events. The Mirosevic MP, the Liberal Party of Chile, intended to introduce a bill regarding free software and encourage its use by the state. The draft agreement submitted by Deputy Mirosevic was also signed by nine other legislators seeking the State to take into account the alternative of free software versus software license, which is paid over 36 billion a year, according to the detail built by the team of deputy. Aware of the threat to their interests, representatives of Microsoft came to interview Mirosevic to persuade him down this motion. In these efforts, Microsoft was accompanied by a strategic communications company called Factor C, whose website service lobby is not mentioned and whose executive director is Javiera de la Cerda, UDI lady mayor of Las Condes, Francisco de la Maza.”
On it goes: “Having described the case of free software, it seems clear that this conflict between Mirosevic Microsoft has an edge and lobbying that can not be overlooked. The regulation of lobbying, we know, is already stipulated in the Law 20.730 which comes into operation yet, because we are waiting for the issuance of the respective regulations. In the short term does not seem plausible to have the law in place, since then the rules have to mount a digital system which enables meeting of parliamentarians and other authorities involved. However, the team has put into operation Mirosevic equivalent minuta to which shall be constructed under Law 20.730. minuta In this, the role played by the company Factor C is seen as a representative of Microsoft and ACTIS. On the website of Factor C mention the lobby as such does not appear. Factor C ¿Understand that what they do is lobby?
“All this leads to the icing on the cake if exposed by the report of Fluxá. It turns out that, in the negotiations in the Senate, an indication is included for companies producing software that will work in practice as a subsidy. That is, the original draft of Mirosevic candid unleashed lobby eventually pushed the project Farcas and then the indication in the tax reform bill. This shows the effectiveness of carambola lobby, the ability to promote and neutering bills and motions, ending leading to direct benefits to large companies. In parallel, an alliance orchestra with small producers to align interests and negotiate together. The result is obvious: to legislate his pint. The logic and the project know as the Fisheries Act, which was dubbed ” a picnic Lobby “by Senator Carlos Montes.”
Ernesto Manríquez shows us another new article. To quote an English translation of the headline: “Deputy Mirosevic reveals sabotage project that promoted free software: “Microsoft violated us””
Here is some translation of the article’s body:
A multimillion-dollar business, in fact nothing less than 36 billion dollars that the State of Chile paid annually to companies by the concept of “software licenses”, ie, authorization to use such common programs such as the Windows operating system or Office programs, Word and Excel.
But did you know that this -upper the amount required to build a hospital of high complexity-pocket is mostly unnecessary? This is because in recent years, countries such as Germany, France, Spain, Russia, China and Brazil have joined the trend of free software, a mode in which programs developed jointly used by hundreds of people, who then distributed for use at no charge.
Following this policy, the deputy Vlado Mirosevic introduced in May this year a bill ordering the Chilean State to prefer free software over proprietary software. The legislation specified that only when a department submit a written justification, may purchase a license.
“We are not against the state hires Microsoft license or other services, but we are breaking this trend in the culture of the state to hire proprietary software because it is the one most on hand. The idea is that the state is obliged to seek alternative services that are free, that will mean significant savings, “he said at that time the deputy Arica daily La Tercera .
Soon, Mirosevic realized that large software companies had accused the coup. As explained by a news magazine Friday picked up by The Desk , Alex Pessó, manager of legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft, traveled to Congress to join him, to expose studies and arguments rebutted the project that had submitted .
However no parliamentary traded. Quite the contrary, received immediate support from other former student leaders as Giorgio Jackson and Gabriel Boric, who were more akin to the ideology of community development. In the case of the other congressmen, he realized that most of them did not understand the topic.
“Half the people had no idea what we were talking. I’m not saying the free software concept, rather the software, but as we had calculated, the rest followed those that had understood, “said Mirosevic publication.
This is becoming a hot article in Chile at the moment. Further down it says:
“Microsoft violated us. And worse, it was a rape that ended in pregnancy, “he snapped.
This is because under the new draft Farcas, not only no longer promotes free software in the state, but a tax break for companies that hire or subscribe technology services through the Internet is established. “It’s a tax benefit to companies to use proprietary software. It encourages buying and state, instead of saving, subsidizing ends, “he added.
Chile would be foolish to stay with Microsoft, especially given public knowledge about espionage by NSA, Microsoft’s “special” partner. It is a matter of national security. Likewise in Germany. Right now Microsoft (through its partners and embedded pseudo-journalists) is libeling Munich's migration to GNU/Linux (see our update with refutation) and one Romanian journalist says that it is “Proof That Microsoft Is Still an Evil Company”. Microsoft has tried so many dirty tricks against Munich and the latest is perhaps a mole of Microsoft. To quote the journalist: “Reports about the city of Munich authorities that are considering the replacement of Linux with Microsoft products mostly comes from one man, the Deputy Mayor of Munich, who is also a long-term self-declared Windows fan.
“Munich is the poster child for the adoption of a Linux distribution and the replacement of the old Windows OS. It provided a powerful incentive for other cities to do the same, and it’s been a thorn in Microsoft’s side for a very long time.
“The adoption of open source software in Munich started back in 2004 and it took the local authorities over 10 years to finish the process. It’s a big infrastructure, but in the end they managed to do it. As you can imagine, Microsoft was not happy about it. Even the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, tried to stop the switch to Linux, but he was too late to the party.”
Even after refutation some Microsoft boosters continue to repeat the propaganda and the lies (no need for links to examples here, as that would feed them). They will probably continue to do this for a while, totally ignoring refutations that are not convenient to this Microsoft brainwash attempt (trying to scare those who wish to mimic Munich and follow its example). Bribes go a long way and Microsoft has clever ways of distributing them. We gave numerous examples from Munich (‘soft’ bribes).
Microsoft is a highly corrupt company, but it is unlikely that its staff will be sent to jail. Microsoft exploits this perceived immunity (laws do not apply) to act recklessly. As Pogson puts it
Of course, the mayor might get a different result if he accepts voluntary labour from M$ or hires his nephew to do the research, but the council is wide awake and understands the issues, so I doubt there will be some coup in IT.
Nothing is going to change in Munich, but Microsoft is trying to maintain an international/universal perception that the migration to GNU/Linux was a disaster. Numerous anonymous blogs were created to attack Munich over this and provocateurs of Microsoft loved citing them, only to be repeatedly proven wrong. Microsoft is trying to make an example out of Munich in all sorts of nefarious ways. We need to defend Munich from this malicious assault by the convicted monopolist and corrupt enterprise that’s acting as though it fights for its very survival (while indeed laying off tens of thousands of employees). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Vista 9, Windows at 12:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![Esther Dyson](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/320px-Esther_Dyson_Monaco_Media_Forum.jpg)
“Influential writer Esther Dyson (pictured here in 2008) popularized the term “vaporware” in her November 1983 issue of RELease 1.0.” — Wikipedia on vaporware (image originally posted to Flickr by eirikso)
Summary: Microsoft’s Windows-powered services are failing and Windows gets bricked by Microsoft patches, whereupon we are seeing yet more of Microsoft’s vapourware tactics (focusing in imaginary, non-existent versions of Windows)
A few days ago Windows showed why it is widely recognised as a piece of trash. Even Microsoft cannot manage it as Microsoft Azure failure got reported. All it’s good for is mass surveillance by the NSA. At the same time we learned about the latest Vista 8 failure. When not promoting Microsoft at the expense of Linux Microsoft’s booster Gavin Clarke wrote about Microsoft bricking Windows: [via]
Patch early and patch often is the advice of security professionals when it comes to software updates.
After all, who needs to be left wide open to hackers and malware writers when the solution is delivered by the software’s maker?
Yet sysadmins will be increasingly leery of applying such an approach to Windows systems following Microsoft’s latest botch job.
On 12 August Microsoft released 40 updates for Internet Explorer, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Pro.
Vista 8 is such an utter mess (worse than Vista) that the editor of InfoWorld at IDG, Eric Knorr, decided to start advertising Microsoft vapourware. Shame on IDG and Knorr. As we showed before, Microsoft had started Vista 8 vapourware half a year before Vista 7 was even released. This was done through known Microsoft boosters. Gavin Clarke was the first. █
“In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
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