07.04.15
Posted in News Roundup at 9:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Eduardo Lima Mitev of Igalia last week published a new vec4 back-end based on NIR for the Mesa i965 DRI driver. This work is part of implementing a NIR to Vec4 pass in order to allow using NIR for everything.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Midterm evaluation week has almost come to an end and midterm evaluation deadline ends today. This post will describe about what all I have achieved in my project “Integration of Cantor with LabPlot” and what I plan to do further.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Florian Müllner announced this morning the 3.17.3 versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter. With these new versions come more Wayland improvements in the road toward GNOME 3.18 this September.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Prolific open-source contributor at Red Hat, Christian Schaller, who has worked on GStreamer as well as the Transmageddon GNOME video transcoding app and other multimedia projects, seems poised to announce PulseVideo.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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An annoying setting of Ubuntu’s GRUB configuration is going to be finally addressed in Ubuntu 15.10 and will be addressed in current Ubuntu releases via a stable release update.
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Flavours and Variants
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Web Browsers
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Project Releases
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Programming
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When Emma Jane Hogbin Westby is into something, she’s all in, and then she shares what she learns. For example, she doesn’t just use Drupal, she wrote a couple of books about learning Drupal, and she created—and shared—a knitting pattern for Drupal socks. Using Drupal is how Emma Jane got started using Git. Then she wrote a book about using Git for Teams, created an O’Reilly video about Collaborating with Git, and, like she did with Drupal, she speaks about the open source project at tech events.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The use of unmanned US drones in Afghanistan has stepped up since January. With the launch of the new US counterterrorism mission, Freedom Sentinel, the ongoing and intensifying drone campaign has reportedly killed around 400 people in Afghanistan over the last six months.
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Foreign Policy correspondent Ty McCormick found out that about 120 US military men deployed there strike Al-Shabab terrorists and reportedly cooperate with African Union peacekeepers.
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Already receiving fierce criticism for operating drone bases on foreign soil – sometimes without the host country’s knowledge – the US has begun expanding its operations in Africa. But according to reports, the Pentagon has been running a base in Somalia, completely in secret, to conduct drone missions and train elite Somali forces.
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Copying an earlier CIA operation to create an elite Somali commando force, US contractors are currently using Baledogle to train a new squadron known as the Danab, or “Lightning.” The project is being overseen by Bancroft Global Development, according to Foreign Policy, but that company has denied any links with the US government.
“We have nothing to do with the Americans,” an employee told Foreign Policy. “We’re in charge of training Danab. We have nothing to do with the Americans, and the Americans have nothing to do with us.”
That’s because, on paper, Bancroft is responsible for training soldiers with the Somali National Army on behalf of the Ugandan government. Uganda is, in turn, reimbursed by Washington, to avoid a direct paper trail.
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Somali officials have confirmed a secretive US presence in the southern port city of Kismayo, according to Foreign Policy correspondent Ty McCormick. Another base, at the airfield of Baledogle near Mogadishu, is being used for both drone strikes and for contractors training Somali security forces.
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The U.S. Military has used drones in combat operations and counter-terrorism as early as 2002. Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV), commonly known as drones, and their operation have been shrouded in secrecy. The U.S. government refused to acknowledge the existence of a drone program until last year. The U.S. government argued that this was a matter of national security. Drones have proven to be a successful tool in eliminating high-value terrorist targets but their impact in combating insurgency and eliminating terrorism remains murky at best.
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I’ve never lived in a place that was attacked in a drone strike. Never seen my parents or children blown to bits or had to collect their scattered, bloody body parts for a proper burial.
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US drone and air strikes killed at least 207 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen so far in 2015, according to data collected by the Bureau.
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From a range of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives, we jointly signed a letter urging the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress to halt its policy of lethal drone strikes. Despite the range of our different belief systems and ideas about warfare, we found that we shared many of the exact same questions and concerns about the drones program that led us to send this letter. Here are a few of those concerns.
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Michael Fallon thinks military action should be back on the table. But the past 15 years suggests use of force wouldn’t be just ineffective, it would make things worse
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After sharing a story on Twitter about a robot who killed a man in Germany, Ryan Calo, professor of robotics and cyberlaw at the University of Washington School of Law, replied that it is not that unusual for robots to kill people. Naturally, I had a few questions. Here they are with Calo’s answers, including why robots aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
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A MAN HAS DIED in Germany after being crushed by an industrial robot. The 22 year-old worker at the Volkswagen factory in Baunatal, north of Frankfurt, was killed while a team of contractors was installing the robot.
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The report, courtesy of War is Boring, describes a January 15 encounter between a single-seat F-35A in an older configuration and an F-16D Block 40. The Block 40 variant of the F-16 is newer than stock model, but still dates to 1989 — not exactly a spring chicken. The test in question was designed to measure the F-35’s ability to dogfight at high angles of attack and with aggressive maneuvering. The F-35 was flying clean, with no weapons in its bomb bays or mounted on the fuselage, while the F-16 was carrying a pair of external fuel tanks. This significantly impacts drag and limits the airplane’s overall maneuverability.
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My deep belief is that Presidents Obama and George W. Bush have done exactly this to our military. American taxpayer dollars have been used to encourage our intelligence officers to torture free from any risk of judicial or other consequences. If you question this assertion, you must read the Senate Intelligence Report on Torture and read for yourself what your money paid for. And as promised, no high-ranking intelligence officers have gone to prison for violating national and international laws.
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Richard Jackson speaks to MEMO: “Once you listen to what their grievances are and try and address them terrorism subsides.”
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Imagine a fancy new autonomous luxury car is cruising down an Australian freeway at 110km, carrying a sole occupant playing Candy Crush on her smartphone.
Meanwhile a beat-up people-mover with mum and six kids onboard blows a tyre, loses control and careers over the median strip into the path of said autonomous car.
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The process of continuous alienation has shaped the world in which today we must live: clans gave rise to tribes; then to cultural and ethnic groups that coalesced into town and cities and in recent centuries merged into nations, of which in our times many have been hammered into states.
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Dorsey then walks away from the counter, saying, “Wonder why 22 veterans kill themselves every day.”
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War is the business of killing the “enemy”, in order to impose your will on them.
Therefore, “humane war” is an oxymoron.
War itself is a crime. There are few exceptions. I would exempt the war against Nazi Germany, since it was conducted against a regime of mass murderers, led by a psychopathic dictator, who could not be brought to heel by any other means.
This being so, the concept of “war crimes” is dubious. The biggest crime is starting the war in the first place. This is not the business of soldiers, but of political leaders. Yet they are rarely indicted.
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Activists cited with trespassing and interfering with traffic earlier this year at Creech Air Force Base used a court appearance today to continue their protest against U.S. armed drone strikes.
“What do we want? Ground the drones. When do want it? Now,” protesters shouted outside the Regional Justice Center in downtown Las Vegas.
Thirty-four people were cited March 6 at the base as protesters urged Air Force drone operators to refuse to participate in the overseas strikes.
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To complicate matters further, the legality of the US’s aerial offensive is also highly questionable. Since 2004, only 4 per cent of all UAV strikes have resulted in Al Qaeda related casualties, whereas 76 per cent of deaths caused by drone attacks fall into a suspiciously termed legal grey area.
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A Staffordshire arms factory making engines for drones exported to Israel will be shut down by protesters on Monday 6 July, to mark the one year anniversary of Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza.
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Russell Brand has described the scheduled minute’s silence for the victims of the Tunisia massacre as “a minute of bullshit”.
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A minute’s silence will be held in memory of the victims at noon on Friday, marking a week since the outrage. Flags are expected to be flown at half-mast over Government departments and Buckingham Palace.
Brand, however, believes the move is: “An empty futile gesture part of a general policy of bullshit that our government can continue selling arms around the world and perpetuating a cycle where its own needs are met at the expense of its own citizens lives.”
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Brand aired comments from David Cameron on BBC Radio 4 in the aftermath of the attacks, and accused the Prime Minister of propaganda, criticising him for refusing to link terror attacks with government foreign policy including bombings and drone attacks.
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Brand said the source of the problem was British foreign policy, including drone attacks, arms sales to countries that abused human rights and “foreign activity in Muslim countries which obviously provokes this kind of response”.
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…many countries had been identified as a threat by David Cameron, yet were still able to buy arms from the UK.
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In the days after 52 people were killed in the 7/7 attacks, the Blair government was insistent that the war in Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the appalling massacre. That argument had to be rolled back eight weeks later when al-Jazeera screened a “martyr video” recorded by one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan.
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THE Rockhampton Peace Convergence has condemned the use of Heron drones by the Australian Defence Force.
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Update: Delegate session leaders announced July 2 that the motion to table the Israel-Palestine divestment resolution for two years passed by a vote of 418 to 336, or 55 percent support.
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An increasing number of United States military veterans are counseling United States military drone operators to refuse to fly drone surveillance/attack missions – the veterans are even helping sponsor prime time television commercials urging drone operators to “refuse to fly.”
In a letter released recently by KnowDrones.com, 44 former members of the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines whose ranks range from private to colonel and whose military service spans 60 years, “urge United States drone pilots, sensor operators and support teams to refuse to play any role in drone surveillance/assassination missions. These missions profoundly violate domestic and international laws intended to protect individuals’ rights to life, privacy and due process.”
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The only thing wrong with the Pentagon checking under its boots to see what and who all has been trod upon is the dishonesty of it. Two words that should not go together are “military” and “sensitivity” when speaking of dead and injured civilians. Sensitivity about the dead is for people who don’t know the victims, who had nothing to do with their demise. Does anyone require sensitivity of mass murderers, especially if they don’t appear to be interested in rehabilitation – that is, not repeating their crimes? How about stop killing people instead of being sensitive when you do?
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It will be deeply ironic if Yemen is the source of another king’s fall from grace.
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Main concept of human rights is that all human beings have equal rights and these rights apply to everyone without interpretation.
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It comes after rebel rocket fire on a residential district of Aden killed 31 civilians on Wednesday and left more than 100 others wounded, according to a medical official.
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Rebel fire on a residential district of Yemen’s second city Aden killed more than 30 civilians Wednesday, as the UN declared its highest level humanitarian emergency in the war-torn country.
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At the height of the Cold War, Toronto was the site of an elaborate game of espionage played between the U.S and the Soviet Union, declassified CIA documents show.
The records provide new details about how the CIA and the KGB spied on the city’s growing community of eastern European immigrants.
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The origin of these compounds for would-be jihadis dates back to 1979, when the Agency sent hundreds of radical Islamic clerics to the United States in an effort to recruit African American Muslims for the holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
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In January 1989, Hector Berrellez reported to Los Angeles, handpicked by the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to get to the bottom of a 4-year-old murder investigation that was a top agency priority. This wasn’t just another killing in the seemingly endless bloodshed in the Mexican drug wars; the victim, like Berrellez, was a DEA agent. Enrique “Kiki” Camarena had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered at the hands of a Mexican drug cartel four years earlier. The identity of the killers was clear enough; two cartel bosses had been convicted of the killings and were imprisoned in Mexico. But the DEA had reason to believe there were many more guilty parties in addition to the two capos behind bars.
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The CIA has paid more than $10 million to a management consulting firm advising senior U.S. intelligence officials on a broad reorganization that agency Director John O. Brennan began earlier this year, current and former U.S. officials said.
The agency also is requiring some of its departments to surrender portions of their annual budgets in an effort to collect enough money to cover other costs associated with the restructuring, officials said.
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We are not winning here — there is not even a promise of victory. Instead, ancestral ghosts are in formation for review. Is this still a beginning, or is it maybe a last hurrah for America? The spirit-soldiers are as stone-faced and grim as the winters at Valley Forge and the mountain fastness of the Wachtung had made them.
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As with most foreign policy moves sold by the neocons and interventionists, grandiose promises of success have found themselves at odds with reality. Advocates of the program claimed that it would produce 5,400 US-trained and armed fighters per year. In fact since the money was approved last May, less than 100 are actually being trained and none has yet completed the course.
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A crucial part of the United States’ plan to train moderate Syrian rebels to combat the self-proclaimed Islamic State terrorist group is locating those so-called “moderates.” The problem: those are becoming harder and harder to find.
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And surely it would be completely unreasonable to suggest that unlimited power might tempt our protectors to engage in things like abduction, torture and political assassination. Oh wait — the CIA has already done all those things.
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Hatley’s 2007 trial drew national attention because he was the highest-ranking service member at the time to be found guilty of premeditated murder. His investigation, arrest and conviction came to define military service for me. In the wake of the accusations, a kind of tribal mentality — “herd mentality” isn’t dynamic enough a phrase — connected many of the soldiers with whom I served. They came out strong in their defense of a leader who can best be described as a cross between legendary college football coach Bear Bryant and the Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” He’s huge, affable, violent, driven, competent and absolutely sure of himself.
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The board deciding whether to remove a Fort Bragg Green Beret from service is attempting to obtain a CIA video of a polygraph exam that apparently details the 2010 killing of an Afghan bomb maker.
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An Army officer who was accused of tracking down and killing an unarmed bomb-making suspect in Afghanistan is being recommended for an honorable discharge even though a military panel that looked into the case determined his conduct was unbecoming an officer.
The military panel at Fort Bragg reached the finding late Sunday concerning Maj. Mathew Golsteyn. Army Special Forces Command spokeswoman Maj. Allison Aguilar said Monday that if the decision is upheld by a review board Golsteyn would be discharged under honorable conditions allowing him to keep nearly all veteran’s benefits.
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“I f—– up because I trusted the FBI,” Neumann told the Guardian about his past decisions. “Do not trust anything to do with the US government because they will lie to you. They promise but they don’t deliver. There is no sense in cooperating.”
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Serving the nation means no more than doing what you’re told.
God bless America. Flags wave, fireworks burst on the horizon. Aren’t we terrific? But this idea we celebrate — this nation, this principled union of humanity — is just a military bureaucracy, full of dark secrets. The darkest, most highly classified secret of all is that we’re always at war and we always will be. And war is an end in itself. It has no purpose beyond its own perpetuation.
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TRNN speaks to survivor Sgt. Bryce Lockwood and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern about the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty
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As the deadline for a nuclear deal between Iran and the United States looms, plenty of Americans are understandably skeptical. Many of them have probably watched images of Iranian mobs burning US flags and chants of “Death to America” at mass rallies in Tehran and wondered to themselves: “Why do they hate us?”
Well, the good news is “they” don’t. According to the Atlantic Monthly, “A 2009 World Public Opinion poll found that 51 percent of Iranians hold a favorable opinion of Americans, a number consistent with other polls, meaning that Americans are more widely liked in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East.”
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The two corporate parties have collaborated in knocking off countries targeted for invasion and regime change.
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In the main, his book is about the CIA and FBI using and protecting ex-Nazis or former Eastern European collaborators who came to the United States, and the subsequent investigations of those people by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) or the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The latter was formed in 1979 specifically to pursue Nazi perpetrators in view of the inadequacy of earlier efforts.
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On July 3rd, the Ukrainian newspaper Vesti headlined “The Ministry of Justice Acknowledges UNA-UNSO Collaborated with Nazis,” and reported that, “Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice has officially recognized that the members of the Ukrainian nationalist organization UNA-UNSO fought on the side of Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War.” It went on to note that, “On May 22 of last year, the State Registration Service renamed the party of UNA-UNSO as the Right Sector Party, which is led by Dmitriy Yarosh.”
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US military strategy includes “press(ing) forward with the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, placing our most advanced capabilities and greater capacity in that vital theater.” It remains committed to NATO allies and Israel’s security.
Ashton Carter replacing Chuck Hagel as defense secretary in mid-February signaled more war besides ones America was waging before his appointment.
Obama’s naked aggression on Yemen followed weeks later. So did greater numbers of US combat troops operating in Iraq, continued bombing of its economic infrastructure on the pretext of attacking ISIS, and the same strategy ongoing in Syria – plus the Pentagon’s latest military strategy signaling endless US-initiated conflicts.
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As you’ll learn from the video above, the CIA has been using a heart attack gun for years. What you see in the video is a congressional meeting dating back to 1975. In it, politicians discuss the CIA’s use of the secret heart attack gun. Only recently did this information become declassified, and Your News Wire somehow dug up this video all about it.
The way the gun works is that it shoots a tiny dart that can pierce through clothing and leaves no trace. But it causes a heart attack only seconds later. No, this is real life, not a James Bond flick!
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Thirty years ago today, Haruo Remeliik, the president of the world’s first nuclear-free state Palau, was assassinated. Investigative journalist Ed Rampell asks serious questions about a mysterious reign of terror in the Micronesian nation.
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On June 30, 1985, 30 years ago today, Haruo Remeliik, the president of anti-nuclear Palau, had his brains blown out. What – if anything – did former CIA Director George H.W. Bush have to do with this and what does it say about who the Bushes really are?
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Declassified United States documents show the CIA knew about the practice since 1994 and was aware the Colombian army worked in coordination with paramilitary forces.
The report shows that the false positive killings happened while US troops were deployed within Colombia, working together with the Colombian army. HRW demanded Washington explain if US troops knew of the killings.
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The office of the attorney general in Ecuador is investigating if the death of former President Jaime Roldos was an assassination of Operation Condor.
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Casting aside more than a half century of hostilities, President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the United States and Cuba would restore full diplomatic relations and open respective embassies.
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, he called the rapprochement “a historic step” in efforts to bring the two countries and their people together. The president said Secretary of State John Kerry would soon travel to Havana to “proudly raise the U.S. flag over our embassy.”
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Nurullah Albayrak, the lawyer representing Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, in a series of tweets on Wednesday slammed stories in pro-government media reports that claimed Gülen and his followers were trained by the CIA and FBI on how to overthrow the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.
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Mr. Tovar, a native of Bogata, Colombia, and World War II veteran, became what Stein calls “a measured critic” of U.S. efforts to overthrow foreign governments.”
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But it was Tovar’s tenure in Indonesia in 1965 that has drawn the most scrutiny. At the time, the country’s president, Sukarno, was leading a global “anti-imperialist” movement with the support of the Soviet Union and Communist China. Tovar, who had earlier worked against Communist guerrillas in the Philippines, was the CIA’s Jakarta station chief. In September 1965, a coup attempt by the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, failed, and the military unleashed a genocidal campaign against the PKI’s mostly ethnic Chinese followers. With the rebellion crushed and the military-backed Suharto regime now fully in power, the U.S. and other Western powers hailed the outcome as “the West’s best news for years in Asia,” as Time magazine put it.
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Hidden cameras, invisibility cloaks and mini-drones were among the gadgets on display Tuesday at an exhibition of Israeli surveillance technology, offering a rare peek into the secretive world of Israeli espionage.
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Human Rights Watch Senior National Security Counsel Laura Pitter claims that the September 11, 2001 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon deserve a fair trial in which they should have access to the evidence used against them.
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The U.S. and Iranian nuclear negotiators have just announced a one week extension of their nuclear talks. If, as expected, there is an agreement next week, it will open a new stage of tension in the process leading to its final formal ratification by all parties. For then, the U.S. Congress will have 30 days to vote the agreement up or down. This vote, forced on an unwilling president by his own party’s Senate members several weeks ago, poses a new threat. For the Israel Lobby, it offers a new opportunity to sabotage the deal.
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On August 19, 1953, the US and UK overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh through an operation codenamed TPAJAX or Boot. Sections declassified in 2013 of the CIA’s internal Iran study admit the agency used false propaganda to undermine Mossadegh, induced the Shah to cooperate and paid demonstrators to ransack Tehran. In his 1954 report, Donald Wilber, the project executor, revealed how Iran’s lukewarm Islamists were galvanised against the PM. According to Wilber, local CIA operatives posing as pro-Mossadegh nationalists threatened the Shia clergy with “savage punishment” if they opposed him and thus fuelled anger in the religious community. The Shah, for his part, had already fled Iran after signing a royal decree dismissing Mossadegh.
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And he proceeds to profanely and succinctly enumerate why he thinks so. Rather than rely on fictional television, I decided to search online. I found a site called Ranking America, maintained by a respected academic.
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We do rank first in a number of categories. At $619 billion, the United States spends more on defense than the next eight countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China ranks second, far behind this country with defense expenditures of $171.4 billion.
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I have a new piece in Foreign Policy that proposes a The National Commission on the War on Terrorism, which would consist of ten former officials, diplomats, and experts—with no personal or financial interest in the outcome—who would comprehensively review, evaluate, and offer new policy recommendations. Such commissions are rarely meaningful or impactful. However, current government officials and congressional members are too personally and professionally vested to objectively evaluate current strategies, demonstrate strategic learning, or implement any new policies. In short, U.S. counterterrorism strategy is both failing and frozen. The National Commission on the War on Terrorism would cost less than $4 million, and could be included in an authorization bill today. It would then be formed in the fall, with its conclusions and recommendations made publicly available in January 2017, just in time to inform Obama’s successor and the 115th Congress. It is a low-cost initiative to rethink the war on terrorism, and one that this Congress should pursue.
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Transparency Reporting
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On the same day that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced his run for president, the Wisconsin GOP has proposed a virtual gutting of Wisconsin’s open records law, long considered one of the best in the nation. The drastic changes were proposed in a last-minute, anonymous budget motion, with zero public input on the eve of a holiday weekend. The motion will be rolled into the state’s massive budget bill and voted on in the coming weeks.
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For many Americans, he is a hero; for the US government, he is a criminal. This is after leaking secret US government documents exposing anything from torture to illegal NSA wiretaps by United States authorities to the public.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has now asked for political asylum in France. It came after the French government indicated that such asylum may be granted in the wake of revelations of alleged NSA surveillance of senior French officials.
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Saudi Arabia’s status as an oil-fueled U.S. ally is a major reason why the dire human rights situation in the country is of little concern to Washington.
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A controversial Pakistani commentator has been jailed in Saudi Arabia and reportedly sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes for allegedly criticizing the Saudi government while on a religious pilgrimage.
Saudi authorities have so far denied consular access to Zaid Hamid, who was arrested last month in the holy city of Medina while traveling with his wife.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Everything in nature is connected, which is great when nature is kind. But when it’s cruel, it brings us California, circa 2015.
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A strong earthquake hit a rural part of China’s far western Xinjiang region on Friday, killing at least six people, injuring dozens and destroying or damaging thousands of homes, the government and state media said.
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A shallow 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck China’s far western region of Xinjiang on Friday, the US Geological Survey said, with three people killed according to Chinese officials.
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Crews exterminated a 15-20 foot long bee hive on a farm in Lozano, Texas on June 28, 2015, after a farmer died from a bee attack. (Raul R. Zuniga Jr.)(LOZANO, Texas) — A third-generation Texas farmer was killed by a bee attack after he disturbed an enormous hive.
Rogerio Zuniga was on his tractor in Lozano, Texas on Sunday when he hit an 18-inch diameter pipe enraging the bees inside.
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Finance
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Greece has missed a $1.8 billion payment to the International Monetary Fund as it stands on the brink of a financial meltdown. The deadline coincided with the end of Greece’s international bailout, leaving it without an infusion of the money it needs to meet its obligations. On Tuesday, European creditors rejected a last-minute proposal from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for a new financial lifeline. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said a new bailout program could be negotiated, but only if the Greek government backs down from its rejection of austerity demands.
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Despite media misinformation and EU blackmail, anti-austerity forces in Greece remain strong ahead of Sunday’s referendum.
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The former Newman government in Queensland acted “like the KGB, the FBI and the CIA all rolled into one” as it secretly drove a multinational mining bid now subject to a high court challenge, a senior Cape York figure has said.
The Wik people of Cape York have asked the high court to overturn laws that allowed the former Liberal National government to favour Glencore’s proposal to gain a bauxite mining licence on their traditional land in Aurukun.
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Just 24 hours before anti-austerity demonstrators flooded the streets of central Athens on Friday, a number of retired Greek military officers publicly called for a “yes” vote in Sunday’s referendum on the European Union’s demands, defying Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s call for a “no” vote.
The contrast between masses of workers denouncing EU austerity and the pronouncements of prominent military figures could not have been starker. Retired General Fragkoulis Fragkos, a former defense minister and one-time head of the Greek army general staff, called for a “loud yes on Sunday.” In 2011, Fragkos was cashiered by then-Prime Minister George Papandreou amid rumors of a coup.
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On Thursday, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis made the strength of his convictions known by saying he would “prefer to cut off his arm” than sign an agreement without debt relief. Meanwhile, the institutions representing the interests of foreign creditors—the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank—have indicated a ‘Yes’ victory would likely force Tsipras and Varoufakis to resign and the current government to dissolve.
Some of the latest polling out on Friday shows that the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ camps are virtually tied going into Sunday’s vote. Both factions also plan to hold large rallies in Athens on Friday night, but the stakes of the vote—whichever way it falls and presuming it takes place as planned—are now seen to reach far beyond the immediate outcome.
Considering developments in Greece since the financial crisis began in 2008, alongside the behavior of the so-called Troika since the Syriza party came into power earlier this year, analysts suggest that powerful financial interests and elite political forces in Greece are executing a slow-yet-coordinated effort to push a democratically-elected government from power and smash populist opposition to corporate rule and austerity policies that have spread across the continent in recent years.
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As soon as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced the referendum, François Hollande, David Cameron, Matteo Renzi, and the German Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told the Greeks that a No vote would amount to Greece leaving the euro. Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, went further: he said “No” means leaving the European Union. In fact the Greek government has stated many times that — Yes or No — it is irrevocably committed to the Union and the euro. And legally, according to the treaties, Greece cannot be expelled from either.
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It may be ugly for a while: Stock markets will slide, Greece will have to re-invent its currency, and the economic depression Greece has endured may last several years longer. But the Greeks will survive, and so will everybody else.
And despite their pain, the poor will know that their government did this for them. The Greek people will know that they weren’t beholden to the Germans or to the International Monetary Fund.
It’s not just about the money. It’s about pride.
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The weapon is finance; the instruments are the mega-banksters of Europe and Washington. They are like dehumanized missiles. The fight is no-holds-barred – all out, no scruples. The savages of Brussels have the audacity to call for Mr. Tsipras’ resignation in case the Greek referendum rejects the austerity package. – Can you imagine!
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Greek police used pepper spray Friday evening to deter several dozen anti-establishment protesters…
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Thousands of people have flooded the streets of EU cities in mass demonstrations expressing solidarity with Greece ahead of this weekend’s referendum on a cash-for-reform deal with its Troika of creditors.
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South Korea proposed on Friday a stimulus package worth 16.1 trillion won ($14.31 billion) to jump-start Asia’s fourth-largest economy as it fights to overcome the twin challenges of weak domestic and global demand.
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South Korea proposed on Friday a stimulus package worth 16.1 trillion won (S$19.3 billion) to jump-start Asia’s fourth-largest economy as it fights to overcome the twin challenges of weak domestic and global demand.
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One of Europe’s wealthiest bankers faces questioning for fraud in France as part of a years-long case that accuses him of defrauding retirees.
Baron David de Rothschild, one of the wealthy members of the famous Rothschild banking dynasty, was indicted last month over allegations that his company, Rothschild Financial Services Group, offered a fraudulent equity release loan program to about 130 retirees between 2005 and 2008. 20 British retirees living in Spain brought the fraud lawsuit, according to Olive Press, an English-language newspaper published in that country, but it’s taken five years of legal maneuvering to successfully force the Baron into court.
Rothschild Financial Services Group is accused of falsely advertising the scheme, under which retirees were told they could reduce the value of their French homes in order to reduce the inheritance tax that their descendents would for those properties. According to the report, France’s “Tax Agency ruled that such a scheme constitutes fraud.”
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Censorship
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Facebook has removed an incendiary status posted by a high-ranking Kremlin official, Russian media has reported.
According to Lenta.ru, deputy head of Roskomnadzor Maxim Ksenzov’s social media status was taken down over his use of the word ‘crest’ — a pejorative term for ethnic Ukrainians.
Ksenzov, whose department is tasked with “supervision of telecom, information technologies and mass communications,” complained on his Facebook profile that he had been censored.
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Wikipedia, the world’s biggest public and free encyclopaedia, is preparing to challenge Europe over plans to revoke the right to use photographs of public spaces without restriction.
It estimates that tens of thousands of images embedded in articles about buildings, art and other public places will need to be taken down.
It is urging the public to act now and contact MEPs by email, phone or visit their constituencies to preserve what is known as the Freedom of Panorama.
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Privacy
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The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has been named the UK internet industry’s villain of the year for pursuing “snooper’s charter” legislation without fully consulting the sector.
The gong, part of the annual ISPA awards, was given for “forging ahead with communications data legislation that would significantly increase capabilities without adequate consultation with industry and civil society”.
“With an investigatory powers bill due before parliament in the coming months, it is essential that ISPs are consulted,” the Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA) added.
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Franco-American relations have taken a further hammering on Monday after WikiLeaks revealed new documents showing that the NSA has been collecting the details of commercial deals in the Land of Brie for over a decade and sharing them with its allies.
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Germany’s foreign minister has called on Washington to swiftly clarify what is and is not true regarding the latest NSA snooping allegations. There are reports that it spied on several cabinet ministers.
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Last July, no-nonsense German police searched the home and office of a military employee accused of passing sensitive secrets to the U.S. At about the same time, a member of German BND intelligence was arrested and accused of selling an estimated two hundred documents to the CIA. They reportedly contained details of investigations by a German parliamentary panel into the vast electronic surveillance of European populations by the NSA.
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WikiLeaks has published a list of German phone numbers that it claimed showed the US National Security Agency eavesdropped on senior German officials beyond Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Green Party security expert Konstantin von Notz told The Local on Friday that Chancellor Angela Merkel is failing to restore faith in the German-US partnership following fresh spying revelations.
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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has spied not only on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but also on numerous high-ranking government members such as the economy and finance ministers, German media reported on Wednesday.
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Angela Merkel’s chief of staff has summoned the US ambassador to a meeting over allegations that the National Security Agency spied on German ministers.
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Germany’s foreign minister said Friday that new allegations of U.S. eavesdropping on senior German government officials’ telephones need to be clarified “as quickly as possible” and that he hoped Washington would be forthcoming with information.
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A cache of documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden details spying targets, including the UN’s general secretary, according to a new report.
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In a thorough, fascinating followup published in the Intercept, Greenwald and colleagues present a detailed look at the system as it stood in 2013, when it consolidated data from 150 field sites. The service uses your Google cookies and cookies from other services to link your activities across multiple sites and forums, making it possible to search for individual users who use different online identities for different purposes.
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The US National Security Agency’s (NSA) infamous XKeyscore mass surveillance tool, first brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, makes tracking people as easy as Googling their name, according to newly published documents.
Details of XKeyscore were published on Wednesday (1 July) by The Intercept in one of the largest releases of NSA documents to date. The 48 top-secret documents relating to XKeyscore detail how around 150 field sites in the US and abroad sweep up people’s internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications.
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If you thought that the National Security Agency needed warrants, proof and reason to look at your online history, you’re mistaken. It might be as easy as entering your name or email into a database much like Google.
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According to NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a covert program called XKEYSCORE allows the US government to see almost everything you do online.
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German news weekly Der Spiegel charged Friday that it was spied on by US secret services and said it had filed a criminal complaint with the country’s chief prosecutor.
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Der Spiegel has filed a criminal complaint
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In the summer of 2011, the CIA station chief in Berlin asked one of the most powerful intelligence officials in Germany to go on a private walk with him, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports. The American spy had an important message to convey: one of Germany’s own senior officials was leaking information to the press.
The suspected leaker, Hans Josef Vorbeck, had been in contact with Spiegel, the station chief told the German official, Günter Heiss. Head of Division 6, Heiss is responsible for coordinating Germany’s intelligence services. Vorbeck was his deputy.
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Is Congress ready to recognize that protecting reporters’ sources protects the public’s right to know
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In 2011 the US had a top German counterterrorism official sidelined over his contacts with the media, and the German government failed to act in response to illegal surveillance on home turf, Der Spiegel reports.
The official was Hans Josef Vorbeck, deputy director of Department 6 in the German Chancellery. The department is responsible for coordinating the country’s intelligence services, and Vorbeck was responsible for counterterrorism.
In summer 2011 Vorbeck’s superior, Günter Heiss, was called to a meeting with the CIA station chief in Berlin, who told him that Vorbeck had been leaking information to Der Spiegel. After the issue was also raised in June 2011, when Heiss visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Vorbeck was quietly transferred, sidelined to work in the archive section dealing with the history of the BND, the German national intelligence agency.
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CIA Used Intercepts to Press Germany Over Officials
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In the summer of 2011, American intelligence agencies spied on a senior German official who they concluded had been the likely source of classified information being leaked to the news media.
The Obama administration authorized the top American spy in Germany to reveal to the German government the identity of the official, according to German officials and news media reports. The decision was made despite the risk of exposing that the United States was monitoring senior national security aides to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Snowden, a film by Oliver Stone, will be released Christmas Day 2015. With Stone running the show, the film is likely to be controversial. Open Road Films recently made a trailer available which showed the intensity of the movie. Based on the book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding, the film follows Edward Snowden from his time in the military to when he joined the CIA two years later.
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The Edward Snowden whistleblowing story has already been covered with the thrilling 2014 documentary Citizenfour, but now Oliver Stone has chose to take a crack at it as well. And all of it is set to a slowed-down cover of a familiar song, because that seems to be the thing to do these days. On that front, mission accomplished.
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The sometime conspiracy theorist and master at shining a light on government hypocrisy, tragic irony and media manipulation is the director behind “Snowden,” about former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on the NSA’s wiretapping program and has not been back to the United States since.
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Still, none of these carrier-capable spyplane ever entered active service, being replaced by cheaper spy satellites.
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Two years after she cancelled her state visit to Washington in outrage over revelations that the U.S. had spied on her, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is back in Washington, taking a decidedly more friendly approach to President Barack Obama.
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Revelations in September 2013 that the U.S. government had monitored the private communications of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff had strained relations between the two countries. But Rousseff’s arrival in the U.S. this week for a meeting with President Barack Obama comes at a time when public sentiment about the U.S. in Brazil has almost fully returned to the overwhelmingly positive opinions held before the surveillance controversy.
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Revelations of digital surveillance by American spy agencies could end up costing US firms billions of dollars in lost business and lawmakers in Washington are falling short in their duty to address the issue, a US think tank has said.
Tech firms, in particular, have underperformed in foreign markets following the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to a paper published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
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You thought bulk metadata collection had been quashed? Think again: Despite what looked like a last-minute reprieve, the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has approved the NSA to continue. Judge Michael W. Mosman says things should stay the same, despite the shifting legal landscape.
So the NSA gets another 180 days to slurp up phone records, and then it becomes the telcos’ job. The American Civil Liberties Union ain’t impressed, to put it midly.
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US Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat-Oregon) criticized this week a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision allowing the NSA to resume collecting millions of Americans’ phone records.
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Privacy International and twenty-two other organisations from around the world welcome the appointment of Mr Joseph Cannataci as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy.
Today, the President of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Mr Cannataci to fill the post that was created by the Council in March 2015 to address the rising concerns about the enjoyment of right to privacy, particularly in the context of new communications technologies.
Mr Cannataci’s appointment marks a significant step in the strengthening of the protection of the right to privacy at international level. It is also the culmination of a campaign by Privacy International and other NGOs to establish an independent expert on privacy within the UN human rights mechanisms.
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The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has revised its recommendations for methods used to generate random numbers, and formally removed an algorithm suspected to contain a National Security Agency (NSA) backdoor.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents in 2013 that suggested the NSA wrote the dual elliptic curve deterministic random bit generator (Dual_EC_DRBG) algorithm which became part of a NIST standard in 2006.
Cryptographers feared that the involvement of the US spy agency in developing the algorithm meant encryption technology using Dual_EC_DRBG could be compromised.
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Bulk data collection has a very limited use and the US intelligence agencies’ problem is that they are gathering too much information to be able to use it effective, says former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson.
The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the bulk collection of American citizen’s data could be resumed. Earlier the court passed a bill which ended bulk collections of telephone metadata – the Freedom Act – which also assumed a six month transition period to let the NSA move to the new rules.
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Critics have accused Chancellor Angela Merkel’s staff of giving the German BND foreign intelligence agency the green light to help the NSA spy on European firms and officials, triggering a scandal that has dented Merkel’s popularity.
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The Bundestag (German parliament) inquiry into spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) has chosen a former judge to examine lists of targets given to German spies by the Americans.
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The US wiretapped two of France’s economy ministers and spied on the country’s largest companies, French media reported citing WikiLeaks documents, just days after it emerged the US had spied on three of the country’s leaders.
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WikiLeaks alleged that François Baroin and Pierre Moscovici, who headed the finance ministry between 2011 and 2014, were targeted by the NSA. Pictured: French President Francois Hollande (R) and Moscovici — then the French Economy, Finance and Foreign Trade Minister — take part in a meeting about economical relations with the Netherlands at the Parliament building in The Hague, on January 20, 2014.
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The US’ National Institute of Standards and Technology is more than a little worried that its encryption guideilnes have been creating back doors for spies, and it’s changing its tune in order to plug those security holes. The agency is no longer recommending an NSA-backed number randomization technique that made it relatively easy to crack and monitor encrypted data. In theory, software developers who heed the new advice won’t have to worry that they’re laying down a welcome mat for government surveillance agents.
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State-of-the-art facial recognition technology, which had been the stuff of hypothetical privacy nightmares for years, is becoming a startling reality. It is increasingly being deployed all around the United States by giant tech companies, shady advertisers and the FBI – with few if any rules to stop it.
In recent weeks, both Facebook and Google launched facial recognition to mine the photos on your phone, with both impressive and disturbing results. Facebook’s Moments app can recognize you even if you cover your face. Google Photos can identify grown adults from decades-old childhood pictures.
Some people might find it neat when it’s only restricted to photos on their phone. But advertisers, security companies and just plain creepy authority figures have also set up their own systems at music festivals, sporting events and even some churches to monitor attendees, which is bound to disturb even those who don’t give a second thought to issues like the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.
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But what’s most interesting about the document is the part where Bossenmaier is advised on how to deal with any questions she might be asked by her overseers, should they request evidence to support her assertions.
The section is headed: “IF PRESSED ON THIS OR ANY OTHER DISCLOSURE.”
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This week, the latest documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in an Intercept report that the National Security Agency had targeted security vendors, reverse engineering their systems to learn about their capabilities and gain access to user data. According to the report by the Intercept, the documents revealed that, in addition to repeated-target Kaspersky Lab, the agency also targeted more than 20 other anti-virus vendors under Project Camberdada. From there, the agency could possibly learn the vulnerabilities of the solutions included in its “More Targets” list and exploit them for its own use.
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France is the oldest ally of the United States; the French provided assistance to the colonists as far back as the Revolutionary War. This has not, over the centuries, led to a relationship similar to the intimate bond Washington maintains with Anglo-Saxon countries like Great Britain or Australia.
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Civil Rights
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Police arrested Dr Al-Singace for his participation in the peaceful Arab Spring protests in 2011.
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Singapore filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s controversial film about the country’s political exiles, which was given a “not allowed for all ratings” (NAR) classification by the Media Development Authority, is now available outside of Singapore.
After touring the international festival circuit, the documentary To Singapore, With Love is now available on DVD and through video-sharing website Vimeo to viewers outside the country. Due to the classification, which amounts to a ban, the DVD cannot be sold and the film cannot be streamed in Singapore.
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For a brief Chinese ‘spring’, the country’s bloggers exposed corruption, cheating and other abuses of power, writes Angus Grigg. Then the Party bosses took back the internet.
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Prominent Singaporean intellectuals, artists and activists Saturday criticised the government’s “harsh” treatment of a teenage boy behind online attacks on the late former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
In an open letter to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the former leader’s son, the 77 signatories said they were “aware of the negative aspects” of 16-year-old Amos Yee s pronouncements in a YouTube video and on his blog.
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“Amnesty International considers him to be a prisoner of conscience, held solely for exercising his right to freedom of expression,” the human rights organisation says in a statement released on Friday, 3 July, with regards to the case of Singaporean video-blogger, Amos Yee.
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The highly opportunistic PAP-run government has repulsively destroyed many vocal critics and opposition members over the decades and it has brazenly used public-funded resources like the People’s Association grassroots network to promote and protect the Party and its MPs.
Yet they have the audacity to prosecute powerless ordinary citizens and children (including sending teenager Amos Yee to a mental hospital) for defamation and even accuse them of being insincere and opportunistic?
Click here to read how the lawyer for PM Lee, in the ongoing court case against blogger Roy, has framed his attack by accusing the writer of being an opportunist.
Our government has launched Character building courses for students purportedly to teach them moral values. Yet the government leaders have time and again shown their own lack of integrity by twisting facts and telling half-truths and even lies just to make themselves look good (One big lie is calling Lee Kuan Yew our country’s Founder when Singapore was founded centuries before he was born).
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This is Mdm Mary Toh’s Facebook post in full:
“Sorry Son.
Sorry for telling you that you are in the safest country. You are feeling so insecure and scared now.
Sorry for urging you to be a law-abiding citizen. The laws are doing you more harm than good now.
Sorry for assuring you that you will be well-protected. You are being threatened and ill-treated now.
Sorry for saying that our government provides us the best welfare. You are not even allowed to sleep at home now.
Sorry for telling you that home is best. It is where you were arrested from.
Sorry for encouraging you to be creative and expressive. You are regarded as crazy and rebellious instead.
Sorry for not teaching you well. You could have been taught otherwise.
Sorry Son. Mummy is wrong.”
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“Amnesty International considers him to be a prisoner of conscience, held solely for exercising his right to freedom of expression,” the human rights organisation says in a statement released on Friday, 3 July, with regards to the case of Singaporean video-blogger, Amos Yee.
“As he is a minor, authorities must also ensure that his treatment is consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Singapore is a State party.”
Regarding the possibility of the teen being sent to reformative training, which entails a minimum 18-month detention, Amnesty said:
“According to the Office of the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, reformative training is ‘akin to detention and usually applied to juvenile offenders involved in serious crimes’ and was referred to in a recent Singapore district court decision as ‘incarcerative in nature and should be imposed cautiously’.”
“Amnesty International calls for the immediate and unconditional release of Amos Yee.”
It added that the authorities in Singapore “must also ensure that Amos Yee is safe from any security threats and is not tortured or otherwise ill-treated.”
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Suaram says Yee’s lawyers and family members have said that the teenager is deteriorating both physically and psychologically in Changi Prison.
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Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) has called on Singapore authorities to release 16-year-old blogger Amos Yee Pang Sang and drop all charges against him.
Its executive director Sevan Doraisamy said the blogger was currently being assessed on his suitability for the Reformative Training Centre (RTC) in the island republic.
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The Online Citizen (TOC) has learned that an urgent appeal was filed on Friday with the courts to request that Amos Yee be released on bail.
The appeal was unsuccessful for administrative reason, TOC understands.
The request was made after the mother of the 16-year old teenager, who is being remanded at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) for psychiatric assessment, felt that conditions in the ward had become worrying for her son.
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The 16-year-old was convicted on May 12 for uploading an obscene image in which the faces of Singapore’s late founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and former British premier Margaret Thatcher were superimposed. He was also found guilty of deliberately hurting the feeling of Christians in a YouTube video criticising Mr Lee.
[...]
On why Hong Kong students were concerned about the issue, he said: “Our core value in Hong Kong is human rights, and we believe in freedom of speech and expression. We have a moral obligation to speak up especially for those who can’t do it themselves.”
The HKU, along with the Lingnan University student union and the student group Scholarism, had earlier announced the plans for a petition in a Facebook post, saying: “Any act of trampling human rights and manipulating the freedom of thought must be condemned.”
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University students in Hong Kong protested near the Singapore consulate in Hong Kong today (June 30), urging the Singapore government to release teen blogger Amos Yee.
According to Hong Kong media reports, about 50 students from the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lingnan and Hong Kong Polytechnic were part of the protest. Singaporean blogger Han Hui Hui was also spotted at the protest.
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About 60 people demonstrated outside the Singapore Trade Office in Taipei on Friday morning, calling for teenage blogger Amos Yee to be freed.
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The mother of 16-year old video blogger, Amos Yee, says she is relieved that her son is eating once again while being held at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH).
The teenager was ordered by the court to undergo a two-week assessment for possibly being within the range of autism spectrum disorder.
A prior three-week assessment while being held at the Changi Prison saw Amos Yee being assessed as suitable for reformative training. However, the psychiatrist who conducted the assessment, Munidasa Winslow, also said the teen may be suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
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Amos has succeeded in getting the world’s attention about the darker side of your father, and the more Amos suffers from unjust treatments, the more the government has helped Amos succeed in a more phenomenal way.
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The fact is that according to the FBI, white people, not Black people, kill white people. In 2011, the perpetrators of 83% of white murder victims were Caucasian. An article entitled “9 Facts That Show White-on-White Crime Far Exceeds Black-on-Black Crime and How Media Outlets Conceal It,” said, “At the heart of an increasingly violent society is not a subculture among Blacks, but the violence and criminality of many Americans, and whites in particular.”
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PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: But why are they snooping? They’re snooping because they say we have enemies everywhere. And why do we have enemies everywhere? Because we put ourselves up as this nation that can determine everything for everyone. Okay? And we lost sight of the essential wisdom of the American experiment, you know, which was our framers, which is do it here, do it for your own people, and if it’s good, others will follow it. If we have a way of respecting each other, of solving our problems, if we can develop cohesion, right, it’s what everyone who ever came and intelligently observed our society, de Tocqueville most famously, and said, they care about each other or they know how to work with each other.
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Stop and frisk searches are taking place daily across the country. Some of them even involve anal and/or vaginal searches. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has approved strip searches even if you are arrested for a misdemeanor—such as a traffic stop. Just like a prison inmate.
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Boris Johnson has placed himself at the head of cross-party group, including a former Tory attorney general and a Labour leadership contender, who are calling on Barack Obama to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in Guantánamo Bay.
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More than 90 signatories including politicians, celebrities and activists – such as Boris Johnson, Russell Brand and Natalie Bennett – challenge the US president to release last British Guantánamo prisoner
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The newly appointed Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure is “under no illusions” that closing the U.S. prison “is going to be easy.”
Lee Wolosky is filling a State Department position that has been vacant for the last six months. He served in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations — working on the National Security Council staff.
Wolosky understands the difficulty of the task ahead of him. The status of the controversial facility, along with its inhabitants, remains mired in delays, appeals and political dramas that make shutting the prison increasingly difficult to imagine.
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At Guantanamo, the CIA gave huge doses of the terror-inducing drug mefloquine to prisoners without their consent, as well as the supposed truth serum scopolamine.
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The recent hurried departure of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir from South Africa, where African Union heads of state were convening, spared him arrest, for now. But the Pretoria High Court order that he defied, which enforced a warrant from the International Criminal Court charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity, marked a step forward in the fight against impunity.
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The Central Intelligence Agency is falling behind in recruiting racial and ethnic minorities and promoting them to its highest ranks, according to an internal study the agency released Tuesday.
Minorities make up less than 24% of the CIA workforce, and only 10.8% of its top Senior Intelligence Service. Among the most experienced employees whose ranks feed into the leadership jobs, known as GS-15s in the parlance of government pay scales, minorities make up 15.2%.
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There are too many white people working for the CIA, according to the results of a CIA-commissioned study released Tuesday — and the lack of racial diversity has contributed to past intelligence failures.
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The Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to bring more minorities into its workforce haven’t been as effective as hoped, according to a new internal report.
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Quite recently, U.S. authorities allowed the declassification of notes from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) attorney Wells Dixon that described what his client, high-value detainee Majid Khan, told him about his torture at the hands of the CIA. Khan, a Pakistan citizen, is currently at Guantanamo, and awaits trial by military commission.
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Attorneys representing terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay have asked judges overseeing the military tribunals for their clients to see an enormous cache of photographs taken of “black sites” operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The images, which total about 14,000, show both the interiors and exteriors of CIA secret locations where detainees were held and interrogated last decade. The photographs reportedly do not show detainee interrogations, “including the torture of some suspects who were subjected to waterboarding and other brutal techniques,” according to The Washington Post. But they do include images of detainee cells, bathrooms, naked prisoners at the time of transport, confinement boxes that held detainees for hours at a time, and a waterboard in the “Salt Pit,” the largest CIA detention facility in Afghanistan.
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As June ushered in rising temperatures, the month also brought about focus to a unique and controversial topic: torture. June was Torture Awareness Month and in light of this, Chicagoland held major events to advocate and encourage an end to its use in any form and on any governmental level. Amnesty International, the world’s largest grassroots human rights organization, hosted a rally on Friday, June 26 at Federal Plaza, which brought together individuals to celebrate recent victories in the fight against torture’s use and created an open space to highlight different narratives of torture, both international and domestic.
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Criminals remain unpunished …
If we look at the statistics provided by “Washington Post”, we can see yet another interesting fact. Forty percent of victims of police violence were unarmed. Criminal proceedings were instituted only in three out of 385 cases. Experts believe that this is a testament to a biased attitude of the US judiciary to the rights of the black population.
Embarrassing “reputation”
The fact that the situation in US prisons is far from ideal is understandable. Human rights in US prisons are grossly violated and black inmates are faced with a campaign of prejudice. This results in serious revolts in prisons. One such revolt took place in a Kentucky prison two years ago, as 250 people were injured.
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“Just because somebody murdered, somebody raped, does not mean it is okay to torture that individual,” says ex FBI agent Ali Soufan in an interview with Channel NewsAsia’s Conversation With.
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Whether the government may keep some legal interpretations secret from the public is a debate that is certain to continue for some time. But there is no justification for keeping the public in the dark about how much secrecy exists. After all, we’re no less safe as a nation for knowing that there’s a PPD-29, and we’re able to have an informed discussion about whether too many presidential directives are kept secret. We should be able to have the same informed discussion about OLC memoranda, FISC opinions, and other manifestations of secret law.
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DRM
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Apple Music rollout seems to have been hit by glitches that are causing the deletion of songs and playlists from the iTunes library of several users. The problems seem to occur only when users turn on iCloud Music Library (a feature introduced in iTunes 12.2 and iOS 8.4) with Apple Music, an option that is meant to provide features like offline caching. Other users report problems like the substitution of bad artwork and metadata, apart from the replacement of files with DRM-protected ones.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A federal judge referred the lawyers behind the Prenda Law “copyright trolling” scheme to investigators in 2013. Since then, there’s been no indication of what stage an investigation is at, or if it’s happening at all.
Now, two co-founders of The Pirate Bay have said they have reason to believe that an investigation is underway. Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij each independently told the website TorrentFreak that Swedish authorities questioned them during their recent imprisonment.
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A range of domains seized from ‘pirate’ sites by the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit have been released back into the wild. After displaying a banner declaring them criminal operations and racking up millions of hits, many domains are up for grabs once more while others display ads.
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Ok, so we posted a video of an Arduino rotating in front of an American flag with the public domain “America the Beautiful” by United States Navy Band as the music. We immediately received this from YouTube.
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Send this to a friend
07.03.15
Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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In both cases, bundling is either a restraint of trade or simply a wasted motion. You don’t paint a house green only to paint it red if you have any sense. The right way to do IT is to make your choice and buy/acquire what you need to accomplish your goals in the most efficient manner possible. Bundling exclusively That Other OS with all PCs was only good for an illegal monopolist and its “partners” in crime. This is not about denying businesses profits. It’s about competition in the market and freedom for users/buyers to have choice.
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Kernel Space
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When Tim Serewicz started teaching Linux system administration classes at IBM, his boss thought Linux was “just a fad.” Serewicz has since made a full-time career out of teaching admins the latest technologies in the ever-evolving and growing Linux ecosystem. He has taught at IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Red Hat and now teaches OpenStack and Linux performance and tuning courses for Linux Foundation Training.
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A patch has been submitted to the Linux kernel to fix a problem that was really bothering the users of Dell laptops, and that’s the ability to use the airplane mode switch.
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Benchmarks
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With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.
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Applications
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Remember RSS? You know, the short headlines and sentences of a few words each. Every major news site and blog has a feed. You can still get news the old fashioned way, only in a much nicer format.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Victor Vran, an action RPG set in the kingdom of Zagoravia, will exit Steam Early Access and launch for PC, Mac and Linux on July 24, developer Haemimont Games has announced.
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Compulsion Games just announced in their Kickstarter campaign that they’ll be releasing We Happy Few for Linux.
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Our very first official LEGO game is now available on Linux, but is it worth your time? I took a look with our caster Samsai.
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Rogue Invader is a new roguelite game from Squishy Games (Nathan Rees and Lee J Hinkle) that is now counting on your votes on Greenlight. And they are now asking all people interested in Linux version, to voice their opinions here. This isometric, 2D sidescroller puts you in the shoes of massive expedition force sent to defeat alien menace. But due to a clerical error an invading fleet have only one gun and one drop pod. So you will be sending only one soldier at a time to accomplish this task.
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You can add Torque 3D into the list of game engines that support Linux, it’s not 100% finished, but it’s good to see them do it.
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Project Ascension is a new open source project that aims to bring together all the major stores like Steam, Origin, and uPlay under one application. After numerous mockups and suggestions from the community, we finally have an official video that shows the progress made so far.
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Infinifactory, a sandbox puzzle game developed and published on Steam by Zachtronics, has been released on the Linux platform as well, and it’s 10% off until July 7.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE recently released the latest slew of security updates for KDE Applications 15.04, bumping the version number to 15.04.3. Other than security fixes there are translation updates, there are no big features so upgrading will go smoothly.
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KDE announced just a few minutes ago the immediate availability of the third maintenance release for the KDE Applications 15.04 software suite that is being distributed as part of the next-generation KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
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The crowdfunding campaign to provide funding and greater community engagement around the refactoring of Roundcube’s core to give it a secure future has just wrapped up. We managed to raise $103,531 from 870 people. This obviously surpassed our goal of $80,000, so we’re pretty ecstatic. This is not the end, however: now we begin the journey to delivering a first release of Roundcube Next. This blog entry outines some of that path forward
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No backports PPA required.
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Therefore, I thought that a closer collaboration with Linux Veda could be mutually beneficial: Getting exclusive insights directly from a core KDE contributor could give their popularity an additional boost, while my articles could get an extended audience including people who are currently interested in Linux and FOSS, but not necessarily too much interested in KDE yet.
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Originally I planned to work on the KCM UI at this time. But as I am unsure how it should look like, I started a discussion on VDG forum, and decided to switch to other tasks.
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It’s been one heckuva road, but I think the dust is starting to settle on the UI design for Fiber, a new web browser which I’m developing for KDE. After some back-and fourth from previous revisions, there are some exciting new ideas in this iteration! Please note that this post is about design experiments – the development status of the browser is still very low-level and won’t reach the UI stage for some time. These experiments are being done now so I can better understand the structure of the browser as I program around a heavily extension-based UI, so when I do solidify the APIs it we have a rock-solid foundation.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers, which takes place in Europe every year. It includes conference days, the GNOME Foundation annual general meeting and hacking in a week of coding and discussion.
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Q4OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses a desktop environment called Trinity DE, which was forked a while ago from KDE. The end result is an operating system that looks and feels like an older Windows version.
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Reviews
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Scientific Linux is supposed to be a serious, stable, useful operating system. So is CentOS. And they both try to be fully compatible with RedHat Enterprise, because after all, that is what they are all about. However, while the latter does manage to do this in a rather smooth, pleasant manner AND still be a great candidate for home use, Scientific Linux fails in its mission statement on oh-so-many levels, definitely not helped by using the Gnome nonsense. Oh man how have the tables turned. Gnome 2 used to be my favorite desktop environment, and Gnome 3 is my most hated one.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Opensuse Tumbleweed has been static since the 20150612 snapshot. But today the 20150630 snapshot was released. We are moving again.
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Red Hat Family
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For a relatively small company, Red Hat, inc. has become a major player in open source technology.
“It is definitely more than a Linux company,” said theCUBE cohost Dave Vellante, summarizing day one of Red Hat Summit 2015. “This conference is ground zero for an open-source revolution.”
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Miniman and Vellante also discussed Open Container platform. “I would want to have something that will work across multiple environments,” said Miniman. “CoreOS and Docker are two of the main players, and they have similar missions.”
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Prior to becoming self-employed, I’d worked at Linux New Media for several years. Back then, Linux New Media was a German-owned tech publishing company, with locations in several countries, and a small portfolio of print publications and digital products in a handful of languages. At Linux New Media, I worked with editors and writers around the world, and most closely with a small team I helped build up in our newest location, an office in Lawrence, Kansas. Most members of our Kansas team were colleagues—and friends—I’d had since starting my career in the late ’90s, when I worked as an editor on Sys Admin magazine. Although we didn’t call Linux New Media an “open organization” back then, it certainly was. Working at that company prepared me for the culture at Red Hat.
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Paul Cormier, president of Product and Technologies for Red Hat, Inc., told theCUBE during Red Hat Summit 2015 that everything the company creates goes back to the open-source community. A newly acquired company may present the one exception.
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Back in late 2013 I joined what was jokingly referred to as the Red Hat IT “DevOps” team. We didn’t like that name, so we changed it and there-after became officially known as Team Inception. From the time the team was formed, we all accepted that the team was to retire in 18-24 months. We were totally cool with that too! To us having a pure “DevOps” team in perpetuity just didn’t make sense.
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The platform offers enterprises a full technology stack to enable mobile-centric workloads to integrate with existing IT infrastructures, reducing the complexity and increasing agility across mobile development and deployment cycles.
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Fedora
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All self-contained changes were approved this week except for the io.js change and the proposed Netizen spin. The Fedora Netizen spin was to be about: “Fedora Netizen is an open source operating system for enabling internet citizens to engage with online services and communities…The philosophy for Netizen closely relates to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs by establishing three primary software package levels in a hierarchical model. The first and lowest software package level addresses the need for Netizen Privacy in the areas of personal privacy, informational privacy, and communication privacy. After Netizen Privacy, the second software package level addresses the need for Netizen Security in the areas of data security, local security, and network security. After Netizen Security, the third software package level addresses the need for Netizen Engagement in the areas of publishing, education, and social engagement. Future Netizen software package levels will address analytics, awareness, design, develop, and others.”
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Yeah, it’s too simplistic for real-world use, but you get the idea. And, in the end, that’s all end users need to know—replace the word ‘yum’ with ‘dnf’ and you’re good to go.
Has the Fedora team gone in the right direction with the migration from Yum to DNF? If not, how should they have approached this transition?
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There were quite a few interesting headlines in the reader tonight. First up, Linux Mint 17.2 was released and openSUSE Tumbleweed is back on a roll. Christian Schaller recently said that Fedora is planning to do for video what PulseAudio did for audio. Several reviews warrant a mention and RedMonk published their bi-annual programming language rankings report. Sourceforge is forming a community panel and Linus Torvalds was interviewed over at Slashdot.
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Debian Family
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The package is also waiting in NEW to be accepted for Debian experimental.
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Last month I started to track all the small Debian-related things that I do. My initial motivation was to be concious about how often I spend short periods of time working on Debian. Sometimes it’s during lunch breaks, weekends, first thing in the morning before regular work, after I am done for the day with regular work, or even during regular work, since I do have the chance of doing Debian work as part of my regular work occasionally.
Now that I have this information, I need to do something with it. So this is probably the first of monthly updates I will post about my Debian work. Hopefully it won’t be the last.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I can’t begin to tell you how saddened I am that I’ve had to write this. I wanted the Ubuntu Phone to completely blow me away and pull me from the Android platform with ease and grace. Instead, it solidified my opinion that jumping into the ring with Android and Apple is a fight that most aren’t really ready to take up.
Please, Canonical, go back to the drawing board and return with a UI that makes sense… or simply return all of your focus on what you do best and leave the mobile platform to Google and Apple.
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Canonical has published details in a security notice about an unattended-upgrades vulnerability that has been identified and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.2, code-named “Rafaela,” was officially released on June 30 by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre, providing users with an incremental update over the Linux Mint 17.1 release that debuted on Nov. 29, 2014. Linux Mint’s focus is always on the desktop, and the 17.2 update aims to further improve the desktop user experience with additional polish and fine-tuning on both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
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When I switched to Linux, my first distribution was Ubuntu and it was using Gnome 2. The experience I had with Gnome 2 was amazing. At the time the latest Windows was XP and Ubuntu was still in 9.04. One of the advantages of Linux (depending on the desktop environment) is the ability to give your system a personalized look and feel.
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The Ubuntu MATE team and Portuguese hardware manufacturer, LibreTrend, have formed a partnership which will see Ubuntu MATE become one of the operating systems which will ship on the LibreBox by default, this puts them alongside Trisquel Gnu/Linux.
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The Ubuntu MATE distribution has managed to score a second hardware deal, this time with a company called LibreTrend. Very soon we’ll start seeing a new computer from LibreTrend with the Ubuntu MATE OS as an option.
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LibreTrend the Portuguese based Linux software and hardware design company and the developers of the Ubuntu MATE operating system that has been created to focus on usability and stability.
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Avalue unveiled three Linux-friendly embedded boards based on Intel’s 14nm Braswell SoCs: a Qseven COM, a COM Express Type 6 COM, and a 5.25-inch SBC.
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Phones
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According to Digitimes and StatCounter the smartphone is the new PC and */Linux is the winner in a competitive market for client operating systems. That Other OS is still ahead in total share of client OS page-views but is in decline while Linux operating systems grow by high single digits.
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Tizen
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The Tizen Experts site was the first website to report on a new Tizen Smartphone, the Samsung Z3, and now there is confirmation that it will be the next Tizen Smartphone to be released, with the model number SM-Z300H.
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Android
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June is officially over, which means it’s time to take a look back at what goodies it brought. The summer months are usually a hot time for new games. June was no exception. We saw a bunch of awesome new games launch last month. If you were busy swimming and grilling you probably missed a few. We have a list of the best games to launch in June. Download a few of these to pass the time while you’re traveling on vacation or when the AC goes out.
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Fans of no-contract prepaid smartphones have five more models to choose from as AT&T, Cricket Wireless and Boost Mobile unveiled their latest Android devices that come with no long-term commitments. AT&T offers the Motorola Moto E and ZTE Maven 4G LTE phones, priced at $99.99 and $59.99 through AT&T stores or at ATT.com. Cricket Wireless, a division of AT&T, is offering the ZTE Sonata 2, a 4G handset that sells for $29.99, through Cricket stores or CricketWireless.com. The Moto E features a 4.5-inch thin-film-transistor (TFT) display, a 1.2GHz processor and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, while the ZTE Maven has a 4.5-inch display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and a 5MP main camera. Cricket’s Sonata 2 has a 4-inch WVGA display, a 1.2GHz CPU and a 5MP main camera. Sprint’s Boost Mobile division, meanwhile, launched the LG Tribute 2 smartphone, which retails for $99.99, and the LG Volt 2, which sells for $149.99, through BoostMobile.com. The LG Tribute 2 has a 4.5-inch IPS display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and a 5MP rear camera, while the LG Volt 2 has a 5-inch HD IPS display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and an 8MP rear camera. This slide show takes a closer look at the five phones.
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It took only five years from the release of the first device running Android for the platform to become the most popular mobile operating system on the planet. That rapid adoption rate has been matched by the pace of development on the operating system itself, transforming Google’s OS from an awkward, if interesting, fledgling effort into the refined and feature-packed offering we see today. As Google looks forward to “the next billion users,” let’s take a look back at Android’s evolution.
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The brand new Android 5.1.1 (build LMY48G) update for the Nexus 7 (2013) WiFi that first serviced via factory image earlier in the week is now available for download as an over-the-air .zip from Google. Yep, you can sideload this little guy as long as you are coming from LMY47V.
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Google has gone back to the drawing board for Android One and come up with a version 2.0 as it were. Having met with a tepid response for the first phones based on the system in September last year, it appears to be reorienting the strategy toward people who’ve had smartphones before rather than first-time users, said a person with knowledge of the plan.
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The month of June was extremely busy for manufacturers and carriers alike looking to deliver the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop update to a slew of smartphones, and for Motorola especially. The company has pushed out updates to an array of devices, and now we have additional details regarding the original Moto X Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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Android and Chrome are better together. Google continues to tie the laces between the two operating systems, giving developers—and adventurous everyday users—the tools to put Android apps on Chrome OS.
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Then we have our wild cards, two phones are included this quarter, and both deserve some sort of mention. One isn’t available yet, while the other is about to receive a much anticipated successor. Without further ado, let’s dive into the top 5 Android smartphones for July 2015. And please, as always, keep in mind that these are in no particular order; each phone has plenty of pros and cons.
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Reports from earlier this month that BlackBerry would soon launch a full fledged Android-powered smartphone are looking up. Ex-tipster who still occasionally tips/confirms new devices @Evleaks tweeted earlier today that a device called the BlackBerry Venice is headed to AT&T later this year. He specifically mentioned that this device would be powered by Android and that — here’s the best part — it will feature a slide-out physical keyboard for QWERTY fans.
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Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur known for founding the transportation related companies such as Zipcar, Buzzcar and Veniam. She wears many hats and is an inspiration to women all around the globe. She is also a strong supporter of Open Source and Open Collaborative technologies. She recently authored a book called Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism. Chase will be delivering a keynote at the upcoming LinuxCon event.
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In my daily life (both personal and professional) I use open source for just about anything, from LibreOffice to Drupal, Kolab, Piwik, Apache, KDE, etc.
Being part of the communities of these projects for me is a very special extra dimension that creates a lot of extra motivation and satisfaction.
For me, open source isn’t so much of a choice it is simply the standard.
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One of the great things about open source is its reach beyond just the software we use. Open source isn’t just about taking principled stands, it’s about making things better for the world around us. It helps spread new ideas by letting anyone with an interest modify and replicate those ideas in their own communities.
In this collection, let’s take a look back at some of the best articles we’ve shared this year about the ways that open source is making an impact on communities and improving the lives of people across the world.
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Forget about having multiple game launcher clients slowing down your computer – a community born on Reddit wants to unify all the popular game launchers into one multi-platform launcher.
Project Ascension started as a community discussion on social bookmarking website Reddit in April, when users complained that they were tired of having many different game launcher ecosystems, such as Steam, Origin, GOG and uPlay.
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In the enterprise, open source software can be a great benefit for those who take the time to weigh the risks and select the right platform.
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“Fifteen years ago, we made the decision to bring Linux into the mainframe. In fact, this was the first $1 billion commitment IBM made to Linux back in the year 2000. And I’d like to think, in some small way, we helped bring Linux to the enterprise with that commitment of over 15 years ago,” Balog said.
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SourceForge has begun outreach to Open Source developers and end-users in an effort to form a Community Panel to help guide future development of our products and policies.
We expect to have ongoing communications with members of our Community Panel in coming weeks, to be followed by an in-person event at summer’s end on the east coast of the US.
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Events
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Once again the OSI and our Board of Directors will be at OSCON. Just like in years past, the OSI will again be strongly represented with presentations form our Board Directors, Affiliate Members and Individual Members, a booth in the Expo Hall and even a dedicated session on how to use OSI’s resources to change the open source world.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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We have already covered a lot of enterprise applications on our site before. However, one would never expect apps in this genre to exist on a browser like Google Chrome. But, nothing could be further from the real truth. Google’s effort to outsmart even the biggest players in the enterprise market are gradually paying off. Slowly spreading its wings into the business world, Google is venturing into arenas where Microsoft once reigned supreme. While the competition doesn’t concern us much, but what has happened, in effect, is that the rivalry is bringing out the best in both companies.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has finally released the stable version of Firefox 39 after it delayed the launch for a couple of days. It’s not a major release, but it does have a few interesting features and quite a few bug fixes.
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Whichever social network you choose, it’s undeniable that being social is a key part of why you enjoy the Web. Firefox is built to put you in control, including making it easier to share anything you like on the Web’s most popular social networks. Today, we’re announcing that Firefox Share has been integrated into Firefox Hello. We introduced Firefox Share to offer a simple way of sharing Web content across popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google+ and other social and email services (full list here) to help you share anything on the Web with any or all of your friends.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Greek city of Livadeia has moved to the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools, replacing a proprietary alternative, the city administration announced in May. The switch is part of the city’s government modernisation, the town in central Greece said.
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Business
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BSD
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Some people were hanging around Michael Lucas’s table at BSDCan, and the topic of conversation turned to Tarsnap. (Lucas has a book about it.) Each person went round the circle and said they were happy to pay Colin for his service, but when it was finally my turn I was forced to admit that while I would pay for Tarsnap, I found a bug and so, thanks to the bounty, it may be more accurate to say I get paid to use it.
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Greets, hackers! I just finished implementing a little embedded language in Lua and wanted to share it with you. First, a bit about the language, then some notes on how it works with Lua to reach the high performance targets of Snabb Switch.
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The OPNsense 15.7 release added i386 and NanoBSD support, LibreSSL support, re-based to FreeBSD 10.1, added OpenDNS support, intrusion detection support, new local/remote backlist options, some security fixes, and added many other new features.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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My workshop on Email Self-Defense took place at the 12th annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Around eight people attended, which was a few more than I expected. Christopher Waid and Bob Call of ThinkPenguin joined me in helping everyone who brought a laptop to set up GnuPG properly. Those who didn’t bring a laptop participated by observing the process on the system most similar to their own and asking questions about particular steps, so as to enable them to achieve the same configuration when they returned home.
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Project Releases
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The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has just announced that a new version of the suite, 2.75, has been released and is now available for download.
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The first release candidate for Kodi 15 has arrived.
Kodi 15 is building up many new features from Android 4K@60Hz support to adaptive seeking support to Android H.265 support to many other updates and additions.
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Public Services/Government
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Members of the House, committees and staff have officially received the green light to obtain open source software for their offices, and to discuss software code and policy with developers, citizens and other legislators in communities such as GitHub, according to the Congressional Data Coalition advocacy group.
The White House joined open source code repository site GitHub in 2012. But it wasn’t until this May a sitting congressman, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., first joined the site. Connolly used it to make edits to guidance on implementation of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act.
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Licensing
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When did the use of open-source software become such a worrisome thought? Big names such as VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, to name but a few, have been caught infringing on open-source software licenses.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Dead was one of the first and most successful open source business models. They never felt their albums captured their true sound and musical depth. This could only come through their live performances. And yet, because they were very experimental and bold risk takers, any particular show could fall flat or even spontaneously combust. Thus, it was important to see many shows because magic would inevitably transpire and they wanted all of their fans to know what that was like and have a hunger for more once it had been experienced. A true natural high for anyone that has experienced it. As it’s been said, there is nothing like a Grateful Dead show.
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Open Hardware
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The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) wrapped up last month, and while teams from Korea and the U.S. took away $3.5M in prize money, the real winner was the open source robotics movement. Of the 23 teams competing in the DRC, 18 utilized the open-source Robotic Operating System (ROS) and 14 used Gazebo, an open source robot simulator that allows developers to test concepts in robust virtual environments without risking valuable hardware.
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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The same developers who are bringing wireless remotely controlled microchip implants are actually focusing on their first flagship product: Gates Foundation-funded birth-control microchip implants. Wireless technology allows the remotely controlled chip to turn a woman’s ability to conceive off or on at will – temporary sterilization.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro added that a U.S. Embassy advisor drafted the script that the coup plotters read in video they planned to air.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Energy giant BP has agreed to settle outstanding state and federal claims against it relating to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for $18.7 billion. The fines, to be paid over 18 years, are a small fraction of the damages caused by the largest offshore oil spill in US history and minor in relation to the immense profits of the transnational oil company.
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Five years ago, the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed out some 134 million gallons of oil, soiling 1,000 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline. On Thursday, BP agreed to pay an $18.7 billion settlement that will help repair the damage from the televised spill that began April 20 and ended July 15, 2010.
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The train derailment occurred Wednesday at 11:50 p.m. ET, and caused toxic substances aboard the train to catch fire. As of Thursday morning, the fire was still burning.
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Finance
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Yes, it may be unlikely that Sanders will win the nomination. In national polls for the primaries Hillary Clinton, the favorite, did not poll less than 50 percent since April. Bernie Sanders has not polled over 25 percent since June 2014. But recent polls seem to suggest growing support for Sanders, particularly in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. Regardless of the results, however, Sanders’ bid for the candidacy has led to a discussion around socialism.
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The Euro project will continue to be extremely strong. New money will be funnelled into the pockets of bankers. It is important to recall that 100% of these bailout funds go to bankers, none of it goes to the Greek people and none of it stays in Greece. The same bankers will become the beneficiaries of servicing of new loans provided to vast corporations to buy up Greek public assets, cheap.
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As Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stands off against the so-called Troika, questions abound about the future of his country.
But there should also be pressing questions about the future of the European Union. The shaky legal foundations of the EU have been laid bare by this crisis.
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Supermarket chain owned by one of Germany’s wealthiest families given money over past decade by World Bank and others as it expands into eastern Europe
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen wrote a column (7/1/15) responding to a FAIR Action Alert, “NPR Celebrates Fast-Track Victory With an All-Corporate Lobbyist Segment” (6/27/15).
Jensen acknowledges that the report in question (Morning Edition, 6/25/15), which featured three executives from business lobbies talking about Congress’s passage of corporate-backed Fast-Track legislation, “would have been stronger and more complete if it had included a voice representing the opponents.”
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For a public radio service, NPR is notoriously known for its lack of diversity within its staff, audience and guests invited onto their shows—problems that NPR has itself acknowledged (6/30/14).
A new FAIR study finds that NPR’s diversity problem also extends into the board of trustees of its most popular member stations: Two out of three board members are male, and nearly three out of four are non-Latino whites. Fully three out of every four trustees of the top NPR affiliates belong to the corporate elite.
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He’s the author of the classic book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which assesses the textbooks used in US classrooms, turning up falsehoods, elisions and distortions. He explains some of the reasons students say they hate history–and non-white students hate it most of all.
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Censorship
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Reddit has been in the news a lot in recent months, and not for any positive reasons. Now the site is again making headlines as its moderators go on a strike and put Reddit in a virtual state of lockdown.
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Reddit is in revolt. This week, Victoria Taylor, director of talent and coordinator of the site’s popular “Ask me Anything” (r/IAmA) subreddit, left reddit, apparently against her will. In response, a group of the site’s coordinators have pulled the shades on some of the site’s most popular sections.
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People may wonder why this issue has attracted so much attention. After all, a speech made by an eminent scientist — a Nobel Prize-winner, no less — to a small group of journalists in South Korea in a previous age would have received no attention at all.
But after the 72-year-old Prof’s weak jokes about how ‘girls’ are a distraction in laboratories — which made some listeners titter and others roll their eyes — just three people tweeted shock-horror, and the storm began.
Sir Tim quickly found his career and reputation, built up over 50 years, all but ruined. Although he apologised for his error, he was still unceremoniously hounded out of honorary positions at UCL, the Royal Society and the European Research Council.
That response was, in my view, hasty and disgraceful —and out of all proportion to his alleged ‘crime’.
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Earlier this year, there were some questions raised when it appeared that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was suggesting that he wanted to undermine all encryption on the internet. Later, some suggested he was looking more at undermining end point security. However, after being re-elected, and apparently believing that this gave him the mandate to go full Orwell, Cameron is making it clear that no one should ever have any privacy from government snoops ever.
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Privacy
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which provides oversight for UK intelligence services, admitted yesterday that its judgement made on 22 June wrongly failed to declare that Amnesty International had been subject to unlawful surveillance by GCHQ. The IPT revealed this in an e-mail sent to the ten NGO claimants involved in the earlier legal challenge to UK government surveillance. As Amnesty International explained: “Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.”
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The IPT said in its original judgement that communications by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources Centre had been illegally retained and examined.
However, the tribunal made it clear in the email sent on Wednesday that it was Amnesty International and not the Egyptian organisation that had been spied on, as well as the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.
The IPT email made no mention of when or why Amnesty International was spied on, or what was done with the information obtained. The organisation is calling for an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organisations.
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THE PRESTIGIOUS HARVARD UNIVERSITY has revealed that it was the victim of a security breach in June affecting eight schools and administrative organisations at the university.
The intrusion in the IT systems of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Central Administration was discovered on 19 June, and is thought to have exposed various log-in credentials, including for Office 365, which were stored on the compromised networks.
“At this time, we have no indication that research data or personal data managed by Harvard systems (e.g. Social Security numbers) have been exposed,” said the university IT team in an advisory on its website.
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The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything — write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game — there’s a decent chance that the Internet traffic her device sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.
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One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Linux would not be here without the Net. Nor would countless other building materials and methods that support networked life and the institutions that rely on networks, which now include approximately everything.
[...]
All these things need to be as casual and easily understood as clothing and shelter are in the physical world today. They can’t work only for wizards. Privacy is for muggles too. Without agancy and scale for muggles, the Net will remain the Land of Giants, who regard us all as serfs by default.
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Civil Rights
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A British tribunal admitted on Wednesday that the U.K. government had spied on Amnesty International and illegally retained some of its communications. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, deputy director of global issues for Amnesty International in London, responds:
Just after 4 p.m. yesterday, Amnesty International received an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which hears cases related to U.K. intelligence agencies. The message was brief: There had been a mistake in the tribunal’s judgment 10 days earlier in a case brought by 10 human rights organizations against the U.K.’s mass surveillance programs. Contrary to the finding in the original ruling, our communications at Amnesty International had, in fact, been under illegal surveillance by GCHQ, the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency.
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There’s been a bunch of fuss online over the “news” that Craigslist is supposedly donating $1 million to EFF when the money is not actually from Craig. It’s from a startup that Craigslist has sued out of business, under a dangerous interpretation of the CFAA that harms the open internet. Obviously, EFF getting an additional $1 million in resources is really great. But it’s troubling to see so many people congratulate Craigslist and Craig Newmark for “supporting EFF.” Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he’s giving his own money to EFF…
[...]
And yet Craigslist sued these companies under a tortured definition of the CFAA, arguing that the mere scraping of its data to provide value on top of it (none of which took away any value from Craigslist) was “unauthorized access.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The number of available IPv4 address spaces has fallen so low that the US organisation responsible for handing out addresses has rejected a request because there was not enough stock.
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) posted a note on its website confirming the move, although it did not say from where the request had come.
“ARIN activated the IPv4 Unmet Requests policy this week with the approval of an address request that was larger than the available inventory in the regional IPv4 free pool,” said ARIN chief executive John Curran.
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DRM/Restriction
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APPLE QUIETLY KILLED OFF Home Sharing for music in iOS 8.4, and has pissed off its customers in the process.
Home Sharing for music launched in 2011 as part of iOS 4.3, and allowed iPhone, iPad and iPod users to stream music from a computer running iTunes, as long as the devices were connected to the same WiFi network.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In an effort to reclaim an estimated $67 million in assets, Megaupload’s legal team has appealed the forfeiture the U.S. Government won earlier this year. The filing refutes the claim that Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues are fugitives, and warns of the dangerous precedent the District Court ruling will set.
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The Internet is built on copying. That’s true at a purely technical level: as packets of data move around the world, they are copied from network to network, and finally to the end-user’s device. But it’s also true in terms of how people use the Internet: they are constantly sending copies across the network, whether partial snippets or entire works. That’s a big problem, because once a creation is in a fixed form, it is automatically subject to copyright, an intellectual monopoly that gives creators the power to prevent copies being made of their work. Quite simply, this situation ensures that almost everyone using the Internet is also breaking the law multiple times every day.
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Send this to a friend
07.02.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Slick, sleek, and fast and very Windows-like … this is a distro that could get your users on the path of OS righteousness
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The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is expected to rule within weeks on the practice of forced sale of licences for operating systems and other software bundled with computing devices. On 25 June, France’s Court of cassation referred to the CJEU a complaint of a French citizen who wanted to purchase a PC without any pre-installed operating system.
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Server
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The ecosystem is based on Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), but it adds role-based access control with a policy for each role, so no one can get to the system root and the root can’t see user data. All access is logged, so any attempts to penetrate the system can be traced. Policies are based on roles such as security admin, audit admin and sysadmin, and each file is tagged with a security level so some users can see it while others can’t.
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There will eventually be two distinct versions… a free version and a commercial version. So far as I can tell they currently call it Virtuozzo 7 but in a comparison wiki page they use the column names Virtuozzo 7 OpenVZ (V7O) and Virtuozzo 7 Commercial (V7C). The original OpenVZ, which is still considered the stable OpenVZ release at this time based on the EL6-based OpenVZ kernel, appears to be called OpenVZ Legacy.
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Kernel Space
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After announcing the release of the Linux kernel 4.1.1, Linux kernel 4.0.7, and Linux kernel 3.10.82 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman also published details about a new maintenance release of the Linux 3.14 kernel branch.
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Linus: You can say the word “systemd”, It’s not a four-letter word. Seven letters. Count them.
I have to say, I don’t really get the hatred of systemd. I think it improves a lot on the state of init, and no, I don’t see myself getting into that whole area.
Yeah, it may have a few odd corners here and there, and I’m sure you’ll find things to despise. That happens in every project. I’m not a huge fan of the binary logging, for example. But that’s just an example. I much prefer systemd’s infrastructure for starting services over traditional init, and I think that’s a much bigger design decision.
Yeah, I’ve had some personality issues with some of the maintainers, but that’s about how you handle bug reports and accept blame (or not) for when things go wrong. If people thought that meant that I dislike systemd, I will have to disappoint you guys.
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Immediately after having published details about the Linux kernel 4.1.1, Linux kernel 4.0.7, and Linux kernel 3.14.46 LTS maintenance releases, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the immediate availability of Linux kernel 3.10.82 LTS.
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ZFS On Linux, a native port of the ZFS file-system to the Linux kernel via out-of-tree modules, was updated last week.
ZFS On Linux 0.6.4.2 brings fixes for a variety of issues, improved metadata shrinker performance on pre-3.1 kernels, Linux 3.12 improvements, and support for the brand new Linux 4.1 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Libdrm 2.4.62 was released this week as a significant update to this DRM library for interfacing between the kernel DRM drivers and user-space.
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Coreboot
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Google engineers have added support for the Tegra X1 “T210″ SoC to Coreboot. Additionally, they’ve added support for the “Smaug” Chromebook to Coreboot that uses this latest-generation NVIDIA Tegra 64-bit SoC.
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Applications
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As you may know, PolyBrowser is yet another internet browser based on the Gecko engine, the same engine used by Firefox and Pale Moon. The browser focuses on working with multiple web pages at once, the most distinctive feature being the ability to zoom in and out of web pages, to monitor more tabs at once.
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When we first designed Mallard, we designed it around creating documents: non-linear collections of pages about a particular subject. Documents are manageable and maintainable, and we’re able to define all of Mallard’s automatic linking within the confines of a document.
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I have just released version 1.10 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, hopefully soon in unstable.
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Proprietary
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On the last day of June, Opera Software announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new snapshot for the upcoming Opera 32 web browser for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Last week, following the announcement that Codeweavers would soon provide DirectX11 support for games and applications, I decided to get in touch with James Ramey, President of Codeweavers, in order to learn more about their plans and their progress on that front. He was kind enough to make himself available to answer some of our questions.
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Games
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Ubisoft hasn’t expressed any interest in the Linux platform until now, but it looks like that might change, although I wouldn’t get my hope up. Anno Online just landed on Linux, but it’s a browser game published through Steam.
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Studio Wildcard announced today that the open-world survival game ARK: Survival Evolved is available now for Mac and Linux on Steam Early Access, and is among the first large-scale Unreal Engine 4 games released for these new platforms. The Mac and Linux versions share all of the features and content of the PC game and include seamless cross-play no matter which platform survivors choose. ARK players can dive into the dynamic island ecosystem where they craft weapons and tools, build multi-story houses, commune with other tribes, as well as tame, train, and ride dinosaurs from the vicious T-Rex to the monstrous Spinosaurus and soaring Pterodactyls.
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The developer of NEON STRUCT the stealth game from Minor Key Games (Eldritch, You Have to Win the Game, Super Win the Game) has posted stats of their sales, and Linux is doing well.
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The sandbox factory puzzler by SpaceChem and TIS-100 developer Zachtronics has left Early Access after five months of tweaks and bug fixing. Infinifactory was made available for Linux in March, and I’ve now had a chance to play a few hours of the game.
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The Steam for Linux platform got a great start, but for some strange reason the number of users has constantly been decreasing for the past few months and it looks like it’s not stopping, although the rate seems to be changing.
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Terraria 1.3 is slated to be released in a few days on June 30, and coming with it are 800 new items, new mini-Biomes, achievements, a harder ‘expert mode’ and “more unknown stuff.” Why does this matter? Because in July, following the 1.3 release, there are going to be Mac and Linux ports of the game!
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Of interest to Phoronix readers will be the “glsl: binding point is a texture unit, which is a combined space” fix, which landed in Mesa Git last week and is back-ported to Mesa 10.5 and 10.6. This fix addresses compilation failures with Dota 2 Reborn, Valve’s first Source Engine 2 game. Separately, last week Valve updated Dota 2 Reborn with many fixes that included a fix when running on the open-source AMD Radeon driver.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasma 5.3.2 has been revealed by the KDE Community, and the KDE desktop has received a number of important fixes that will be welcomed by the users.
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Today KDE released the second stability update for KDE Applications 15.04. This release contains only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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This update is a little break from my current GSoC project so i won’t talk about my progress just yet. I will talk about the current observers management dialog that is currently active in KStars. Basically, an observation session requires observer information like first name, last name and contact. Currently, an observer could be added only from the settings menu so i thought that it would be more intuitive if this functionality was placed in a more appropirate place and a proper GUI was to be implemented for a better user experience.
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Building on their UOS Hangout, the Kubuntu Podcast Team has created their second Hangout, featuring Ovidiu-Florin Bogdan, Aaron Honeycutt, and Rick Timmis, discussing What is Kubuntu?
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Today, the KDE Community is happy to announce the release of KDE Applications 15.04.3. This release contains only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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Today I whipped up a small Emacs minor-mode to interface with KDE’s ActivityManager system. It’s my first minor-mode and it’s janky as fuck right now, but I’m going to expand on it to eventually be able to filter, for example, to just buffers that are linked to your current activity, pushing me towards a long-standing goal of mine to create a system which flows with what I’m doing, rather than forcing me in to its workflow.
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This time around, I’m adding a mechanism that allows us to list plugins, applications (and the general “service”) specific for a given form factor. In normal-people-language, that means that I want to make it possible to specify whether an application or plugin should be shown in the user interface of a given device. Let’s look at an example: KMail. KMail has two user interfaces, the desktop version, a traditional fat client offering all the features that an email client could possibly have, and a touch-friendly version that works well on devices such as smart phones and tablets. If both are installed, which should be shown in the user interface, for example the launcher? The answer is, unfortunately: we can’t really tell as there currently is no scheme to derive this information from in a reliable way. With the current functionality that is offered by KDE Frameworks and Plasma, we’d simply list both applications, they’re both installed and there is no metadata that could possibly tell us the difference.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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StratOS is supposed to be a new operating system that uses GNOME, and it’s a project currently raising money on Kickstarter. Surprisingly, this is not the unusual part. Its developers are also claiming full convergence of the OS, for desktop and mobiles, which is highly unlikely.
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In heavily populated IRC channels such as #debian on Freenode, a lot of idle IRC users are joining and leaving every couple of seconds. At the moment, we display a status message for every user in the room which in some cases results in a lot of visual noise.
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This is the third in my series of blog posts about the latest generation of GNOME application designs. In this post, I’m going to talk about Photos. Out of the applications I’ve covered, this is the one that has the most new design work.
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This is the last day of the GNOME West Coast Summit, and for the past three days we’ve been working and discussing topics…
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New Releases
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David Purse from the development team of Simplicity Linux, a distribution derived from LXPup and built around the LXDE desktop environment, has announced the release of the first Beta build towards the final version of Simplicity Linux 15.7.
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The Tanglu development team, through Matthias Klumpp, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the forthcoming Tanglu 3 GNU/Linux operating system based on Debian 8 “Jessie.”
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StratOS is supposed to be a new operating system that uses GNOME, and it’s a project currently raising money on Kickstarter. Surprisingly, this is not the unusual part. Its developers are also claiming full convergence of the OS, for desktop and mobiles, which is highly unlikely.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia 5 Linux distribution, which launched June 19, provides new tools, improved stability and overall ease of use. The Mageia Linux distro was first formed in September 2010 as a fork of French Linux distribution Mandriva. While Mandriva as a commercial entity ceased operation in May of this year, Mageia is alive and well, continuing on its mission of creating a user-friendly desktop-focused Linux distribution. New features in Mageia 5 include support for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) hardware, which enables Mageia to run on a broader array of systems than previously. Historically, Mandriva was focused on the KDE Linux desktop as the default. In addition to KDE, Mageia offers users an easy installation choice of other desktops, including GNOME 3.14, Cinnamon 2.4.5 and Xfce 4.12. With Mageia 5, the Btrfs next-generation Linux file system is now fully supported, providing users with a robust file system capability. Helping users move from Microsoft’s Windows operating system is also part of Mageia 5, which has a Windows settings import feature. eWEEK examines key highlights of the Mageia 5 Linux distribution release.
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Normally, I test a new distro more cautiously; first, I run a VM, then, I run a live version on the actual system where I wish to install before I decide to wipe out the root partition and say hi to the new OS.
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With Mandriva having been liquidated (allegedly due to employee lawsuits), OpenMandriva is paying tribute to it — and its precursor, Mandrake — with their new point release.
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Arch Family
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Being July 1 and all that, that time has come for a new Arch Linux build to surface the Web. Arch Linux 2015.07.01 has been released earlier, and you can download it right now!
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Red Hat Family
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In my new position I will be a Solutions Architect – so basically a sales engineer, thus the one talking to the customers on a more technical level, providing details or proof of concepts where they need it.
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At Red Hat, our IT organization is working with each of our business partners to help them develop digital strategies and solutions to enable them (and us) to be more effective. We’re investing in the deployment of new communication and collaboration tools in the organization. And we’re trying to better understand the needs of our end users as individuals rather than solely as a part of sales or as a part of marketing. We’re building an internal consulting capability so that we can help our end users be more efficient and effective in their jobs as a community of associates, in addition to being part of a business function.
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Fedora
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In cooperation with Imagination Technologies, the first Fedora image for the MIPS architecture is now out in testing.
This initial Fedora 22 MIPS release supports the low-cost MIPS Creator CI20 development board that packs in two 1.2GHz MIPS32 processor cores and PowerVR graphics.
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Christian Schaller of Red Hat explained in the new blog post, “One of the original goals of Pinos was to provide the same level of advanced hardware handling for Video that PulseAudio provides for Audio. For those of you who has been around for a while you might remember how you once upon a time could only have one application using the sound card at the same time until PulseAudio properly fixed that. Well Pinos will allow you to share your video camera between multiple applications and also provide an easy to use API to do so.”
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Back in March there was the announcement of Fedora looking for a diversity advisor as a volunteer position to help promote diversity within this popular Linux distribution. Unfortunately it looks like their initial search didn’t yield any suitable applicants so they’re back to looking for more people interested in that position.
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I had the pleasure to attend my second FUDCon APAC, in Pune, India this time. I arrived the day before the conference at the airport in Bombay where I met Tuan. After four tiring hours, we arrived to Pune and met Kushal.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Volker Theile, project leader of the Debian-based OpenMediaVault NAS (Network-attached Storage) distribution, was more than happy to inform us about the immediate availability for download of OpenMediaVault 2.1.
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Straight from Thessaloniki, Greece, the antiX development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of the antiX 15 GNU/Linux operating system.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“We are taking these and installing Ubuntu/Linux software on all the computers and then putting them back in Meridian’s public schools,” said AOTECH owner Robb Hudson.
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After having reported last week that work started on implementing push notifications for Web Apps on the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical’s David Barth now comes with more great news about the latest developments in the Web Apps area.
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The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS flavored Intel Compute Stick is finally going on sale next week, and it joins the Windows version that was already made available a while back.
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As you may know, Canonical has released the Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 Update and while ago, and now is working at implementing new features for the OTA-5 Update, which should get released in mid-July, if it does not get delayed for some reasons.
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Linux users install most of their software directly from a centralized package repository managed by their Linux distribution of choice. This is a convenient, one-stop shop place to get your software—but what if the repository doesn’t have the program you need, or you want a newer version? For Ubuntu and Linux Mint users, that’s where personal package archives come in.
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Flavours and Variants
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Today, July 1, Clement Lefebvre released the twelve maintenance release of the modern and open-source Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment for the Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) operating system.
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Thankfully this is not the case with Mint 17.2 because the underlying packages from Ubuntu have not changed. You can update to Mint 17.2 directly from Update Manager. That will continue to be true for the rest of the 17.x release cycle (which will last through Ubuntu 16.04, due in April 2016).
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Well, it’s here. Linux Mint 17.2 is now available for download. Currently only the Cinnamon and MATE releases are out and other editions will launch later. For users on 17.0 or 17.1 more announcements will follow next week when the update is made available for those users as an upgrade. It’s not clear yet whether 17.0 users will be able to choose to go to 17.1 or 17.2 or whether 17.2 will be the single destination those users can jump to.
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Ubuntu MATE is an official flavour of Ubuntu focussed on usability and stability, which has gained massive traction in the Linux community over recent months. Inspired by the traditional GNOME 2 interface of classic Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu MATE is the perfect distribution for easing the transition between Microsoft Windows or Mac OS and Linux.
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The Ubuntu MATE team makes monthly donations to other projects that are being used by this distribution and this month’s targets are Geany and Transmission, along with a couple of MATE developers.
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Just a few short weeks after the Rafaela 17.2 RCs, Linux Mint 17.2 has been officially released this morning in the form of the Cinnamon and MATE desktop spins.
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The DT7816 is billed as a “real-time ARM-based, high throughput, high accuracy, simultaneous data acquisition module.” Its feature set is similar to the mainboard in Data Translation’s recent DT7837 device, including the open source Debian Linux distro, an FPGA, and a Texas Instruments Sitara AM3352 system-on-chip with a single Cortex-A8 core. However, the DT7837 is designed specifically as a dynamic signal analyzer for measuring noise and vibration while the DT7816 is a general purpose data acquisition board.
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X-ES unveiled a rugged, sealed embedded PC that runs Linux on an Atom E3800, and offers 4GB of ECC RAM, IP67 protection, M12 ports, and -40 to 70°C support.
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Phones
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Tizen
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On June 29, Samsung announced that since January, it has sold over one million units of its Tizen-based Samsung Z1 smartphones in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. According to Reuters, Samsung will “launch several more Tizen smartphones at varying prices.”
The Reuters report, which did not mention a timetable, was based on a tip from an undisclosed source. The story also cited a Counterpoint study that estimated the Z1 to be the best-selling smartphone in Bangladesh in Q1 2015.
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Android
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Blackberry results came out last week. They managed to sell 1.1 million smartphones. Its still going down the Cliff, that is down from 1.6 million three months prior and Blackberry’s market share is around 0.3%. And they are still making a loss. As I said the Passport form factor was not the solution.
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BlueStacks, a free desktop Android emulator that lets users play any mobile game or app on the big screen with a mouse and keyboard, has mostly been limited to PC users until today. But Mac users are about to get access to the software that the company says already has around 90 million users on Windows.
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Apple’s worldwide radio station Beats 1 launched yesterday alongside the company’s new streaming service, but it’s currently only available for iOS, OS X, and Windows users — the Apple Music app won’t arrive on Android until this fall. However, there is a workaround. Simply click here to listen to a live stream of Beats 1 which works on Android devices running Android 4.1 or later, iOS devices running iOS 6 or later, and OS X machines using the Safari browser. We’ve tested the live stream successfully on all these devices, but be warned: the service is far from reliable.
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The hardest part was to figure out, how to compile everything with cmake instead of qmake and Qt Creator. There are some very basic things what can sabotage your successfully packaged and deployed app. For example if you did not set a version number in cmake for your library…
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Yahoo’s Aviate Android launcher, which the company acquired for $80 million in order to own a piece of the growing mobile ecosystem, as it doesn’t have its own mobile operating system or hardware in play, has seen continued development in the months following the deal. The latest addition to this intelligent homescreen application is something Yahoo is calling the “Smart Stream” – essentially, a stream of personalized content that adjusts throughout the day based on where you are and what you’re doing at the time.
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June has been a big month for the team working on the Dolphin emulator, which allows users to play GameCube and Wii games on their PC. In addition to getting Virtual Console games up and running, they’ve also managed to get GameCube games working on an Android device (albeit one that few of you will own).
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If you’re in charge of managing apps on Google’s Cloud Platform, chances are you are intimately familiar with the inner workings of the web-based Google Developers Console. Until now, that was pretty much the only way to get a quick overview of the health of your system. Now, however, Cloud Platform users can also use Google’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android to manage their Google App Engine- and Compute Engine-based apps on the go.
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YouTube introduced the ability to play videos in 60fps back in October of last year, but that was limited to the Web. Now it’s introducing the same functionality on the mobile YouTube apps as well.
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Super Evil Megacorp’s mobile MOBA has been a big success on iOS, with some 1.5 million active users frantically touching turrets each month. Today the game officially launches on Android. Welcome, fresh meat.
Vainglory made its debut during Apple’s iPhone 6 press conference last year, a showcase for iOS’s Metal graphics API. It’s a very pretty mobile take on the MOBA, with only a single lane and a jungle for each three-player team to contend with. Matches are relatively fast (under 20 minutes) and a a hell of a lot of fun when I win.
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Freebeats1 debuted Wednesday as part of 6 Seconds, a free radio app for iOS and Android that was launched earlier this year by MP3.com founder and serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson. Freebeats1 simply monitors Apple’s radio station and then compiles a playlist of the same songs, explained Robertson. But don’t expect to hear the same music at the same time: “The songs are not in the same order as Beats 1 because there’s lots of talking on Beats,” he said, adding that Apple’s station also tends to repeat a lot of songs.
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It is no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of different Android tablets on the market to choose from, but if you filter this down to “best” tablets then this list boils down to only a handful.
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Open source software (OSS) is becoming a standard in the technology market, and much of today’s youth will find themselves using open source in their future educational and professional endeavors. But to do so, this younger generation will first need to develop the skills that will allow them to build, create and explore OSS technology effectively down the road. This calls for education in open source.
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The deepdream project is now available on GitHub. The project relies on the open-source Caffe deep learning framework. Deep learning involves training artificial neural networks on a large pile of data — for example, pictures of geese — and then throwing them a new piece of data, like a picture of an ostrich, to receive an educated guess about it.
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Randi Harper has been a FreeBSD src committer, a DevOps engineer, and a FLOSS Weekly co-host. Recently, she’s taken on a new role: target of sustained harassment. Randi met the harassment head-on and began developing tools to make the Internet a less hostile place. Her new organization, the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, seeks to reduce online abuse through analysis, tools, and cooperative efforts.
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Jose Luis Rey, computer expert Venezuelan community activist Software and Free Knowledge in Venezuela, who was part of the team that recovered the computer operations of PDVSA during the strike of 2002-2003 coup, was found died in El Hatillo, Miranda state, victim of a shooting.
It is presumed that King was robbed to strip him of his motorcycle. Friends and relatives say that he was not aware of enemies.
His remains will be veiled Valles Wednesday in the funeral of Caracas, in the early afternoon.
King was founder of different groups of free software, as VELUG and Solve, and fought tirelessly to realize the Decree 3,390 of migration to Free Software, signed by Commander Chavez, which does not fully meet today.
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Intel wonks Brian McGillion, Tanel Dettenborn, and Thomas Nyman (plus N. Asokan of Aalto University and University of Helsinki) released the OpenTEE software framework for developers as an alternative to expensive or non-existent TEE tools.
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Events
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As the Seattle GNU/Linux conference enters its third year, we decided we could do more to highlight the amazing community in Cascadia (a region on the west coast of the United States that includes Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and Idaho). This area, especially in Washington, may seem like a haven for proprietary software, but when you take a closer look, you realize people are doing the hard work of helping friends, colleagues, and students embrace free software everywhere.
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Recently, I’ve been to Hong Kong for Open Source Hong Kong 2015, which is the heritage of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 we’ve had in Hong Kong. The organisers apparently liked their experience when organising GNOME.Asia Summit in 2012 and continued to organise Free Software events. When talking to organisers, they said that more than 1000 people registered for the gratis event. While those 1000 were not present, half of them are more realistic.
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Not long to go now for the second annual TuxCon Conference taking place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. For those that do not know, this is a free community event that is about free and open-source software for Internet of Things, mobile, embedded and wearable devices. The Conference will start on 11 July at the International Fair Plovdiv, were there will be lectures and also lightning talks. The second day of the conference (12 July) will see it moved to the Olimex Training Building were there will be Workshops and a hackathon.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The first Firefox 39 stable release was supposed to be unveiled by the end of June, but it looks like it’s being delayed due to a stability issue.
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SaaS/Big Data
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This year, Engine Yard bought Deis, an open source Platform-as-a-Service project. It provides a PaaS that can rub on public clouds, private clouds, or bare metal. Starting now, Engine Yard will offer its well-known support options to companies that want Deis support.
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The Netherlands’ Elastic BV is ticking another item off the fairly narrow list of ways to monetize open-source software with the launch of new hosted implementations of its hugely popular free search engine for unstructured data that offer a simpler alternative to manual deployment. The launch couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
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Databases
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Big Data projects have a lot of promise, but the majority fail. A recent study found just 11% of corporate leaders in the UK have generated any cash using data, despite recognising the value it holds, although Chief Technology Officer at Hotels.com Thierry Bedos says focusing on Big Data as a business rather than an innovation project can set you on the path to success.
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Big Data is supposed to level the business playing field, but up until now it has not. Because even though it’s cheaper to store data in Hadoop or to work with open source NoSQL in theory, it’s too expensive in a more practical sense because it’s too hard and the talent isn’t available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announced that LibreOffice 4.4.4 is now available for download and packs over 70 bugfixes. It’s not the last one in the series, so expect to see more of these in the coming months.
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BSD
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MidnightBSD FreeBSD is a fine operating system to run on servers and some people feel the characteristics which make FreeBSD suitable for servers (conservative updates, stability, performance) also make the operating system a good choice for desktop computers. Or, at least, FreeBSD could be a good desktop operating system with a few tweaks. That is the premise behind MidnightBSD, a desktop-oriented project that forked from FreeBSD. “MidnightBSD was forked from FreeBSD 6.1 beta. The system was forked to allow us to customize and integrate the environment including the ports and system configuration. We wish for the system to appeal to beginners as well as more experienced BSD users. Many operating systems are under active development; with MidnightBSD, we wish to focus on optimization and usability improvements for desktop users.”
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OpenSSH 6.9 was released yesterday as the final step before the expected OpenSSH 7.0 release in late July.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In May 2015, RMS traveled to and spoke at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France and to Greece, where he spoke at Commons Fest in Athens, at the Natural History Museum of Crete, in Heraklion, and at the Technical University of Crete, in Chania.
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Public Services/Government
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France’s tax department is willing to make the source code available for its income tax software system, says Axelle Lemaire, minister responsible for Digital Affairs. However, preparation takes time, she told April, France’s free software advocacy group, last month.
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Mandating open ICT standards and demanding interoperable ICT systems will lower the costs of government ICT systems, while increasing performance, agree one hundred French ICT firms working with open source and open standards. They responded to a poll organised last month by CNLL, a trade group.
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The OpenDreamKit initiative forms part of a €7m pot for establishments across Europe led by Université Paris Sud. All the code from the event will be open source and available free on the internet.
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The city of Poznań (Poland) on 20 and 21 June co-organised, a combination of a workshops and a hackathon aiming to deliver prototypes of smart phone applications for citizen participation. The city is funding the outcome of the hackathon; the development of an app to bring neighbours closer together.
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Openness/Sharing
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People can build their own customised applications on top of the financial intelligence firm’s vast swathes of data using the Thomson Reuters Elektron family of APIs.
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James Cameron, director of Titanic and Avatar, is a solar power advocate. Actually, “advocate” may not be strong enough. He is a solar power fanatic who is determined to convert the movie industry to renewable energy so it can shrink its carbon footprint.
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Artist Katsu has been working hard at extending the language of public mark making, and his latest experiments have been drone-based. Long known for his distinctive, large-scale fire extinguisher tags that trail across whole walls, his spray-painting flying machines are the latest evolution of his interest in “things that can make marks,” he tells Hyperallergic.
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Open Data
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The European Committee on Democracy and Governance (CDDG) recently organised its second Workshop on e-Democracy and e-Governance. The theme of the workshop was the “Current state of use of electronic tools in the context of citizens’ participation”, focussing on the work of the Council of Europe and its standards in relation to e-Democracy, e-Governance as well as the internet.
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A global Open Data standard could be useful in providing a unique starting-point to aid data publication. This conclusion was reached during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa (Canada) in May.
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Open Hardware
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Master’s Student Øyvind Kallevik Grutle at the University of Oslo has created a 5 axis 3D printer for his studies with the first prototype of the machine taking 2-3 months to build and design.
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Programming
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It being the third quarter, it is time at RedMonk to release our bi-annual programming language rankings. As always, the process has changed very little since Drew Conway and John Myles White’s original analysis late in 2010. The basic concept is simple: we regularly compare the performance of programming languages relative to one another on GitHub and Stack Overflow. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion (Stack Overflow) and usage (GitHub) in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
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The towering scrapheap of NHS IT failures may about to rise further, with the increasingly expensive GP Extraction Service IT system deemed not fit for purpose by the government’s spending watchdog.
Costs for the GPES IT system, which is supposed to extract data from all GP practices in England, have ballooned from £14m to £40m, with at least £5.5m wasted on write-offs and delay costs, said the National Audit Office.
The GPES has so far managed to provide data for just one customer – NHS England – who received four years later than originally planned.
The NAO said the need for the service remains and further public expenditure is required to improve or replace it.
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Science
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Security
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Well, it’s probably no shock to you that the security industry can’t agree on a definition of security. Imagine if the horse industry couldn’t agree on what is a horse. Yes, it’s like that.
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Those contacts include their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends. There is method in the Microsoft madness – it saves having to shout across the office or house “what’s the Wi-Fi password?” – but ease of use has to be teamed with security. If you wander close to a wireless network, and your friend knows the password, and you both have Wi-Fi Sense, you can now log into that network.
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L0pht co-founder and CTO of Veracode Chris Wysopal told Security Ledger software remains among “the last products that has no transparency to what the customer is getting, adding that the “pseudo-monopolies” in the industry can simply refuse to co-operate with third-party testers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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On Monday, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4th weekend.”
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A Washington Post fact-check debunks the right-wing media myth that ending controversial stop-and-frisk policies that allow police officers to stop and search pedestrians they consider to be suspicious, has led to an increase in crime, a claim frequently made on Fox News.
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Finance
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We have fun with why US govt leaving Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York and we celebrate rising UK movement against austerity. Second half of show interviews veteran reporter Bob Hennelly on the Pope’s statement about ecology, environment, and a failing economic system.
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Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand the differences between them to move beyond today’s dysfunctional economies. With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can truly be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and socialism.
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Privacy
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On Wednesday, WikiLeaks published two new top-secret National Security Agency briefs that detail American and British espionage conducted against German leaders as they were discussing responses to the Greek economic crisis in 2011.
The organization also published a redacted list of 69 German government telephone numbers that were targeted for snooping. That list includes Oskar Lafontaine, who served as German finance minister from 1998 to 1999, when the German government was still based in Bonn—suggesting that this kind of spying has been going on for over 15 years at least.
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A STUDY has found that 11 out of 14 virtual private network (VPN) providers are exposing personal information through a vulnerability known as IPv6 leakage.
This is damning for such privacy services, many of which have seen increased use since the Edward Snowden PRISM revelations of 2013.
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The Guardian Project, the group behind previous efforts to bring Tor and other privacy-preserving software to Android, is working on a Tor-friendly browser built on the desktop equivalent’s codebase. This app, named Orfox, will replace its WebView-based predecessor Orweb.
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Civil Rights
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The TSA runs a fairly entertaining Instagram account, if you’re the sort of person who is impressed by pictures of weapons seized from stupid passengers. That would be the extent of its social media prowess. Its blog is pretty much a 50/50 mix of Yet Another Thing You Can’t Take Onboard and Blogger Bob defending the TSA’s latest gaffe.
One of the TSA’s official Twitter flacks tried to loft a lighthearted “hey, look at this thing we came across!” tweet. She couldn’t have picked a worse “thing” to highlight, considering the ongoing outrage over civil asset forfeiture.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Lawmakers agreed a final proposal to scrap roaming charges and introduce rules based on “net neutrality”. Roaming charges are a part of life when you travel abroad and customers are penalised that just have to use their mobile phone for data. The good news now is that nonsense will come to end in June 2017, there will however be the usual fair use policy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Set-top boxes help deliver streaming services like Netflix and Now TV into our homes, but they’re also giving rise to less-than legal methods of watching films, TV shows and sport. As manufacturers have embraced the open nature of Android, enterprising users have found ways to install apps that facilitate piracy, which has become a business in its own right. This week, a number of police forces conducted raids on sellers of “pirate” Android streamers, confiscating thousands of units in the process.
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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Google’s appeal of the Google-Oracle API copyright dispute. The high court’s move lets stand an appellate court’s decision that application programming interfaces (APIs) are subject to copyright protections.
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This is unfortunate, even if it was somewhat expected: the Supreme Court has now rejected Google’s request to hear its appeal over the appeals court decision that overturned a lower court ruling on the copyrightability of APIs. The lower court decision, by Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to understand the issues), noted that APIs were not copyrightable, as they were mere methods, which are not subject to copyright.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.01.15
Posted in News Roundup at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux computers are particularly prone to this, and last time several high-profile websites running databases such as Hadoop, including Linkedin, Reddit, and Yelp, were temporarily borked.
GPS trackers don’t play nicely either and, given that their accuracy depends on the timings between receiver and satellite, it can make them inaccurate until the problem is addressed.
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I’m not going to lie to you, my transformation was not easy. It was a slow and painful process. But after I finished it, it felt like nothing before. Thanks to my stubbornness, I was able to truly embrace open source in my life. I gave some minor contributions to some of the worldly-known open source projects like Reddit and the Tor Project. I’m constantly writing about my open source experience on my blog. I started contributing to Opensource.com and to free software magazine written in Serbian language. I even became a guest blogger to a couple of blogs related to open source and IT in general.
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Windows 10 is about to launch in less than a month, and it’s going to be a very interesting release. We had a chance to play with the latest build, and at least a couple of things have jumped out that you could say are flattering towards Linux.
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Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, yet they both deserve to exist in this diverse desktop OS ecosystem. So this Windows vs. Linux post is going to be a little different. I will compare and contrast the technological aspects of the two operating systems, whilst also discussing channel opportunities.
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Linux, the operating system on which Android was built, is an attractive alternative to many developers and tech-savvy user who can’t get their kicks from Windows or OSX. Designed for open-source distribution, Linux was developed in 1991 and remains one of the most prominent examples of free software available. If you’re one of the folks that craves something “more” and have a desire to grow and learn, Linux is probably for you.
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HP credits the Linux community and Red Hat partners with its breakthrough x86 Superdome X server, which Distinguished Technologist Tom Vaden showed off to CRNtv at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston.
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Desktop
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My goal today was to help you better understand the risks of logging in as root, and how to better take advantage of built-in utilities to limit your rootly super powers. If you insist on having a root account, at least make use of the su – -c [command] option. When possible, make the best use of sudo to maintain tight control over access to super powers. Remember, with power comes responsibility. Use your super powers wisely!
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Server
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If your Unix/Linux servers are to be involved in an ISO 27001 audit, there are a lot of things you should be doing ahead of time to ensure that they won’t end up generating findings. While there are many things you can do to secure the systems you manage, the key to getting a Unix system to pass an ISO 27001 audit is knowing what the auditors are likely to ask and what they will need to see.
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“Docker is Linux containers for mere mortals,” Boyd Hemphill is fond of saying. The Director of Evangelism at container application management startup StackEngine organizes Docker Austin meetups, DevOps Days Austin and Container Days events. He has recently given a number of Docker 101 workshops around the country aimed at introducing DevOps professionals to the business advantages of embracing containers and the disposable development environments that they enable.
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Container technology remains very big news, and in the container space ClusterHQ has been much in the news as the company announced the availability of Flocker 1.0. Flocker is an open source project that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers and make them highly portable. In addition to other annoncements, ClusterHQ is collaborating with EMC to enable Dockerized applications to use two EMC storage solutions suited for distributed applications: ScaleIO and XtremIO.
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Kernel Space
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Adding to the already lengthy list of new features for Linux 4.2 is the Btrfs file-system updates that were sent in today by Facebook’s Chris Mason.
The Btrfs file-system update for Linux 4.2 includes sub-volume quota updates, sysfs improvements, device management improvements, and various other changes. In total around 1,700 lines of Btrfs code were touched for this merge window.
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On the last days of June, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of several maintenance releases for the Linux kernels 4.1, 4.0, 3.14, and 3.10. The seventh point release of Linux kernel 4.0 is a small one that brings mostly updated drivers.
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Sasha Levin, the maintainer of the Linux 3.18 kernel series, announced on the last day of June that the seventeenth maintenance release of the long-term Linux kernel 3.18 branch is available for download, urging all users to upgrade.
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The OpenDayLight Project today announced its Lithium release, marking the third major platform release for the open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) effort since the project was first created in April 2013.
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The AllSeen Alliance is expanding the reach of its AllJoyn Internet of Things framework with bridging software that lets other types of devices look like part of the same family.
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Graphics Stack
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The hour draws nigh. Valve recently announced the first few Steam Machines available for pre-order, and beyond SteamOS itself, each one had something in common: The first announced Steam Machines from Alienware and Syber all have Nvidia graphics hardware.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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I was called in after the NAS had been rebooted when it was refusing to recognise the RAID. The first thing that occurred to me is that maybe RAID-5 isn’t a good choice for the RAID. While it’s theoretically possible for a RAID rebuild to not fail in such a situation (the data that couldn’t be read from the disk with an error could have been regenerated from the disk that was being replaced) it seems that the RAID implementation in question couldn’t do it. As the NAS is running Linux I presume that at least older versions of Linux have the same problem. Of course if you have a RAID array that has 7 disks running RAID-6 with a hot-spare then you only get the capacity of 4 disks. But RAID-6 with no hot-spare should be at least as reliable as RAID-5 with a hot-spare.
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Games
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Distance is a beautiful neon survival racer that I finally had a chance to play, and what I found really did surprise me.
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It got a massive 1.3 update and features a SteamOS (Linux) version, which is a Steam exclusive and has a couple of exclusive voiced lines.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Tuesday, 30 June 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.3.2. Plasma 5.3 was released in April with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
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This year marks my first year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor, and it has been an exciting experience thus far. I have been a KStars developer for the last 12 years and it is amazing what KStars has accomplished in all those years.
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Krita is by far the most complete digital painting tool developed on Linux.
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KDAB are pleased to announce that the Qt 5.5.0 release includes a Technology Preview of the Qt3D module. Qt3D provides a high-level framework to allow developers to easily add 3D content to Qt applications using either QML or C++ APIs. The Qt3D module is released with the Technology Preview status. This means that Qt3D will continue to see improvements across the API design, supported features and performance before release. It is provided to start collecting feedback from users and to give a taste of what is coming with Qt3D in the future. Please grab a copy of the Qt 5.5.0 release and give Qt3D a test drive and report bugs and feature requests.
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On X11 the daemon uses the X11 core functionality to get notified whenever key events it is interested in happen. Basically it is a global key logger. Such an architecture has the disadvantage that any process could have this infrastructure and it would be possible for multiple processes grabbing the same global shortcut. In such a case undefined behavior is triggered as either multiple actions are triggered at the same time or only one action is triggered while the others do not get informed at all.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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This GNOME release cycle (3.18), we plan to do the last ever release of gnome-common. A lot of its macros for deprecated technologies (scrollkeeper?!) have been removed, and the remainder of its macros have found better replacements in autoconf-archive, where they can be used by everyone, not just GNOME.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Today in Linux news Kate Lebedeff announced the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.2, a major update to 2014.1 released September 2014 and the first to support UEFI. In other news, Douglas DeMaio announced openSUSE 42, the next release of the gecko emblazoned Linux due in November. Elsewhere, Jack Germain reviewed Makulu 9 Aero and Alap Naik Desai reported Friday Microsoft hinted at a Linux OS at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last month.
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The OpenMandriva community, through Kate Lebedeff, has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the OpenMandriva Lx 2014.2 Linux operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Security is key part of the open source Linux operating system that Red Hat delivers to its customers. Yet despite the fact that security is baked into the operating system, Red Hat doesn’t currently have a separate security offering.
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During the Red Hat Summit last week, the vendor provided roadmaps for its Ceph and Gluster storage software products including unified management technology and expanded protocol support for Ceph.
Red Hat demonstrated the new unified capabilities that will allow users to install, manage and monitor Red Hat’s Gluster and Ceph storage. Additional capabilities targeted next year for Red Hat Ceph Storage include support for iSCSI and NFS and improved multi-site capabilities, according to Neil Levine, a Red Hat director of product management.
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According to Wall Street, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is expected to report earnings per share for the current fiscal quarter of $0.29. This is the consensus mean estimate based on the individual covering sell-side analysts’ reported numbers. The company last reported earnings for the period ending on 2015-05-31 of $0.31.
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Sarah Sharp, embedded software architect at Intel, and Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology have been named as the first winners of Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Awards.
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Fedora
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Fedora is a big community that includes contributors and users from many different countries, each with their own experiences and historical backgrounds that contribute to a diverse mix of cultural, educational, and behavioral norms. To continuously create and foster an inclusive environment in the Fedora community, it’s important to respond to the needs of existing contributors and users, and welcome new contributors and users from diverse backgrounds.
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In order to prevent users from being overwhelmed by a fire hose of notifications from the hubs they’re subscribed to and from all the other apps connected to Fedora Hubs, we decided to design a filtering system.
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So what is Pinos? One of the original goals of Pinos was to provide the same level of advanced hardware handling for Video that PulseAudio provides for Audio. For those of you who has been around for a while you might remember how you once upon a time could only have one application using the sound card at the same time until PulseAudio properly fixed that. Well Pinos will allow you to share your video camera between multiple applications and also provide an easy to use API to do so.
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I had to spend some time understanding how to use docker-storage-setup on an Atomic host. The tool docker-storage-setup comes by default and makes the configuration of storage on your Atomic host easier. I didn’t read any of the provided documentation (although that probably would have helped) other than the script itself. So, pardon me if this is a duplicate of other info out there. It was a great way to learn more about it. The goal here is to add more disk space to an Atomic host. By default, the cloud image that you download has one device (vda) that is 6GB in size. When I’m testing many, many docker builds and iterating through the Fedora-Dockerfiles repo, that’s just not enough space. So, I need to know how to expand it.
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Debian Family
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I have now been using Debian for a few weeks and it is therefore time for me to write a review of my experience thus far.
Debian has been around for what seems like forever now and it is the base for so many other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, SolydXK and Knoppix.
I think that the general consensus amongst Linux users is that Debian is stable, dependable and a good environment on which to build upon.
Does that mean it is suitable for Everyone?
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I think it primarily comes down to flexibility—the ability to get things working how you want them, how you can fix issues that are annoying you and then feed that back to the community so that others can also benefit.
Secondly, it’s about trust. The difference between using free software and proprietary software is important—knowing exactly what is running on your computer leads to a safer and more secure environment.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is about to undergo a dramatic overhaul.
No, I don’t mean the huge shift to a converged Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server, although that’s also coming. Ubuntu is going to move past Deb packages and apt-get in favor of Snappy, which is currently used for cloud images.
Canonical’s Ubuntu isn’t the only project looking to replace Linux packages with something better. The GNOME project is working on a sandboxed, cross-distribution application package framework.
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The Movilforum website had the great pleasure of interviewing Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux.
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The UbuTab is a tablet that was supposed to ship with either Windows or Ubuntu, and had some pretty sweet hardware specs, including 1TB of storage space. As some of the users have suspected in the first place, this is very close to being confirmed as a scam.
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Now that Ubuntu Touch is in the hands of actual users, one of the most common critiques is that it doesn’t feel like a finished product and it cannot compete with the likes of Android or iOS. The problem is not Ubuntu, but the comparison itself.
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Unsettings is an application that allows users to customize the Unity desktop environment by exposing options that are not usually available by other means. It has a lot of features, and it’s one of the best that you can find.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” Cinnamon has been officially announced by Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the project, and it brings numerous upgrades for the desktop environment and the underlying operating system.
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Users of Linux Mint outhouse looking for a new operating system, might be interested to know that a couple of new versions of Linux Mint have been made available today in the form of Linux Mint 17.2 with the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments.
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We no longer cover every Android media player or HDMI stick that comes around, but the new Tronsmart “Orion R68″ certainly caught our attention. (So did its similar predecessor, the quad-core Rockchip RK3288 based Orion R28). First, it runs Android 5.1, a bug-fixed and more secure version of Android 5.0 Lollipop, on a new Rockchip RK3368 system-on-chip, which combines eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.5GHz.
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Adlink’s “Matrix MXE-100i” gateway runs Wind River’s Linux-based IDP XT IoT gateway stack on an Intel Quark processor, and offers multiple wireless options.
The Matrix MXE-100i is a spinoff of the Matrix MXE-200i gateway computer announced by Adlink in February. Like the MXE-200i, the identically sized, 120 x 100 x 55mm MXE-100i comes preloaded with a Linux-based Internet of Things gateway software stack from Intel subsidiary Wind River, called Wind River Intelligent Device Platform XT.
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The Wallpad is a 7″ touch computer powered by HIO Project’s modular expandable hardware platform. It can mount on a standard 2-gang electrical box, is powered by a Freescale ARM processor, supports Power over Ethernet (PoE) and comes with either Yocto Linux or Android preinstalled.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Tizen-distro is now synchronized with the meta-tizen needed to build Tizen-Common Q1 2015 with Yocto tools. A branch named ‘tizen_3.0.2015.q1_common’ has been created on both git trees for this release.
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Android
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MICROSOFT MIGHT GIVE UP on Windows Phone and adopt Google’s Android software for future smartphone devices, according to rumours.
Twitter leakster MSNerd said that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his senior leadership team (SLT) are discussing potentially dropping Windows Phone from the firm’s smartphones and smaller tablets.
Instead, the tweets claim, Microsoft will offer Android with its own apps and services pre-loaded. The firm has already signed deals with Dell and Samsung to load its apps onto the companies’ respective Android tablets.
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BlackBerry 10 is an immense platform, almost without equal. But sources are now claiming BlackBerry could augment it with Google’s Android OS in a bid to make its future devices more attractive to consumers.
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When Google announced Android Auto at Google I/O 2014, I was already sold. And by “sold,” I mean I fully expected it to be something I’d want [were I in the market to buy a car that had it]. And while I don’t actually plan on buying a car with Auto any time soon, after spending a week with it, I do feel pretty OK with that gut feeling. We reviewed Auto earlier this month on a Pioneer head unit, but I figured I’d also share my own thoughts on it.
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Officers from a UK-based Regional Organized Crime Unit (ROCU), the Government Agency Intelligence Network (GAIN) and the Federation Against Copyright Theft have carried out more raids in pursuit of ‘pirate’ Android TV boxes. More than a thousand devices were seized in two locations this morning and at least two people have been arrested.
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During the past two months many manufacturers have been busy pushing out updates to the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop update Google released back in March, and then again in April, and this week we’ve finally received a few details about the incoming HTC One M9 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
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After research firm comScore released data last month indicating that Android’s share of the US smartphone OS market dropped 1 percent during the three months ending in April, Kantar Worldpanel has its own research out which says the OS is gaining momentum stateside again.
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Samsung’s Galaxy S6 helped boost Android’s market share in the U.S. over the past three months according to data released on Tuesday by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
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Razer’s open source virtual reality project will support Android, which opens up the future of this mind-altering world to multiple devices.
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Many organisations have a wide array of open-source applications and code in use today – whether it be at the infrastructure and application layers, or in development frameworks and GitHub repositories.
However, the applications developer and infrastructure teams come under increasing pressure as organisations rush to develop new services for customers, comply with growing amounts of industry regulation, or simply strive to meet the needs of the information generation.
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The software, s2n, is a new implementation of Transport Layer Security (TLS), a protocol for encrypting data. TLS is the successor of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), both of which AWS uses to secure most of its services.
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Etsy, the leading marketplace for handmade goods, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years. During that time they’ve iterated on their model, their strategy, and their mission. One thing that’s driven the success of those changes is their open workplace culture.
I talked to senior engineering manager John Goulah about what it means to fail faster at Etsy, and he shared with me some interesting insights into the communication techniques Etsy uses to empower their associates and improve the experience of buyers and sellers on the site.
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SaaS/Big Data
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It was back in June of 2013 when TheServerSide was first introduced to OpenStack, Red Hat’s ambitious attempt to do for cloud computing what they did with the open source Linux model, that is, make a commodity out of it leverage it as a major revenue stream. From the 2013 Red Hat Summit, we first floated the basic What is OpenStack? articles, while asking questions such as Will the Red Hat model work for IaaS cloud computing?
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CBR spoke with Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis about the challenges facing OpenStack and how operating as an independent company means it can offer what the customer wants, rather than just its own solution.
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Databases
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Ingo is a senior solutions architect at MongoDB. He is active in many open source projects, and is the author of Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, a book on open source community ethics and business models.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation today announced LibreOffice 4.4.4, the latest update to the 4.4 branch. Today’s release brings 74 bug fixes including several crashes and import/export bugs. The announcement today also brought news of version 5.0 as well as reminders for the LibreOffice Conference in September.
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BSD
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The PC-BSD development team today announced their 10.2 pre-release, which continues to be derived from FreeBSD. Additionally they’ve also announced new 11.0-CURRENT images for those wishing to get a look ahead at FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0.
The PC-BSD 10.2 pre-release / 11.0 current announcement didn’t offer many details about all of the changes in store, but once PC-BSD 10.2 and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 11.0 are officially out, you can expect lengthy write-ups on Phoronix.
More details via the PCBSD.org blog.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We believe package management and reproducibility are key topics for HPC research. We are glad to have this opportunity to discuss the subject with researchers of the field.
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Public Services/Government
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First, the good news: members of the House of Representatives in the US Congress are now allowed to use open source technology in their offices, rather than the very limited list of proprietary offerings they were given in the past. Second, the bad news: how the hell is it 2015 and this is only becoming an option now? I guess we can’t change the past, and so let’s celebrate the House of Reps finally getting to this point — which just happens to coincide with the upcoming launch of the House Open Source Caucus (led by Reps. Blake Farenthold and Jared Polis).
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Traditionally, members of the House of Representatives have been presented with a limited plate of options when choosing technology to run their offices and manage their web presences. Members that wanted to take advantage of open source solutions — which are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective — faced significant uncertainty and were pushed towards a small selection of proprietary options.
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Advocates of free software are protesting a tender by the school board of the Spanish region of Extremadura requesting proprietary software licences. The advocacy group, Extremadura Focus Initiative, is supported by the new, incoming government of the region and by several of Extremadura’s school teachers.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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So come be a part of our culture YaWiO as we are open sourcing our codex.
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Open Data
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The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has established an award for innovative open data applications. The Stuiveling Open Data Award, which is named after Saskia Stuiveling, the outgoing President of the Dutch National Audit Office (Court of Audit), was announced by Rutte at her final symposium ‘The art of open data’ last month.
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Alexander De Croo, Belgium Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Development Cooperation, Digital Agenda, Telecom and Postal Services, will force the National Railway Company of Belgium (NMBS/SNCB) to make its timetable information available as open data. This will allow software developers to create alternatives to the official app.
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Open Hardware
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5axisaniWhen we think of desktop FDM/FFF 3D printers, we typically picture a gantry style Cartesian-based machine, or a Delta robot style printer. These machines are capable of 3D printing objects based on three axes: X, Y, and Z. The X and Y axes make up the two-dimensional plane, while the Z axis is the third dimension, allowing for objects to be built up one layer at a time. For one University of Oslo Master’s student, named Øyvind Kallevik Grutle, this just wasn’t enough.
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Programming
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The ancient Library of Alexandria may have been the largest collection of human knowledge in its time, and scholars still mourn its destruction. The risk of so devastating a loss diminished somewhat with the advent of the printing press and further still with the rise of the Internet. Yet centralized repositories of specialized information remain, as does the threat of a catastrophic loss.
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So what is R? The R programming language is a free and open source programming language for statistical computing and provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists to unlock value from data.
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A science center in Johannesburg, South Africa, has opened the doors to a five-month course in Linux-based Web apps and entrepreneurial skills. The training is available free of charge to underprivileged students from nearby townships; if it’s successful, it will be rolled out nationwide.
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A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a way to use ‘donor’ programs to improve the functionality and reduce system errors and flaws in open-source programs.
Outlined in a paper dubbed “Automatic error elimination by horizontal code transfer across multiple applications,” MIT researchers describe the Code Phage system, which automatically transfers code from donor programs to other applications which have buggy code and errors.
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The Fedora PHP SIG (Special Interest Group) is back / working.
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Standards/Consortia
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Last weekend I attended EdgeConf, a conference populated by many of the leading lights in the Web industry. It featured panel talks and breakout sessions with a focus on technologies that are just now starting to emerge in browsers, so there was a lot of lively discussion around Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifests, and more.
EdgeConf’s hundred-odd attendees were truly the heavy hitters of the Web community. The average Twitter follower count in any given room was probably in the thousands, and all the major browser vendors were represented—Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera. We had lots of fun peppering them with questions about when they might release such-and-such API.
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A man in Louisiana is asking for an explanation from Walmart after his request for a Confederate flag cake at one of its bakeries was rejected, but a design with the ISIS flag was accepted.
Chuck Netzhammer said he ordered the image of the Confederate flag on a cake with the words, “Heritage Not Hate,” on Thursday at a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana. But the bakery denied his request, he said. At some point later, he ordered the image of the ISIS flag that represents the terrorist group.
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Science
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You just had one of the longest hours of your life. At midnight GMT, clocks added an extra second to allow atomic clocks to stay in sync with the Earth’s rotation. Will the internet fall apart? Follow all the latest developments on our live blog
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Health/Nutrition
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Even by the standards of newsweekly hyperbole, this is ridiculous. In the piece, Stein writes that “in the US, doctors performed over 15 million cosmetic procedures in 2014, a 13 percent increase from 2011 and more than twice as many as in 2000.”
The population of the United States is now 319 million, so 15 million is about 5 percent per capita.
Even that overstates how big “everyone” is, since most of those procedures are injections like Botox–a muscle relaxant that has to be readministered as often as four times a year. Coupled with the fact that Botox can be used on multiple parts of the body—each of which may be considered a different “procedure”—the “everyone” who “gets work done” turns out to be a tiny fraction of the population.
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Security
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I’m a huge PKI (public key infrastructure) fan. I love the beauty of the mathematics and cryptography. I love its myriad uses and scenarios.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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I knew with certainty that the BBC and official line of a lone gunman being responsible for the Tunisian attacks was a lie, because one of the victims of one of the “other” gunmen was my dear niece Kirsty.
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Transparency Reporting
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The McKinney (Texas) Police Department is under lots of outside scrutiny, thanks to the racially-tinged antics of its police force — namely the since-departed Officer Eric Casebolt, who barrel rolled into infamy in a cell phone-captured video that culminated in him pinning down a 14-year-old girl while waving a gun at two teens.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Pollution restrictions would prove almost impossible to meet, while new runway would restrict economic growth elsewhere, green groups warn
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…hottest recorded weather in the UK in nine years.
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Temperatures of 30C today and 35C tomorrow are likely to cause transport delays, particularly in the south east and London.
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Speed restrictions are already in place on Britain’s railways as temperatures soar to 95F (35C)
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A heatwave in Spain and Portugal has triggered alerts across the region, with temperatures soaring above 40C and warnings of risks to residents’ health.
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It’s good news for cattle, but bad news for commuters, as the heatwave currently hitting London will mean the temperatures on some tube trains tomorrow will exceed the legal limit for transporting cattle.
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Finance
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With bank doors slammed shut, frantic Greeks are turning to online trading platforms to see if the digital money Bitcoin is a better bet than the euro.
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In fact, central banks have not spent this money, they have lent this money, mostly by buying government bonds. This matters hugely, because lending is a much more indirect way to boost the economy than spending.
Lending by central banks is supposed to boost growth by lowering interest rates. This encourages borrowing in the public and private sectors. This helps to explain the growth in debt in recent years: Rather than indicating a troubling situation, this was actually the point of the policy.
Rather than focus on the amount of debt countries, companies and individuals have incurred, it would be more reasonable to examine their interest burdens. These are mostly quite low.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded Colorado $46 million under the Charter Schools Program. Part of the reason the state landed the competitive grant was that charters are free to hire unlicensed teachers and then fire them at will, documents reviewed by CMD show.
Designed to create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year program has been repeatedly criticized by the watchdogs at the department’s Office of the Inspector General watchdog for suspected waste and poor financial controls.
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In early 1989, seven weeks after his father moved into the White House, Jeb Bush took a trip to Nigeria.
Nearly 100,000 Nigerians turned out to see him over four days as he accompanied the executives of a Florida company called Moving Water Industries, which had just retained Bush to market the firm’s pumps. Escorted by the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, Bush met with the nation’s political and religious leaders as part of an MWI effort to land a deal that would be worth $80 million.
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43 Percent Of Newspaper Coverage Failed To Note That Candidates’ Climate Statements Conflict With Scientific Consensus. From March 23 — when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the first candidate to announce his presidential bid — to June 22 of this year, newspapers and wire services surveyed by Media Matters published 54 news stories (in print and online) that included a presidential candidate denying either that climate change is occurring or that human activity is largely responsible for it. But the newspapers and wires failed to indicate that the candidate’s position conflicts with the scientific consensus in 23 of those stories, or 43 percent of the coverage.
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Censorship
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Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to read by encouraging read-outs, displays, and community activities that raise awareness of the ongoing threat of censorship. Last year, tens of thousands of people participated in Banned Books Week online. More than 500 videos were posted in a virtual read-out, and thousands participated in hundreds of events in bookstores, libraries, and schools and universities across the country.
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Privacy
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Yet also today, the lower house of France’s legislature, the National Assembly, passed a sweeping surveillance law. The law provides a new framework for the country’s intelligence agencies to expand their surveillance activities. Opponents of the law were quick to mock the government for vigorously protesting being surveilled by one of the country’s closest allies while passing a law that gives its own intelligence services vast powers with what its opponents regard as little oversight. But for those who support the new law, the new revelations of NSA spying showed the urgent need to update the tools available to France’s spies.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.
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A secret US tribunal ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency is free to continue its bulk telephone metadata surveillance program—the same spying that Congress voted to terminate weeks ago.
Congress disavowed the program NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed when passing the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed June 2. The act, however, allowed for the program to be extended for six months to allow “for an orderly transition” to a less-invasive telephone metadata spying program.
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According to an announcement from the site, Rights Alliance lawyer Henrik Pontén recently approached Cloudflare in an effort to uncover Sparvar’s email address and the true location of its servers. The discussions between Rights Alliance and Cloudflare were seen by Sparvar, which set alarm bells ringing.
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The Government’s planning to publish a draft of a new law that’s likely to extend the surveillance powers of the police and GCHQ in early autumn.
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Civil Rights
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Fox News Latino’s coverage of NBC’s decision to sever ties with Donald Trump differed dramatically from Fox News’ rush to defend the presidential candidate’s incendiary remarks about Mexican immigrants. While Fox hosts praised Trump’s stance and reticence to apologize, Fox News Latino characterized NBC’s move as a victory for Latino media advocacy leaders.
NBCUniversal announced Monday that it would sever ties with Trump after he characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists,” explaining in a statement: “At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values. Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.”
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A federal judge has just ordered the government to return $167,000 it took from a man passing through Nevada on his way to visit his girlfriend in California. The officers really wanted that money, too. They used two consecutive stops to jerry-rig some probable cause… even though at that point they thought they were only dealing with $2000. From the original stop forward, the entire situation was deplorable, indisputably showing that everyone involved was more interested in taking (and keeping) a bunch of cash than enforcing laws or pursuing justice.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Announced on Tuesday, the tech giant said the move will accelerate the development of the Cisco Cloud Delivered Security Portfolio, and OpenDNS will prove a boost to advanced threat protection services for Cisco clients.
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A two-tier Internet will be created in Europe as the result of a late-night “compromise” between the European Commission, European Parliament and the EU Council. The so-called “trilogue” meeting to reconcile the different positions of the three main EU institutions saw telecom companies gaining the right to offer “specialised services” on the Internet. These premium services will create a fast lane on the Internet and thus destroy net neutrality, which requires that equivalent traffic is treated in the same way.
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After months of negotiations behind closed doors between the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Parliament (trialogue), the very positive text on Net Neutrality adopted by the European Parliament in April 2014 has become more ambiguous and weaker. Net Neutrality deserves more guarantees and La Quadrature du Net is regretting a third-rate agreement.
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A federal court has set a schedule for the legal case over the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial net neutrality rules.
The telecom companies, trade groups and individuals suing the FCC must submit briefs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by July 30. Their supporters have until August 6 to submit their own filings.
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Following a mammoth negotiating session that ended in the early hours of this morning, the European Union (EU) has released their long awaited rules on Net Neutrality.
The EU Commissioner’s tweet and an accompanying press release proclaimed the rules as strong protection for net neutrality, but we’re not so sure. In fact, our initial response is one of disappointment. As others have pointed out, the proposals are unclear. At best they will lead to disputes and confusion, and at worst they could see the creation of a two-tier Internet. If enacted, these rules would place European companies and citizens at a disadvantage when compared to countries such as Chile and the USA.
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It seems the European Union has learned little from the hard-won fight in the United States to preserve net neutrality. Today, the European Commission announced an agreement between the European Parliament and EU Council that—on the surface—claims to promise to protect net neutrality, while simultaneously allowing for exceptions that would threaten its very existence.
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Data roaming charges associated with using your mobile phone while travelling abroad within the 28 member countries of the European Union will be a thing of the past as soon as June 2017. After that, consumers will pay the same price for calls, text messages and internet surfing throughout the EU.
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The commission said it would also reserve the right to control traffic if it was in the public interest, for example, to combat child pornography or a terrorist attack.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) rejected Google’s petition for certiorari in its long copyright dispute over Oracle’s Java application programming interface (API)s. That ruling upheld a potentially deadly 2014 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that held the Java APIs can be copyrighted.
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The decision curtails Google’s efforts to avoid paying Oracle licensing fees for using Java code in the Android mobile operating system.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.30.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It wasn’t that long ago that Linux and open-source were thought of as toy software. Today, they dominate both business and technology.
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If you are planning to purchase SSDs for Linux, keep an eye on the drives that are blacklisted by the Linux Kernel. Also pay heed to what Sukar suggests, “…be careful, even when you don’t enable the TRIM explicitly, at least since Ubuntu 14.04 the explicit FSTRIM runs in a cron once per week on all partitions – the freeze of your storage for a couple of seconds will be your smallest problem.”
If you pay attention to these points, your data may just stay in the solid state.
Read more
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Right now, my refrigerator uses Linux, as does the thermostat that controls the climate of my home. The washer and dryer components and firmware with the touch control screens are built on Linux (Amana if you want to look it up). The navigation system on my old Ford Explorer is based on Linux. Our home entertainment center has a touch screen control based on Ubuntu.
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Kernel Space
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For those using perf for Linux profiling with performance counters, the Linux 4.2 kernel will bring many improvements to benefit Intel customers.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 4.1.1, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and the most advanced version available. It’s not a large update , but that usually happens with the early versions.
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Specifically, CII’s funds will support a new open source automated testing project, the Reproducible Builds initiative from Debian, and IT security researcher Hanno Böck’s Fuzzing Project.
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Applications
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Any Linux operating system is incomplete without a download manager. From many years, Linux based distros are using wget as default download manager. Its pretty little application which works fine from command line, if you need to install anything, download any stuff, you need to run shell scripts etc, everything uses wget on some level to complete tasks. Over the past many years, it has been identified that wget is lacking some advance features and its alternative, Aria2, has received the attention of many users due to fulfilling the thirst of advance linux users. We will be reviewing the installation process of Aria2 and the difference between Wget and Aria 2 in this article, so you may decide which download manager best suits your needs.
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Data is growing both in volume and value. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to back up and restore this information quickly and reliably. As society has adapted to technology and learned how to depend on computers and mobile devices, there are few that can deal with the reality of losing important data. Of firms that suffer the loss of data, 30% fold within a year, 70% cease trading within five years. This highlights the value of data.
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A much more powerful took is “Atop”, a powerful monitor program that allows you to see system-level counters concerning utilization of CPU and memory/swap, as well as see disk I/O and network utilization counters at the system level — in real time or historically. It also allows you to store raw counters in a file for long-term analysis on system levels and process levels, as well as seeing resource consumption for each thread within a process of a multi-processor program.
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A few months ago I reported about my advancement in my use of Emacs. This post will be a report of my further progress. Quick reminder: I started using emacs for project management and working on web sites. I still do that today, even though I spent much less time editing websites and these are very much side projects I do for and with friends.
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Proprietary
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Google Drive is an instrument that is used by many. Of course, there are many alternatives to it like Dropbox or Yandex.Drive, but nevertheless many prefer a Google-backed solution. One of the reasons for me was an ability to have several services under one “roof”, one account.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Building on Friday’s Wine 1.7.46 release, Wine-Staging 1.7.46 was released today.
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At present Wine – the open-source compatibility layer software that runs Windows applications on other operating systems – supports DirectX9, allowing many older Windows games to run on Linux, but software has moved on and developers are no longer using that older version of DirectX.
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Games
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Garry Newman, the developer behind the famous Garry’s Mod and the survival MMO Rust, has made some very interesting comments about the lack of Linux players and why his studio doesn’t really care about the open source platform.
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FPS adventure game Gone Home is now available on Steam for Linux with huge 88% price cut that will last for another day.
Gone Home is a story driven game that is like nothing you’ve ever played until now. You don’t get to meet anyone, and you don’t get to interact with any other character. You’re just trying to solve a mystery. Despite the fact that there are no enemies, and you don’t get hurt in any way, the game manages to keep the suspense going with ease, and that’s mostly due to the script and the gameplay itself.
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Unity is a game engine that managed to get a lot of developers and fans in the past couple of years. Even if it supports the Linux platform, there are no Linux tools just yet, and the developers have explained why that happened.
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Guild Software announced this past weekend the availability of a new update for their Vendetta Online science-fiction MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) for Windows, Android, Linux, Mac OS X, and iOS operating systems.
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Solar 2 is described by its developers as a sandbox universe, but that doesn’t quite cover it. And when you’re having a problem describing the gameplay, you know that you have some something special.
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Valve is pleased to announce the preview of the next SteamOS release, codenamed “brewmaster” and based on the latest Debian 8.1 stable release.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the most often voiced complaints about Open Source Software is that it tends to be “ugly” or otherwise aesthetically uninspired. A few years ago a few people in the KDE camp came together and created, what they hoped, would be a solution to that problem: The KDE Visual Design Group.
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When I wrote my Kubuntu Vivid review, I mentioned a tool called KDE Connect, which I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be doing. A bunch of you emailed me, telling me it’s a nice little applet that can keep your smartphone notifications in sync with the desktop, as well as allow you to remotely control certain parts of your KDE-flavored desktop from the smartphone.
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At beginning of June 2011 I made my first blog post about KWin support Wayland clients featuring a screenshot of Desktop Grid effect with a Wayland window shown on each desktop.
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The statistics collection feature of KActivities is slowly becoming a core part of Plasma.
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The first new feature of the GSoC project on animation in Krita is has landed in git. Until now, I have been mostly concentrating on refactoring the core structures toward their final form, which has taken much more time than I anticipated. Fortunately, it is now mostly done, and I am getting to the point where progress is more visible.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We reported earlier this week that the GNOME Project has announced the availability of the third snapshot of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, GNOME 3.17.3, a release that brought in new features and plugged numerous annoying bugs.
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Béla Markus has announced the immediate availability of piCore 6.1, a special edition of the Tiny Core Linux operating system specifically designed for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC).
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It was recently brought to our attention that there’s a Linux kernel-based operating system out there developed in Havana, Cuba by students at the University of Computer Sciences and sponsored by the Cuban government.
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New Releases
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The Solus operating system has just received its first daily ISO, and it looks like the team is well on its way to promote the first RC. The developers are moving closer to a stable version, and things seem to be on the right track.
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The main features at a glance:
Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
Add a new dashboard and widgets
Many internal improvements and bugfixes
Improved the internal network interface backend
Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
Add VLAN support
The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, …) instead of cookies.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Here is our tribute to our founder and the community he and others created.
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Arch Family
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The second update pack for Manjaro 0.8.13 has been made available, and it packs a lot of new packages, including Budgie 8.2 and a new Linux kernel.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s new Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage open-source, software-defined storage products continue to push storage’s limits.
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When Jim Whitehurst set out to write his book The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, he wasn’t looking to define the open-source movement in the same way that Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar defined open-source. Rather than define open-source as a development methodology, Whitehurst’s focus is on open-source principles as applied to the domain of company management.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst spent last week’s annual Summit praising the progress made in open source, but during his opening keynote he also warned attendees about companies that claim to be open source without actually encouraging open participation and innovation from a broad group of users.
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Fedora
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Releases of the Fedora operating system, being the mostly regular six-monthly events that they are, do not usually find themselves worthy of note — your average run-of-the-mill Fedora release can usually be summed up as: “Everything you had six months ago, only slightly better.”
With Fedora 22, though, changes arrived thick and fast. The release’s desktop environment got a new, flatter look; the package manager of choice changed; GCC was updated to the 5 series; and the next generation of display server inched towards general availability. While none of these changes alone should send the quality of the release into reverse, somewhere along the line, it hasn’t all come together.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Now that Ubuntu for phones has also landed on the Meizu MX4 a lot of people might want it, but it’s difficult to get. Some people might get the idea of buying a regular Meizu MX4 with Flyme OS, but they wouldn’t be able to get Ubuntu on that device or at least not in a safe way.
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If you have any questions regarding new features and apps that are present, absent, or in the works for the Ubuntu Touch platform, you need to know that there is already a comprehensive wish list out there that takes care of everything.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” ISO images for both the Cinnamon and MATE flavors have been released, although the official announcement hasn’t been made available just yet.
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Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela has been released in its two traditional flavors, Cinnamon and MATE, but the developers did not publish any release notes yet.
Like Linux Mint 17 and Linux Mint 17.1, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and uses latest generation desktop environments: Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10, but most likely, many Linux Mint-specific improvements have been implemented.
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As usual, the Linux 4.2 kernel is bringing more improvements for ARM, including support for new SoCs and boards.
Highlights for the ARM Linux 4.2 merge window include:
- SMP support for the Allwinner A23 SoC with the SunXI code and SMP support for the Broadcom BCM63138.
- Big endian support in Socpga.
- Initial support for the Freescale I.MX7D. The dual-core i.MX7 has two Cortex-A7 cores up to 1.0GHz, Cortex-M4 up to 256MHz, LPDDR2/LPDDR3 support, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCI Express lane. The i.MX7 series is primarily aimed at “Internet of Things” devices.
- Initial support for the ZTE ZX296702 SoC with dual-core Cortex-A9 processor and ARM Mali 400 graphics.
- NVIDIA Tegra HDA support.
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The Dronecode open-source UAV platform initiative has announced that it has welcomed on board a raft of new members, who’ll help drive the project towards becoming a de facto standard for consumer and commercial drones.
The non-profit organisation – governed by the Linux Foundation – was formed in late 2014. Founding members 3D Robotics (3DR) and Yuneec International have since been joined by 27 other organisations and sponsored members, keen to participate in the “neutral, transparent initiative for advancing UAV technology”, as the Linux Foundation’s marketing big cheese Amanda McPherson described it.
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BeagleCore is a new Internet of Things development board that has been created to be 100 percent open source and provide an easy way for makers, developers and hobbyists to have access to all all the core features of BeagleBone Black in a miniaturised computer module.
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Industry-leading organizations and start-ups like Parrot, Walkera, and Team Black Sheep have joined 3DR, Intel, Qualcomm and others to create an industry-standard, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Even groups that compete against one another are working together as part of Dronecode. Change is not just coming in the future, it’s taking place now. Think advances in vision processing, obstacle avoidance, and environmental and situational awareness: Dronecode members are delivering on all of these today.
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A German startup called BeagleCore is spinning a computer-on-module version of BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black single board computer on Kickstarter. Packages start at 39 Euros ($44) for the first 500 units shipping in Feb. 2016, or 49 Euros ($55) for the second shipment in April. With a baseboard, it costs 99 Euros ($111), also with April 2016 shipment. The BeagleCore and Starter-Kit support Linux flavors including Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and Cloud9 IDE on Node.js with BoneScript library.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Samsung now plans on delivering a Gold variant of the Z1 next month and has also confirmed more models are on the way. The Z1 launched at 5,700-Rs whist the second Tizen handset is expected to go on-sale for between the 8,000-Rs 15,000-Rs range. We have previously reported on a rumoured Samsung Z3, so this could signal it’s launch? The handsets will also be manufactured in India at Samsung’s factory in Noida.
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The SDK includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a light-weight TV Simulator for testing web apps, and a TV Emulator.
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Android
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Google has decided Android Studio is all you need to make apps, and by the end of the year will no longer support the venerable but popular Eclipse IDE.
Android product manager Jamal Eason has blogged that in recent years “our team has focused on improving the development experience for building Android apps with Android Studio”, and it’s now time to move on.
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In this video, Android Engineer Kris Pena picks out the most important pieces of information that came out of this year’s Google I/O conference.
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Along with a tweak in the application design guidelines, Google has updated its own applications for Android with a subtle graphical tweak to remind users just who the driving force behind the ecosystem actually is. Not only are splash screens now an acceptable part of Android design, Google is making immediate use of them in a defensive move against other cloud providers such as Microsoft.
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Android software service for Galaxy S3 has long been disbanded and for those who are still hanging on to their 2012 Samsung smartphone, crDroid has some good news to share.
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The mobile boom brought forth a world of opportunities to creative individuals – especially musicians. Gone are the days when these artists were bound to full studio equipment (which costs fortunes) in order to get anything done. Professional music makers still need those, but our smartphones and tablets are more than capable of taking a quantifiable load of work.
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Android is beloved by millions because it’s endlessly customizable. Want to use a different launcher? There are a ton of options in the Google Play store. Same goes for icon packs, of which we’ve covered extensively in the past. If you don’t like TouchWiz, Sense or even the way vanilla Android looks, it’s easy to change up the look and feel of your phone to make it look exactly the way you want it to. That’s the beauty Android has to offer.
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Recently, Google made a selection of Android games under 25 MB, and highlighted them in Play Store.
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Yes, Google hates lag on smartphones as much as you do — enough so that the search giant has a robot dedicated to spotting that delay between your finger input and what happens on screen. Meet the Chrome TouchBot, an OptoFidelity-made machine that gauges the touchscreen latency on Android and Chrome OS devices. As you can see in the clip below, the bot’s artificial digit pokes, prods and swipes the display in a series of web-based tests (which you can try yourself) that help pinpoint problems in both code and hardware. This isn’t the only gadget monitoring device lag at Google, but it could be the most important given how much the company’s software revolves around touch. Don’t be surprised if this automaton boosts the responsiveness of Mountain View’s future platforms.
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Back in February the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally started rolling out in the United States on multiple carriers, following a release in other regions around the globe. Since then we’ve seen the G4 arrive with Android 5.1 on board, and many G3 owners are hoping for the same treat.
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Once again, consumers in the market for a new Android phone have tough decisions to make. While hardcore Android purists will understandably opt for the Nexus 6 to get fast updates and greater tinker capabilities, the Galaxy S6 is the better choice for all others. It is a more well-rounded experience.
Samsung has crafted a phone that is not only a piece of art, but is a comfortable size and has superior security with biometrics. The fingerprint reader is more important than having the ability to run custom ROMS. In 2015, there is no excuse for any flagship smartphone to ship without a fingerprint scanner.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is Android at its finest. Highly recommended.
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Some of its biggest selling points include 4K and NVIDIA Grid support. If you love gaming, have a powerful rig with a robust NVIDIA GPU, and want to enjoy one of the best in class Android TV experiences, then the NVIDIA Shield Android TV is a sure bet. If you’re more of a casual gamer, then there are less expensive options, but if you want to have something that packs a wallop, streams your games, and is quite future proof, then we highly recommend it. Further, we’ve given it our highly coveted Editor’s Choice Award for being a rock solid Android TV device!
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The Huawei P8 represents the classiest and most capable Android from a Chinese manufacturer yet, and a strong advance from last year’s P7. The hardware design is superb and it has a terrific camera. The biggest differentiator is actually quite useful: the microSD slot doubles up as a SIM slot, too.
The stuttery performance and annoying popups that marred last year’s P7 have been banished. There’s a lot to like with thrown-in features like call blocking and security.
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Some new tidbits about Nokia’s Android future have surfaced and word is that Foxconn will be making the Android smartphones for Nokia. That is no big surprise considering that Foxconn makes many of the popular smartphones on the market today for the companies who sell them including the Nokia N1 and the iPhone.
Word has also surfaced that the first markets to get the new Nokia Android smartphones will be India, China, and a few European nations. Nokia appears to be targeting markets where smartphones are booming in popularity but aren’t as saturated as they are in other countries. These also appear to be nations where consumers show or budget devices rather than high-end devices.
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The CDE7060T is said to offer a Linux OS, but the datasheet more specifically notes that it runs the Linux-based Android 4.2.1 on an unnamed, dual-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip. Also onboard are 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of flash.
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It’s not really a surprise, but after just over six months since the “forking” of both Node.js and Docker, the two different projects have ended up back in some sort of alignment. For Node.js, it was the reunification with io.js under the Node.js Foundation, which was officially launched under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella. The Node.js and io.js technical development is now driven by a technical committee and hopefully this will all work out well for all.
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The Libreboot “fork” of Coreboot now has support for its first AMD motherboard — or more broadly, its first desktop motherboard.
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So it’s interesting when a senior IBM exec turns up in a keynote slot. Big Blue’s heritage, at least at the high end, had for years been dominated by proprietary architecture. No longer, said Doug Balog, general manager of IBM Power Systems. The founding of OpenPOWER roughly two years ago, sale of IBM’s x86 business, and the sprint away from the formidable but proprietary Blue Gene (and re-embrace of the battle-tested mainframe) are all part of IBM’s about-face.
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The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) today announced that The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) has been accepted as an Affiliate Member. “The OSI is excited to welcome OISF,” said Patrick Masson, General Manager and Director at the OSI. “Just as we’re seeing with open source software projects, more and more organizations are looking for support from mature, robust and relevant security communities. The OISF and the open source technologies they support are ready to help and we’re happy to promote their good work.”
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I caught up with Eva to get a bit of a background on her, Netflix, and how open source is being used to improve services at Netflix. Not only has Netflix used and contributed to existing open source projects, but they have released their own projects like Genie as open source. To learn more about Netflix’s open source projects you can pursue their GitHub.
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Events
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The All Things Open conference today pushed out a notification to recipients on its mailing list announcing that registration for the event, slated for October 19th and 20th. has begun. For the first time ever, event organizers are offering something of a super early bird special: Buy a ticket before July 7th and get admission for both days for only $99 — which is a deal since that’s what a single day will cost once the Early Bird Special kicks-in next Tuesday.
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SaaS/Big Data
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New Zealand-based global open source company Catalyst has announced that Kiwi software development companies can build on the Catalyst Cloud for free.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks, a leading LibreOffice developer, says the open source suite is currently being used by about 20 million Linux users. (LibreOffice is included in many Linux distributions.) He adds that update requests are also regularly received from 120 million different IP addresses – with one million new ones appearing every week — and suggests that in total there may be 80 million LibreOffice users around the globe.
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The Document Foundation has released the second RC for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0 version, and it looks like the developers are making a final push for the new version of the office suite that is scheduled to land in July.
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And yet there is a lot of really good documentation out there. For example, the documentation for LibreOffice is excellent. It includes several documents in multiple formats including HTML and PDF that range from “Getting Started” to a very complete user’s guide for each of the LibreOffice applications.
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Funding
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A couple days ago, the Roundcube Next crowdfunding campaign reached our initial funding goal. We even got a piece on Venture Beat, among other places. This was a fantastic result and a nice reward for quite a bit of effort on the entire team’s part.
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BSD
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DragonFly BSD is a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX. The developers have released a new version of the distro, and they have integrated quite a few changes and improvements.
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For the first time I installed a BSD box on a machine I control. The experience has been eye-opening, especially since I consider myself an “old-school” Linux admin, and I’ve felt out of place with the latest changes on the system administration.
Linux is now easier to use than ever, but administration has become more difficult. There are many components, most of which are interconnected in modern ways. I’m not against progress, but I needed a bit of recycling. So instead of adapting myself to the new tools, I thought, why not look for modern tools which behave like old ones?
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DragonFlyBSD 4.2 was released this morning as the next major release to this popular BSD operating system. For end-users there are a lot of notable changes with this update.
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The editors are certainly salivating over the possibility of valgrinding our way to victory.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On June 28, the GnuCash development team had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and update of the seventh maintenance release of the stable 2.6 branch of one of the best free financial accounting software, GnuCash.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Galicia (Spain) has made available three open source solutions over the past year, one for PC classrooms, one for land-management, and a third for computer network enhancement. The tools are available at Galicia’s software repository, and information about the solutions is now also available at Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer (CTT).
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The government of Aragon (Spain) has published updates of the open source software it uses for 25 eGovernment services. The updates have been available at the repository of Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer since late last month.
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The House of Representatives has officially jumped on the open source bandwagon. A June 25 announcement declared that U.S. representatives, committees and staff would be able to procure open source software, participate in open source software communities and contribute code developed with taxpayer dollars to open source repositories.
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As the executive branch of the United States government quietly works on creating an official open source policy, the legislative branch is also moving into the 21st century: Open source software is now officially permitted in the U.S. House of Representatives. That means software developed in the People’s House with taxpayer funds will eventually be available to the people. According to the nonpartisan OpenGov Foundation, there will soon be an Open Source Caucus in Congress.
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Programming
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The Simplon course was developed in France to teach skills in Linux, Ruby on Rails, CSS, Javascript, Meteor.js and other web development langauges. Co-founder Andrei Vladescu-Olt attended the opening of the SAP-funded laboratory, and explained that there’s more to the course than coding.
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Science
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It is a sad day in tech. This is such a young industry in mobile that most who built it are still alive. One of the biggest pioneers, however, died this past Friday. Matti Makkonen, the inventor of the SMS text message, was a former Telecoms Finland (later known as Sonera) exec and then Nokia VP and later Finnet Group boss and ended his career as Managing Director of Anviva before he retired from active business management work. He still continued on some part-time jobs in telecoms in Finland. In 2008 Matti received the Economist Innovation Award for inventing the SMS and we celebrated that occasion here on this blog at the time.
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Security
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It took about 2.5 hours to test, deploy and upgrade Ikea’s entire IT infrastructure to defend against Shellshock. Here’s how Ikea did it so quickly.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Serbia unveiled a statue on Sunday of the man whose killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 101 years ago lit the fuse for the First World War, feting an assassin who still divides his native Balkans.
Many Serbs regard Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, as a pan-Slavic hero, the shot he fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 marking the death knell for centuries of foreign occupation over the various nations and faiths that would make up the Yugoslavia that emerged.
To others he is a terrorist, a nationalist fanatic whose act triggered a war in which 10 million soldiers died and the world order was rewritten.
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It’s too early to say whether yesterday’s ‘day of terror’ was coordinated, or whether it was a random convergence of events whose perpetrators share the same commitment to ‘leaderless resistance’ jihad which makes it equally possible to murder ‘apostate’ Shia worshippers in a mosque or ‘kufar’ tourists in Tunisia.
Whoever they are, their broader intentions are not difficult to fathom. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Kuwait and Tunisia attacks. Both are acts of ‘strategic’ terrorism.
The attack in Kuwait is clearly intended to foment the sectarian war that IS believes it can exploit for its own purposes.
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Technologies are making humans who remote-control drones more and more like children playing video-games. That is the main problem. When deaths or killings seem to be happening so far away, the “combat mentality” can combine with the comfort zone to highly murderous effect. When it’s so easy to kill without risking your own life, will you be merciful or shoot them up?
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When Israel is criticized about its rights-abusive policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the refrain most often heard among local politicians is that the government’s hasbara—the Israeli propaganda machine—is inadequate. The problem, in other words, is not what Israel actually does to the Palestinians, but rather the inability to get its positive message across to the international community. This is usually referred to as “rebranding Israel”. The underlying assumption here is that the merchandise is fine, and only the packaging needs to be replaced.
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Here’s how Israel deals with hostages. The results aren’t pretty.
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The war in Gaza, which had raged for three weeks by then and claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis and some 1,500 Palestinians, seemed to be tapering off. The ambush near Rafah would have gone down as one more skirmish. But as the surviving Palestinians retreated, they did something that would turn that Friday into the bloodiest day of the summer and embroil Israel in a possible war-crimes ordeal that reverberates even now: They dragged the third Israeli, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, with them underground.
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Conservatives immediately turned on the news agency, which released a statement saying the five photos it issued “were not intended to portray Senator Cruz in a negative light”.
After “consideration”, said the statement, “we have decided to remove those photos from further licensing through AP Images”.
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Civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discuss whether the shooting in Charleston was an act of domestic terrorism. “Dylann Roof was a human drone, and every Tuesday morning the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don’t even know and can’t pronounce,” Kevin Alexander Gray says. “So I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word ‘terror.’” But Richard Cohen calls the shooting “a classic case of terrorism.” “It’s politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who were the immediate victims,” Cohen says. “I think in some ways it’s important to talk about terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we’re facing.”
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White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States, according to a study by the New America Foundation. The Washington-based research organization did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.
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I don’t rate any of our wars since to have been justified morally. I am morally shaken by our U.S. war these days involving drone use. Innocent civilians are being killed. We call it “collateral damage,” which I believe actually means “unintended murder.” How have we come to justify that? We claim to be doing it for the right reason. We have identified terrorists in these locations. When our drones strike, there are too often innocent civilians caught in the hell fire. It was not our intention to kill innocent people, but there are too many unanticipated consequences.
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To deem behavior or opinion as extremist depends on a particular point of view.
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A pair of US drone strikes over the past 48 hours have killed at least nine people, none of them identified by name but all of them labeled “al-Qaeda suspects” by local officials on the ground in Yemen.
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Ex-chief of navy Lord West says Britain must protect covert relationships but must also clear up grey areas over involvement in non-war zone killings
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The New York Times on Wednesday reported details about American counterterrorism officials’ use of drone strikes in countries such as Yemen, as well as the working relationship between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
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The documents are said to show the extremely close cooperation between the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters better known as GCHQ, in regards to the controversial drone program.
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Britain’s murky operations against the United Nations were first made public in 2004 when government minister Clare Short stated she “had read transcripts of some of Mr Annan’s conversations. She said she recalled thinking, as she talked to Mr Annan: “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying”.” She admitted in a BBC interview that British intelligence agencies had recorded conversations of the UN Secretary General in his office in New York. This astonishing revelation attracted an intriguing reaction from her own government, with prime minister Blair declaring her statement to be “deeply irresponsible” rather than taking any action about this manifestly irresponsible and illegal operation. It was obvious that the British government was up to its neck in a program of espionage against the leader of the organization that is intended to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person,” and there was no possibility that the prime approver of such funtime capers was going to admit his culpability.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times continued their fight in court Tuesday as they try to secure nine Department of Justice memos they believe outline the federal government’s legal justification for tactical drone strikes that have killed hundreds — including U.S. citizens — across the world.
Attorneys on both sides presented their arguments to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday — the latest round of courtroom discussions that date back four years.
In 2011, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the targeted killings of U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Sameer Khan earlier that year in September.
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The appealing parties want the public to know who and why the U.S. is killing in drone strike operations.
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Five militants have been killed following a NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, a source said on Sunday.
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Wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan have killed at least 149,000 people between 2001 and 2014, says a recent report by a US think-tank.
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Recent escalation in tension between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India figured high among US international concerns last week, with Secretary John Kerry cautioning against implications of South Asian hostilities, amidst tenuous search for Afghan stability.
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Protesters from 25 UK-based campaign groups are expected to take part in the latest rally on July 6 outside the Lynn Lane factory which they claim supplies arms to Israel.
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The U.S. actually trains more unmanned pilots than traditional fighter pilots today.
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Fighting surged again this week in eastern Ukraine, where government troops are battling separatist militias and their Russian allies.
NATO is responding by sending troops and equipment to eastern Europe, and it’s also giving defensive training to Ukraine’s beleaguered army.
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Nato defence ministers are meeting in Brussels to agree their next steps in dealing with the renewed threat from Russia.
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It is harder for eyes from the sky or those pushing the drone buttons from the other end of the world to see precisely what lies wasted under the rubble of mud houses in the tribal regions of Pakistan. The loud claims of ‘successfully’ targeting wanted al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists have drowned the cries of the local populations for about a decade over their children, women and men having been killed. Over 2,000 civilian casualties must not disappear from the human radar after being termed collateral damage. True, we cannot escape human tragedies for larger ends of the war on terror, but we also need to take responsibility for errors of judgment.
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Sunday reports indicate an Israeli warplane bombed a remote Lebanese Bekaa region to destroy one of its drones apparently downed.
An IDF spokeswoman declined to comment. A Lebanese security source said it’s not entirely clear what happened “but most probably it was an Israeli airstrike to destroy its downed drone” – whether because of mechanical failure or by Hezbollah isn’t known.
America, its rogue NATO partners and Israel unilaterally or together bomb other nations in blatant violation of international law.
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The Obama administration is contemplating setting up bases in Iraq and sending hundreds of additional American troops there. And a few months ago, President Barack Obama announced that nearly 10,000 American troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of the year. This is in spite of US interventions in the two countries that have left hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced and continuing instability all over the region.
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Transparency Reporting
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The FBI must disclose its interviews with so-called “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the New York Times and reporter Scott Shane have told a federal judge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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From the Arabian Peninsula to northern India to California’s Central Valley, nearly a third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished, according to a recent study led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine. The aquifers are concentrated in food-producing regions that support up to two billion people.
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An application to start fracking at a site on the Fylde coast in Lancashire has been rejected by councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to extract shale gas at the Little Plumpton site between Preston and Blackpool.
Lancashire County Council rejected the bid on the grounds of “unacceptable noise impact” and the “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape”.
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Plans to frack for shale gas in Lancashire have been rejected by county councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to undertake exploratory drilling and fracking at a site between Preston and Blackpool.
Planning officials recommended approval of the operation subject to a number of conditions – but councillors rejected the advice and voted against.
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Justices invalidate new rules in move that could make Environmental Protection Agency more vulnerable to challenges to new regulations on carbon emissions
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Finance
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A man who ran a Bitcoin-based online poker site and then fled to Antigua after being raided earlier this year has pleaded guilty to a lesser gambling violation in Nevada as a way to stay a near-free man.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Bryan Micon accepted probation on Thursday and will also pay a $25,000 fine, surrender the computers, 3.0996 bitcoins ($750) and the $900 that were seized from him during the raid. Once complete, his charge will be reduced to a gross misdemeanor of operating an unlicensed interactive gaming system.
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The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.
The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of ‘basic income’ can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.
Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.
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Tsipras asks voters to reject austerity proposals offered by creditors as thousands of his supporters rally in Athens.
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Evidence pointing to international espionage, a plot to murder former Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and a 2012 plan for Greece’s exit from the euro code-named the “Silver Drachma” are just some of the sensational findings unveiled in a report by Greek Anti-Corruption Investigator Dimitris Foukas, released on Friday and sent to the Justices’ Council for consideration.
The report outlines the findings of three converging judicial investigations spanning several years, initiated after the notorious phone-tapping scandal in 2005 and revelations that the mobile phones of then Prime Minister Karamanlis and dozens of other prominent Greeks were under surveillance.
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Martina Roemmelt-Fella, who owns a small, family-run turbine manufacturer in Bavaria, should be a cheerleader for a trade deal between Europe and the United States that promises to ease the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic.
But instead she fears the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being hammered out between Brussels and Washington will give too much power to big multinationals at the expense of small companies like hers.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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At some point, Will either noticed, or someone pointed out to him, that Roberts’ decision did the opposite of what Will’s column says it did: It did not defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the ACA, but instead produced its own definitive interpretation of the law. This makes most of Will’s criticism–starting with the first paragraph, which denounces “decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches”–irrelevant to the opinion Roberts actually wrote.
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Privacy
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Anyone who has been freaked out by the robots in Channel 4’s new hit drama Humans knows what life in the Uncanny Valley feels like. The same goes for those who have met or seen footage of Aiko Chihira, a realistic humanoid who has just started welcoming visitors to a department store in Japan. She’s creepy, in the extreme.
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Cisco revealed a security vulnerability in a number of the company’s network security virtual appliances that could give someone virtually unlimited access to them—default, pre-authorized keys for Secure Shell (SSH) sessions originally intended for “customer support” purposes. As Threatpost’s Dennis Fisher reported, Cisco has released software patches that correct the problem, but there’s no temporary workaround for systems that can’t immediately be patched.
Cisco released an advisory on the vulnerability on June 25. There are two separate SSH key vulnerabilities for the Cisco Web Security Virtual Appliance (WSAv), Cisco Email Security Virtual Appliance (ESAv), and Cisco Security Management Virtual Appliance (SMAv).
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Many Cisco security appliances contain default, authorized SSH keys that can allow an attacker to connect to an appliance and take almost any action he chooses. The company said that all of its Web Security Virtual Appliances, Email Security Virtual Appliances, and Content Security Management Virtual Appliances are affected by the vulnerability.
This bug is about as serious as they come for enterprises. An attacker who is able to discover the default SSH key would have virtually free reign on vulnerable boxes, which, given Cisco’s market share and presence in the enterprise worldwide, is likely a high number. The default key apparently was inserted into the software for support reasons.
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That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in the policy, the host of details that Hulu can gather about subscribers — names, birth dates, email addresses, videos watched, device locations and more — could be transferred to “one or more third parties as part of the transaction.” The policy does not promise to contact users if their data changes hands.
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While this project is separate from the ongoing developments in Nissan’s connected vehicle technology, Deacon said that there were “huge developments” ongoing in bringing customer service to the car dashboard and more automated systems.
Last year Renault also revealed a major overhaul of its internal and customer-facing interactions through a Europe-wide Salesforce rollout that would link its systems to its dealerships, allowing it to claw back valuable customer data.
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Clauses in privacy policies that enable online services to transfer or sell personal data about consumers as part of a merger, bankruptcy or other transaction are becoming common practice, an examination by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United States has found. The prevalence of these data-transfer clauses illustrates how little control people typically have over the dissemination of information about them. Details from privacy policies of five companies offer a sampling of the information that may be collected and how companies may handle the data in the event of a sale or bankruptcy. — Natasha Singer
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In 2013, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a once-clandestine warrantless surveillance program that gobbles up Americans’ electronic communications—a project secretly adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States. Congress legalized the surveillance in 2008 and again in 2012 after it was exposed by The New York Times.
Human-rights activists and journalists brought the Supreme Court challenge amid claims that the FISA Amendments Act was chilling their speech. But the Supreme Court tossed the case, telling the challengers’ lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to bring proof by real targets of the warrantless e-mail and phone surveillance. In a 5-4 ruling (PDF) by Justice Samuel Alito at the time, the court said the case was based on “assumptions” and that the plaintiffs “merely speculate” that they were being spied upon.
Fast forward to the present day: a US resident of Brooklyn, New York, accused of sending $1,000 to a Pakistani terror group has won the right to become the nation’s second defendant to challenge the surveillance at the appellate level. This could mean a Supreme Court bid is likely several months or more away.
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But the true nature and scope of the information required by the government and subsequently collected by the government on an employee is massive. Take a look at Standard Form 86. This is a 127-page form that usually takes a week or more to complete and requires the entry of the applicant’s Social Security number on each page. The data included on this form is not just enough for identity theft, but enough to allow a person to literally become another person. Each Standard Form 86 fully documents the life of the subject. The only thing missing is the name of your first crush, though that might be in there somewhere too.
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Facebook is to open a new office in Africa, a region with more than one billion people but only 120 million Facebook users.
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Civil Rights
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One thing I was obsessed with was campaign finance reform. I almost cut my throat when Citizens United was allowed to participate in financing political campaigns because corporations have the same rights as people. I believe that decision absolutely destroyed our so-called democracy. I also observed the Democrats that stood by and let that happen. What that showed me was how corrupt and devious our elected officials are. I stand with Bernie on this issue on overturning Citizens United.
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China’s State Council Information Office on Friday issued a list of human rights violations committed by the United States government. The annual report is intended to counter US allegations of human rights abuses in China.
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Amnesty International finds all 50 states and Washington, DC, fail to comply with international law and standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers
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The transition from Bush to Obama was much less dramatic than one imagined and the transition from Obama to someone else is likely to be more nuanced
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More than 100,000 migrants have entered Europe so far this year, with some 2,000 dead or missing during the perilous quest to reach the continent. Dozens of boats set off from lawless Libya each week, with Italy and Greece bearing the brunt of the surge.
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Australians who engaged in terrorism will be stripped of their citizenship, under new laws aimed at preventing militants fighting overseas from returning home.
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The prime minister announces an expansion of powers ‘to reflect modern conditions’ and says laws could be applied retrospectively; Julie Bishop can’t confirm deaths of two Australians reportedly killed in drone strikes; and the ABC is under attack for allowing a former terrorism suspect to appear on Q&A. As it happened
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The laws would also strip citizenship from dual nationals who engage in terrorism inside Australia.
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When are we going to have an honest conversation about guns in America? While I vigorously disagree with the Supreme Court’s most recent interpretation of the Second Amendment, I’ll concede that the right of individuals to bear arms is, for now, the law of the land.
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Operation Rescue has confirmed that the Routh Street Women’s Clinic in Dallas, Texas, halted abortions earlier this month, beginning what is expected to be a series of clinic closures in the wake of a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling upheld a 2013 law, HB2, that requires abortion clinics to meet minimum safety standards.
In addition, Planned Parenthood has apparently abandoned its efforts to open a larger clinic to replace its outdated facility located at 104 Babcock Road in San Antonio. Pro-life supporters with the Stop Planned Parenthood SA Coalition sued and successfully blocked a planned opening in January 2015, citing deception and zoning violations.
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David Cameron, echoed by the corporate media, calls upon the millions of law-abiding Muslims in the UK to denounce and distance themselves from a few terrorist nutters with whom 99.99% of British Muslims have no connection anyway. That apparently is acceptable. But to ask that the Zionist and Jewish organisations denounce the long term criminal activities of the man who actually led those organisations, is portrayed as unacceptable racism.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Charter yesterday promised that it won’t impose any data caps or overage charges on customers for at least three years if the Federal Communications Commission allows it to buy Time Warner Cable.
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The Council of the European Union is looking to remove all reference to Net Neutrality in the regulation of telecommunications. While the Council has always refused to take a step towards a compromise, it has been looking for several weeks to put the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations on the European Parliament. Thus, it is with bad faith that the Council is taking on this 4th trialogue today ; with their aim to make the Parliament to give in.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Supreme Court’s decision is bad news for developers targeting the U.S. market, who will now have to avoid any API not explicitly licensed as open
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A week after making the US LGBTQI community happy last week by ruling gay marriage legal across all the states, the US Supreme Court made the decision to not review the Google v. Oracle API Copyright decision made by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals last year. The Federal Circuit have been accused for misunderstanding both computer science and copyright law.
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Last week Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm lost his appeal against his hacking conviction in Denmark. With an August release potentially on the horizon but an unexpected situation still to be resolved in Sweden, Gottfrid is longing to get in front of a computer and back into the world of IT. But before then he wants to set the record straight.
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06.28.15
Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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And where there is a hot new technology, there are of course hot startups.
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Kernel Space
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In a recent Google+ post from June 27, the father of Linux, Mr. Linus Torvalds, revealed some interesting information about the next major version of the Linux kernel, for which the development cycle might start in a few days with the first RC (Release Candidate) version.
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KDBUS was once again heavily debated on the Linux kernel mailing list this week and Linus Torvalds said he looked forward to merging it when ready (and also had some choice words about performance). However, Greg KH has confirmed today that KDBUS isn’t ready for merging this cycle.
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While Greg Kroah-Hartman isn’t sending in KDBUS for Linux 4.2 as announced yesterday, he did send in the code updates for the other kernel subsystems he maintains.
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For those using the Global File System 2 (GFS2) for Linux clusters, the Linux 4.2 kernel is slated to offer better performance.
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie landed some of the OpenGL 4.x code he’s been playing with for AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver on the HD 7000 series GPUs and newer.
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Applications
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We reported a couple of weeks ago that the second maintenance of ownCloud Desktop Client 1.8 was out and work has started on the next point release, ownCloud Desktop Client 1.8.3, which was unveiled recently for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Telegram Desktop is an open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux. The client has support for notifications, sending messages and media files, and inserting emoji.
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As you may know, Phototonic is an image viewer and organizer for Linux systems, created in Qt and C++.
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Instructionals/Technical
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KDE touchpad configuration module supports both Libinput touchpad driver and Synaptics driver. Newer versions of distros like Fedora 22 comes with both libinput and synaptics drivers installed, where libinput driver is chosen by default for touchpads. Some users wanted to use synaptics driver and tweak all options exported by it using the touchpad KDE control module. To do so, simply uninstall the libinput driver (xorg-x11-drv-libinput) and touchpad kcm uses synaptics driver which makes all the kcm options tweak-able. Some of those users reported that after uninstalling libinput driver but keeping synaptics driver (xorg-x11-drv-synaptics), touchpad KCM displayed the error message “No touchpad found” and no options were editable as reported in this bug.
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Games
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VoidExpanse is a good looking and fun space RPG game from AtomicTorch Studio. It has recently been through some major updates, and they finally sorted a proper Linux structure for their data files.
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Oil Enterprise is a business simulation that has been available in steam Early Access for about a month and it has been available for Linux from day-1.
In the game you have to manage an oil company in all aspects from prospecting, refining and selling the oil. The game is split into three different layers: Oil field, world map and headquarters.
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Distance is a beautiful neon survival racer that I finally had a chance to play, and what I found really did surprise me.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries, Kolab Enteprise has gained data loss prevention (DLP) functionality this year that goes above and beyond what one tends to find in other groupware products. Kolab’s DLP is not just a back-up system that copies mails and other objects to disk for later restore, it actually creates a history of every groupware object in real-time that can later be examined and restored from. This will eventually lead to some very interesting business intelligent features.
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New Releases
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illume OS is a free and open source Debian based Linux distribution that is especially designed to run on note books, laptops and computers for students. It is very efficient, lightweight, stable and flexible Linux operating system that supports both 32 and 64 bit hardware platforms and ISO images and Live DVDs are available in both architectures. Its latest version 2.1.2 has been released now and we are going to discuss the introduced features and its install method in this article.
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SparkyLinux 4.0 is new release of this Debian based operating system, it is created on the testing branch of Debian and comes with multiple desktop environments. Its lightweight linux distro and this latest release comes with Linux kernel 4.0.5. The new release is available with KDE, Xfce, MATE, LXDE, and LXQt desktop environments.
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Arch Family
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Ringo de Kroon, Manajaro community support and IRC manager, had the great pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago the immediate availability for download of the Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 0.8.13 distribution.
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Slackware Family
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The VectorLinux developers were euphoric to announce today, June 27, the immediate availability for download of the final release of the VectorLinux 7.1 operating system derived from Slackware.
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Red Hat Family
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This year’s Red Hat Summit brought together the company’s executives, customers and partners from June 23 to 26 to discuss technology trends and product innovation. A key theme this year was Docker container technology, with Red Hat announcing its Atomic Enterprise Platform and the OpenShift Enterprise 3 platform. Atomic Enterprise brings an enterprise-grade supported host platform for the deployment and orchestration for Docker containers, while OpenShift is a platform-as-a-service offering targeting developers building, managing and deploying containers. At the conference, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst emphasized that open-source technology’s value isn’t just about licensed code, but about collaboration and communities. No Red Hat Summit event would be complete without at least one session on the roadmap for the core Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform, and the 2015 event was no exception. The next major update for the platform, RHEL 7.2, will include new performance capabilities for virtualization, security and networking. Here’s a look at highlights from the event.
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Many Samsung customers still struggle to bring their businesses to the mobility space, according to Robin Bienfait, chief executive innovation officer for Samsung Business Services.
“Leveraging the platform that Red Hat offers will allow us to bring that back end to the end user in the mobility domain,” she told theCUBE cohost Stu Miniman during Red Hat Summit 2015.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Cemil Azizoglu sent in his regular report to inform us all about the new features that were implemented in the third maintenance of Mir 0.13, the next-generation display server for the Ubuntu Linux operating system.
Mir 0.13.3 was released on June 26, as reported by Cemil Azizoglu, and it is a major maintenance version that brings important new features, various under-the-hood improvements, and fixes many of the bugs reported by users since the previous release.
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On first impressions, it feels more similar to Amazon’s Fire Phone than a straightforward Android phone in the way it presents information. I’m interested to see how the scopes work out over time though, so check back for a full review in the coming weeks.
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I don’t know about you, but I like my Linux distribution of choice to have the latest software versions installed, always. I like to know that I am using an up-to-date operating system. Is that so hard? Apparently yes, if you’re using Ubuntu.
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In recent weeks Aewin, ASRock, BCM, BioStar, ECS, and MSI have collectively announced a dozen Braswell based Mini-ITX boards that are all able to run Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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It seems that someone at Google decided that it’d just be more work than it’s worth to come up with a more pragmatic solution, so it used an emoticon instead to say¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And how many people actually use more than 100 tabs, in a mobile browser no less? Only psychopaths, probably.
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We recently got a chance to check out the big Chevrolet event in Detroit, Michigan, which allowed us to take a look at all things Android Auto. While many other auto manufacturers have revealed that a number of their new vehicles would come with Android Auto pre-installed, Chevrolet recently announced that it’s bringing Android Auto to 14 of its new 2016 model vehicles. Today we’re taking a look at the all-new 2016 Chevrolet Spark – an affordable vehicle for anyone who doesn’t want to break the bank.
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The NVIDIA SHIELD is one of the newest Android TV devices to land on the market. Not to mention, it is available in two different (and quite contrasting) size models, a 16GB internal storage version and the much larger 500GB variant. The NVIDIA Android TV option has been a device which has taken its time in coming to the market (at least from the consumer’s perspective) and is one of the more highly awaited devices. We have one here and will be looking at it in more detail over the coming weeks. Not to mention with our major review of the product to come soon. However, in the meantime, we thought it would be a good time to take a quick look at the SHIELD and provide some first and brief impressions of the device.
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No matter how many times we say DevOps is a culture and a mindset, it’s hard to deny that it is also a fairly sizeable chest of tools.
Target operates two main data centers to support its retail locations as well as distribution centers. The retail giant moved to an enterprise DevOps model to empower the backend IT team to provide technology services in an entrepreneurial way.
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BSD
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Electric Sheep Fencing, through Chris Buechler, has recently had the great pleasure of announcing that the third maintenance release of the stable pfSense 2.2 series is available for download and upgrade to all users of one of the best FreeBSD-based firewall.
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Openness/Sharing
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Eight years sounds like a long time to make a chair, but Munro insists that this method is the “faster, cheaper and more efficient” than the conventional method of mass production. Munro estimates that his grove of furniture has offset 5,000 kilograms of carbon since its initial planting, and only uses the equivalent energy consumed by ten 60-watt lightbulbs burning for eight hours per day, for a year. Full Grown furniture is estimated to have only one-quarter of the carbon footprint of conventionally mass-made furnishings.
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Open Hardware
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Among other interesting parts of the open source project – which has been released under the Creative Commons license for non-commercial use and can be downloaded over at Felfil.com – is that the design team has incorporated a number of commonly found objects into their final design. Among others include a bicycle chain and a windshield wiper motor. The decision to use these found parts certainly falls in line with the team’s dedication towards “giving new life to unused components”.
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Not really, no. Computers are exciting, liberating technology that are doing wonderful things in the world. I’m a technologist who is saddened by the state of computing, the things we’ve given up in an effort to digitize the world. We’ve given up privacy for the ability to show people what we’re eating, we’ve traded the ability to live without needing corporate overlords for the ability to always know if someone at work needs to get a hold of us. Technologists can be more closed minded and insular than anyone else while claiming to be liberal and open-minded. Tech culture and Silicon Valley culture make me sad.
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Using data from the CIA Factbook, Global Post created graphics to visualize the median age of every country in the world. The world’s 15 youngest countries are all in Africa.
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Security
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A vulnerability was found in the OpenID module that allows a malicious user to log in as other users on the site, including administrators, and hijack their accounts.
This vulnerability is mitigated by the fact that the victim must have an account with an associated OpenID identity from a particular set of OpenID providers (including, but not limited to, Verisign, LiveJournal, or StackExchange).
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As the world dives deeper and deeper into the digital depths of technology, with most civilizations dependent on computers and networks, with phone lines kept under the scrutiny of spy agencies – isn’t it time to talk to those, who were in on things at the beginning? Today’s special guest was a pioneer of digital technologies. The man, who hacked into phone lines from the White House to Vatican – and did it just for fun. Today we talk to John “Captain Crunch” Draper – the legendary hacker is on Sophie&Co.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The BBC are strangely promoting a lone gunman story of the attack in Sousse.
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Pawle was joined by CNN National Security Analyist Peter Bergen to discuss the matter. During the segment, the camera panned in repeatedly on the flag in question. CNN has not yet commented on the error.
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Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqi heard the murder case registered against Jonathan Banks in Islamabad for a drone strike which had killed several innocent civilians in North Waziristan in 2009.
The police submitted records of the correspondence they had with the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Secretariat on the case. Justice Siddiqui questioned how police could transfer the case without investigating it.
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The federal government on Thursday informed the Islamabad High Court (IHC) that the First Information Report (FIR) registered against former station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and his legal advisor has been cancelled. Barrister Jahangir Khan Jadoon, standing counsel of the federal government, informed the IHC that after cancellation of the FIR against former CIA station Chief Jonathan Banks and his legal advisor John A. Rizzo, the matter has been referred to the secretary FATA secretariat by the Islamabad police.
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Police registered the FIR in 2014 against CIA station chief Johnathan Banks and his legal aide John A. Rizzo on the direction of IHC on a petition filed by Kareem Khan.
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The government on Thursday informed the Islamabad High Court (IHC) that after cancellation of the FIR against former CIA station chief and his legal adviser, the Islamabad police have referred the case to the secretary Fata secretariat.
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…Britain’s military has carried out drone strikes…
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The Guardian and The New York Times suggested yesterday that the documents indicate British intelligence may have provided information to US agencies before the strike, which took place outside a recognised war zone.
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The paramount consideration of any country is its security. Today, threats to security takes sophisticated forms such as for instance the cyber terror, which have even upset the US. Today’s technology has enhanced the capabilities for so-called intelligence organisations such as the CIA, the RAW, the ISI, the MI6, MOSAD etc to destabilise and even overthrow a regime they dislike. In the circumstances we should be extra vigilant we should have the wherewithal to take preemptive action if we perceive any threat to national security. Although we had a war for over thirty years, and though it had an international dimension with India and many countries of the West involving themselves in various ways, we did not have a separate office to study the different strategic aspects and formulate policy.
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National-security interests justify the CIA keeping all documents related to its targeted drone-strike program secret, a federal judge ruled.
Though the American Civil Liberties Union had characterized its request as seeking only “factual information,” U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer noted Friday in Washington, D.C, that the request was far wider reaching.
“To the contrary, ACLU seeks explicit details on U.S. drone strikes that would be ‘sufficient to show the identity of the intended targets, assessed number of people killed, dates, status of those killed, agencies involved, the location of each strike, and the identities of those killed if known,’” she wrote. “Such details could reveal the scope of the drone program, its successes and limitations, the ‘methodology behind the assessments and the priorities of the agency’ and more.”
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Last week CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling went to prison. If he were white, he probably wouldn’t be there.
Sterling was one of the CIA’s few African-American case officers, and he became the first to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency. That happened shortly before the CIA fired him in late 2001. The official in Langley who did the firing face-to-face was John Brennan, now the CIA’s director and a close adviser to President Barack Obama.
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Here’s the thing about President Obama’s war on whistleblowers: In bringing espionage charges in nine cases involving disclosures or alleged misuse of classified information, the current administration has set a floor, rather than a ceiling, on the number and types of whistleblower espionage cases a future President can bring.
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The US attorney’s office and Howard County police said on Tuesday they have completed investigations into the 30 March incident at a security gate outside the agency off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
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On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Scheer discusses why the mass movements of the 1960s subsided
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Good times in spookland as biz gains $20bn valuation for latest funding round
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These talks broke down after the Saudi Arabian and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) backed politician, the ousted and fugitive President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, demanded that he be re-installed as the head-of-state in order for a halt to the bombing of the country which has been taking place daily since March 26.
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I believe Desmond Tutu to be a decent person. Unfortunately, having a good heart isn’t enough to prevent somebody from supporting terrible things. As Malcolm X put it, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” To the newspapers Malcolm X mentioned, we should add NGOs who are embedded in the western establishment.
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The onetime CIA informant hadn’t spoken to a journalist since a 1996 interview with CNN’s Larry King from a Miami federal prison, where following his capture by American troops he was sent for being a major conduit for Colombian cocaine traffickers.
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Wikileaks has published documents which it says shows that the US National Security Agency spied on French president Francois Hollande and his two immediate predecessors between 2006 and 2012.
The US was interested in France’s leading of the Libya intervention and Europe’s handling of the economic crisis during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, as well as Francois Hollande’s policy on Mali, said former CIA officer Michael Scheuer.
When there was a clear threat from a common enemy, Western allies were a “closed club” who refrained from spying on each-other, said the Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University.
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Earlier this month, a largely redacted investigator’s report from 2005 on the twin towers attacks, was further declassified. This release, while proposed as a bid toward transparency, has been criticized, as not going far enough in uncovering the US’s Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) full knowledge of events surrounding the attack.
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The blueprint for a new transition plan involves a dual command structure—giving the Defense Department and the CIA joint control of drone strikes.
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President Barack Obama has abandoned plans to consolidate his drone program under Pentagon control in favor of a plan that would give the Defense Department and the CIA joint control of drone strikes.
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President Barack Obama has abandoned his two-year push to consolidate his controversial targeted killing program under Pentagon control and has spent the past several months finalizing a new plan that would give the Defense Department and the CIA joint control of drone strikes, sources tell The Huffington Post.
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Show me someone who publicly insists that the United States has an effective counterterrorism strategy, and I’ll show you someone who draws a paycheck from the U.S. government.
“This week we have seen success across a broad spectrum,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters on June 16, commenting on the death of Yemeni al Qaeda leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, reportedly killed as a result of a U.S. drone strike. “Any time a terrorist is removed from the battlefield, is killed or captured, I think the net gain outweighs any potential loss.”
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Murphy admits, quite openly, that his party has long been afraid to stand up to Republicans on foreign policy. He wants to play a role somewhat akin to what Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders have done on domestic policy: articulate a new left flank in the debate that could actually change the conversation inside the party.
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French spies secretly organized and funded the Libyan rebels who defeated Moammar Gadhafi, according to confidential emails to Hillary Clinton that were made public on June 22.
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A Spanish court seven years ago listed Karake in a roll-call of 40 army officers it meant to prosecute for genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda during the 1990s. Andreu accused Karake and 39 others of ordering revenge massacres of ethnic Hutus in the wake of the 1994 genocide as well as the kill of three Spanish aid workers for Medicos del Mundo.
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The Rwandan foreign minister accused Spanish non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which she said were behind the arrest warrant, of backing the FDLR.
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She headed his legal team in his fight against extradition to Spain.
Karake, 54, is accused of ordering massacres while head of military intelligence in the wake of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Among the victims are said to be three Spanish nationals working for aid charity Medicos del Mundo.
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Mr Watkins argued Karake should not be granted bail as there were “substantial grounds” to believe he would flee the country.
Johnston Busingye, Rwanda’s Minister of Justice, said government has contacted British authorities and asked for clarification on what it termed “the abduction of the senior security official”. A precise location was not specified publicly during the hearing.
Dozens of Karake’s supporters gathered outside the court to protest against his arrest and demanded the court release him. “This is the best it gets with this legal system”.
Karake is part of a circle of top military officers in the ex- Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel movement, which is now the country’s ruling party. The Spanish government alleged that, since General Pinochet had been accused of torture, a crime against humanity, any country in the world had the jurisdiction to try him for it, due to the gravity of the crime.
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Cherie Blair helped secure bail for Rwanda’s intelligence chief today as he fights extradition to Spain in connection with alleged war crimes.
The wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London where she was working as part of General Karenzi Karake’s defence team.
The 54-year-old director-general of Rwanda’s national intelligence agency was arrested in the UK on behalf of authorities in Spain, where he is wanted over alleged crimes against civilians.
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The recent killings in Charleston once again invite us to ponder how western Europe differs from the United States. Nobody who has passed through Northern Ireland in July should get too hoity-toity about the controversy concerning the Confederate flag. The US government’s continuing inability to engage with gun control does, however, point up that this really is a whole other country.
When Alice Tripp, senior official in the Texas Rifle Association, argues that nothing in proposed legislation would have stopped the perpetrator carrying out the attacks, her friends elsewhere in the pro-gun lobby nod sagely. In this part of the world we note that this is because none of the restrictions currently under consideration come close to having anything you could call teeth.
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The Turkish political party representing the country’s Kurdish minority blamed the Turkish government and its support for the Islamic State for the group’s renewed offensive against the town of Kobane, which was secured by Kurdish militias after months of fighting.
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Last August the president began his air war against the Islamic State which controls two Iraqi provincial capitals and the city of Falluja. Obama declared that his purpose was to “dismantle” the I.S. By April of this year, the Pentagon’s 4,050 missile and bombing strikes against IS in Iraq and Syria had cost over $2.1 billion, over $8 million a day, but without any success. Then on May 16, after assuring the country that “I will not allow the US to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” the president sent a group of US commandos on their first raid into Syria. Since Congress has not declared war, this unauthorized attack and intensification would make Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon proud. Can the Nobel Committee withdraw a Peace Prize for cause?
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Transparency Reporting
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Classified documents appear on WikiLeaks.org, revealing that the American government is spying on its allies. American officials rush to deal with a sudden diplomatic crisis while publicly refusing to comment on leaked materials. And WikiLeaks proclaims that it’s just getting started.
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Wikileaks spokeswoman Kristinn Hrafnsson said that France will most likely not offer political asylum to whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange regardless of the French Justice Ministry’s predictions.
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After the reveal of the scandal, France summoned the U.S. ambassador while the U.S. said there will be more cooperation between the two countries. Moreover, White House wanted Hollande to be sure that he is not wiretapped. However, France gave a political response to the U.S. through saying that asylum may be offered to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
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French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira said Thursday she “wouldn’t be surprised” if France decided to offer asylum to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy for more than two years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors want to question him about 2010 allegations that he raped one woman and sexually molested another.
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France should respond to the U.S.’s “contempt” for its allies by giving Edward Snowden asylum, the leftist French daily newspaper Libération declared on Thursday.
France would send “a clear and useful message to Washington, by granting this bold whistleblower the asylum to which he is entitled,” editor Laurent Joffrin wrote (translated from the French) in an angry editorial titled “Un seul geste” — or “A single gesture.”
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French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira would “absolutely not be surprised” if whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received asylum in France.
“It would be a symbolic gesture,” Taubira told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday, adding that it would not be her decision to offer asylum, but that of the French Prime Minister and President.
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American and European security agencies are reportedly investigating a possible new whistleblower behind the WikiLeaks publication that exposed alleged NSA spying on top French officials, including three presidents.
The website on Tuesday released what appear to be classified NSA documents alleging the US agency spied on three successive French presidents: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and incumbent François Hollande.
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French officials have reacted with outrage to new WikiLeaks revelations that the US spied on French presidents. But some analysts say the response is just an act of political theatre from a nation that does some significant spying of its own.
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Friday’s document drop consisted of around 60,000 different files. Almost all of these documents are scanned pieces of paper, written in Arabic.
Wikileaks claim they have more than half a million files, and they’re going to be released in batches of tens of thousands over the next few weeks.
Naturally, with this many documents, there’s a lot of inconsequential memos that don’t give too much away. However, only around 12 per cent of the documents have been released so far, and they contain some very important information.
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WikiLeaks’ publication of more than 60,000 Saudi documents has set pens racing across the Middle East with disclosures about the secretive Arab monarchy’s foreign affairs. But lost amid the torrent of revelations are offbeat memos showing the underbelly of Riyadh’s diplomacy, including candid accounts of booze runs and pork smuggling.
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A financially troubled Lebanese TV network received a $2 million Saudi bailout in return for adopting a pro-Riyadh editorial policy.
A news agency in Guinea got a $2,000 gift, while small publications across the Arab world received tens of thousands of dollars in inflated subscription fees.
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A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom’s diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved.
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That scandal came back to life this week when the Associated Press reported on Saudi Arabian embassy memos released by WikiLeaks suggesting that almost all of the students who were involved were Saudis studying in the U.S. on government scholarships and that their government attempted to shield them from potential criminal liability.
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Montana Tech’s chancellor said Tuesday that he did not conspire to fly students involved in a grade-changing scandal out of the U.S., despite recently published Saudi Embassy memos saying he suggested removing them from the country to avoid deportation or arrest.
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Documents published by WikiLeaks recently revealed that many of the students who had their grades changed were Saudis, and that they gave tokens of appreciation to a college employee who changed their transcripts.
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Last year violence broke out near a Mosque in Bommanhalli, Bengaluru and what was being termed as minor tiff was in fact a case of some youth trying to impose the Wahabi preachings.
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It’s no secret that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals, and speculation has long existed as to whether the oil-rich country had a hand in aiding al-Qaeda’s actions on that fateful day. Conspiracy theorists have long speculated that the U.S. is hiding a Saudi connection to 9/11 due to their high reliance on their petroleum.
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Damascus, Jun 25 (Prensa Latina) Documents revealed by WikiLeaks show the Saudi government”s commitment to the terrorist groups al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
International media and several websites on Thursday published letters and documents that confirm Saudi Arabia’s financial, logistic and military support for the armed extremist groups that operate in Arab countries, mainly in Syria.
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France sought to go ahead with a bid to restart direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 2011, and even considered keeping other world powers out of the effort and issuing an ultimatum to the United States, according to a leaked cable released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday.
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The federal government is facing a mounting pile of electronic documents and other material that are due to be reviewed for declassification. But there just aren’t enough people and enough budget to meet the statutory deadlines.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Prince Turki bin Saud bin Mohammad Al Saud belongs to the family that rules Saudi Arabia. He wears a white thawb and ghutra, the traditional robe and headdress of Arab men, and he has a cavernous office hung with portraits of three Saudi royals. When I visited him in Riyadh this spring, a waiter poured tea and subordinates took notes as Turki spoke. Everything about the man seemed to suggest Western notions of a complacent functionary in a complacent, oil-rich kingdom.
[...]
Such talk sounds revolutionary in Saudi Arabia, for decades a poster child for fossil-fuel waste. The government sells gasoline to consumers for about 50 cents a gallon and electricity for as little as 1 cent a kilowatt-hour, a fraction of the lowest prices in the United States. As a result, the highways buzz with Cadillacs, Lincolns, and monster SUVs; few buildings have insulation; and people keep their home air conditioners running—often at temperatures that require sweaters—even when they go on vacation.
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Slowly, the earth began moving. The ground underneath buildings started to sink as the water supporting it was pumped to the surface. One family reported a quarter-inch crack that started in the kitchen floor and began creeping throughout the house.
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When natural gas was discovered a few years ago off the shores of resource-poor Israel, it was heralded as nothing short of a miracle, but an emerging deal with developers has been plagued by criticism, with opponents accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of caving to a monopoly.
After long negotiations, a government committee has struck a deal with the firms, which aims to break up their monopolistic control of Israel’s gas reserves and introduce competition while maintaining incentives for fresh investment. But liberal lawmakers and environmentalists say the deal would squander a national treasure.
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Finance
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Just ten years ago, Ghana had the most reliable electricity supply in all of Africa and the highest percentage of households connected to the grid in all of Africa – including South Africa. The Volta River Authority, the power producer and distributor was, in my very considerable experience, the best run and most efficient public utility in all of Africa. Indeed it was truly world class, and Ghana was proud of it.
Obviously the sight of truly successful public owned and run enterprise was too much of a threat to the neo-liberal ideologues of the IMF and World Bank. When Ghana needed some temporary financial assistance (against a generally healthy background) the IMF insisted that VRA be broken up. Right wing neoliberal dogma was applied to the Ghanaian electricity market. Electricity was separated between production and distribution, and private sector Independent Power Producers introduced.
The result is disaster. There are more power cuts in Ghana than ever in its entire history as an independent state. Today Ghana is actually, at this moment, producing just 900 MW of electricity – half what it could produce ten years ago. This is not the fault of the NDC or the NPP. It is the fault of the IMF.
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First, it is difficult to describe the default in Argentina as a disaster. The economy had been plummeting prior to the default, which occurred at the end of the year in 2001. The country’s GDP had actually fallen more before the default than it did after the default. (This is not entirely clear on the graph, since the data is annual. At the point where the default took place in December of 2001, Argentina’s GDP was already well below the year-round average.) While the economy did fall more sharply after the default, it soon rebounded, and by the end of 2003 it had regained all the ground lost following the default.
Argentina’s economy continued to grow rapidly for several more years, rising above pre-recession levels in 2004. Given the fuller picture, it is difficult to see the default as an especially disastrous event, even if it did lead to several months of uncertainty for the people of Argentina.
In this respect, it is worth noting that Paul Volcker is widely praised in policy circles for bringing down the US inflation rate. To accomplish this goal, he induced a recession that pushed the unemployment rate to almost 11 percent. So the idea that short-term pain might be a price worth paying for a longer-term benefit is widely accepted in policy circles.
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The moment approaches when every American sees that the 1% are taking it away. Then we each make a choice to go with the flow or resist. Here are a few events that show this time is close. I’ve predicted the events leading to this point, but have no idea how we’ll react. Much depends on our choice.
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You see, when the dollar reigns supreme, countries like China and Russia unwittingly find themselves paying for U.S. military expansion.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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After the Senate joined the House of Representatives in granting President Barack Obama fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements, National Public Radio aired one report (Morning Edition, 6/25/15) on the legislative action that paves the way for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and other corporate-friendly international deals.
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Larry King’s back on the air, beaming his high-octane brand of talk to households around the world. Where can you catch him? Kremlin-backed television.
Moscow wants you to pay better attention to what it’s saying, and to better reach your eyes and ears it’s spending around a half-billion dollars a year and carrying top-name talent like King and former governor and professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
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With all of the establishment media owned by just a handful of corporations, six to be exact, it’s never been easier for the U.S. government to manipulate the news. A diversity of outlets, from websites to traditional newspapers, repeat the same stories to create an illusion of choice that allows propaganda to take root in the American imagination.
Infiltration of the media by intelligence agencies has been standard practice since at least the 1950s, as exposed by watchdog journalist Carl Bernstein in a landmark 1977 report for Rolling Stone.
“The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA,” wrote Bernstein.
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Censorship
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Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals.
Following the ruling, Google removed a large number of links from its search results, including some to BBC web pages, and continues to delist pages from BBC Online.
The BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google’s search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, we’ll republish this list with new removals added at the top.
We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC’s online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.
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A couple of days ago, I wrote about the difficulties Apple would face if it tried to censor the Confederate flag in its online stores. Unfortunately, the company – under Tim Cook’s leadership – wasted no time in engaging in reactionary censorship of the Confederate flag in its app store.
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Julian Assange (JA): We have contracts with more than a hundred media organizations around the world, still. But it varies among mainstream press outlets. For example, the one in Pakistan can be great on issues outside of Pakistan. Issues inside Pakistan are different. It’s the same for Russia Today, outside Russia and Ukraine, it can be great, but inside Russia is a different story and through this we need to understand the political and economic dynamics that mean the organization might be trustworthy on one matter and not trustworthy on another matter.
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In the eyes of at least one intellectual property academic, the passing of controversial anti-piracy website-blocking legislation in the senate on Monday night represented “a very dark day for the internet in Australia”.
But for the film and TV industry, which has been battling online piracy at record levels, it was a watershed moment. Finally they could seek a remedy in the courts to block access to sites offering their content for free.
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Since our report last week on Australia’s Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites that have the primary purpose of infringing copyright, or “facilitating” its infringement—a term that the law does not define.
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The Pirate Party condemns the passage of the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 through both Houses of Parliament. The legislation means that Australia now joins a list of countries that allows individuals and companies to seek orders to censor websites they allege infringe copyright.
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Google, once a global bastion against censorship, is having a pretty tough time of it these days. From being forced to comply with Right To Be Forgotten legislation in the EU to pressure from numerous industries to censor results which may violate copyright, Google’s defenses against censorship are crumbling. Even Google themselves — arguably in a very positive move — is taking steps to censor their own results when it comes to “revenge porn” and hacking victims, as previously reported by the Inquisitr.
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Google is in a tough spot. For years, it has met censorship demands in different countries by offering a local workaround. But now some judges have caught on and are asking the company to rip out search listings worldwide – a trend that is likely to embolden more courts to do the same.
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PBS said on Wednesday that it was postponing a future season of “Finding Your Roots” after an investigation revealed that the actor Ben Affleck pressured producers into leaving out details about an ancestor of his who owned slaves.
PBS will not run the show’s third season until staffing changes are made, including hiring a fact checker, it said.
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PBS has suspended the ancestry-finding program Finding Your Roots following allegations that actor Ben Affleck used his clout to get the network to censor information about a slave-owning ancestor, the Washington Post is reporting.
Affleck appeared in a 2014 episode of Finding Your Roots that the actor had hoped would reveal information about his ancestors that would give credibility toward the actor’s interest in activism in progressive causes, says Post writer Sarah Kaplan. And, in fact, the show did turn up some ancestors that made Affleck look good, including an ancestor who had fought in the Revolutionary War.
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An episode of Finding Your Roots which omitted references to Ben Affleck’s ancestor as a slave owner violated PBS standards, the public TV service has said.
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Others reiterated a previous demand that the district should release to the public the reason for Nguyen’s dismissal. They also asked for accessible video recordings of future board meetings, as well as meeting minutes written in various languages to accommodate the surrounding population.
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Last month Singapore teenager Amos Yee was found guilty of circulating obscene imagery and “wounding religious feelings,” after posting a YouTube rant in which he criticized the recently deceased Lee Kuan Yew, the nation’s widely revered first prime minister. Today Yee was scheduled to receive his sentence.
Instead, he has been remanded at a mental health institute for a few weeks.
A district judge said that because Yee possibly suffers from an autism spectrum disorder, she’ll explore other sentencing options besides the up to three years in prison Yee faced.
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“If we want our freedom, we have to fight for it,” wrote blogger Roy Ngerng last year after he was sued for defamation by Singapore’s prime minister. The case was sparked by a blog post in which Ngerng allegedly suggested Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had misappropriated funds in a state pension system. In November, the court ruled in favor of the prime minister.
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Criticizing the leaders of Singapore can come with a high price.
Last year, blogger Roy Ngerng was sued for defamation by Singapore’s current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Ngerng had suggested that the leader had misappropriated funds in a state pension system.
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A Singapore court on Tuesday ordered psychiatric tests for a teenager who made online attacks on late former leader Lee Kuan Yew as international rights advocates sought his release.
Amos Yee, 16, will be remanded at the Institute of Mental Health for two weeks to undergo further examination after previously being declared mentally and physically fit for an 18-month stint in a reformatory.
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16-year-old Singaporean blogger Amos Yee is facing up to three years in prison for uploading remarks and images critical of the late Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore.
Now, the UN Human Rights Office calls for the immediate release of Amos Yee in line with its commitment under the UN Convention on the Rights of Child.
Amos was remanded on Jun. 2 for three weeks after he refused probation and is currently detained in Changi prison where, according to his lawyer, his physical and psychological status is deteriorating, the United Nations Human Rights Office for South-East Asia (OHCHR) said in a statement.
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Journalist Lukasz Masiak, founder of news site NaszaMlawa.pl, was attacked and killed in Poland on 14 June 2015. Masiak, who had been subject to numerous threats believed to be connected to his work, died of traumatic brain injury after being assaulted, according to TVN24.
Launched in 2010, NaszaMlawa.pl covers Mlawa, a town of about 30,000 in the north central part of Poland. Masiak’s site reported on several controversial issues, including the dealings of local businessmen, drug use involving participants of the local mixed martial arts league, incidents involving Roma citizens in the area and the botched investigation into the death of a young woman. He received death threats following the latter story.
The attack on 31-year-old Masiak took place in the bathroom of a local establishment at about 2am on 14 June. Police have issued an international arrest warrant for Bartosz Nowicki, a 29-year-old mixed martial arts fighter. Two people who were earlier detained have now been released. Police consider them witnesses to the incident.
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) calls on all students to oppose the political censorship imposed on the IYSSE student club at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), Bankstown campus.
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Significantly, IYSSE supporters were first forced to shut down a campaign in April, amid a deluge of militarist propaganda by the entire political establishment, including the universities, to glorify the centenary of the “Anzac Day” British-led invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli.
On April 23, IYSSE supporters distributed statements advertising a Socialist Equality Party public meeting entitled “Anzac Day, the glorification of militarism and the drive to World War III.” The leaflets called on students, workers and young people to oppose the political censorship of that meeting by the Labor Party-controlled Burwood Council, which cancelled a booking for the event, and the University of Sydney, which refused to permit the meeting to be held on its campus.
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Take a browse through the data that’s presented for each country, and you’ll eventually come to the USA. While ‘Content Restrictions’ in Turkey are justified (“We restricted access to items primarily reported by the Turkish courts (and Access Providers Union) and Telecommunications Authority under local law 5651, which covers a range of offenses including defamation of Ataturk, personal rights violations, and personal privacy”) as are those in Russia, the Content Restrictions section is notable by its absence from the United States’ page.
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Culture Minister Miri Regev, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party who has been unabashed in her disdain for artistic projects that criticize the Israeli occupation, was at Tel Aviv’s Einav Theater on Friday to present an award. She was booed by the protesters as she entered the theater, and heckled by several audience members as she took the stage.
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In reaction to culture minister’s decision to freeze funds to Arab theater which staged play about Israeli-Arab terrorist, a meeting of Arab artists and MKs says it will seek funds from the EU.
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The newly appointed Minister of Culture Miri Regev sparks strong criticism. A series of recent statements lead to believe freedom of expression could be threatened by the government’s policies.
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Miri Regev, the hard-right Israeli Minister of Culture, has accused the country’s artists and performers of being “tight-assed” hypocrites after they raised vocal objections to her policies, which many consider a threat to freedom of expression.
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With her ‘delegitimization’ obsession, the minister has to realize her paranoia is shaking the foundations of local culture.
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Two words have been embedded in the consciousness of millions of Israelis recently: Miri Regev, Miri Regev and again Miri Regev. Compared to her, who is the immigrant absorption minister, the housing minister, or even the finance minister?
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Demonstrators protest ‘atmosphere of dictatorship’ created by Likud pol day after she calls artists ‘ungrateful tight-asses’
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Twenty leftist protestors have gathered outside the Israeli Theater Awards ceremony at the Einav center in Tel Aviv on Friday, to protest alleged censorship from current Culture Minister Miri Regev (Likud).
The activists carried blank signs and bandages on their mouths to say they are “being silenced,” so to speak.
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Today’s New York Times has an interesting story about a satirical political show in Gaza inspired by Jon Stewart. Headlined, “A Show Finds Humor in Gaza’s Headlines. Will Hamas Get It?” the article says the Gaza comics have screened their political show for hundreds at a theater, and aim to put the episodes on Youtube.
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Ursula Hedwig Meta Haverbeck-Wetzel, an 86-year-old German woman who was ethnically cleansed from her home following WWII, has been arrested following her appearance on a public television program in Germany. There, she openly disputed the state-sanctioned-and-enforced “Holocaust” narrative of WWII, describing it as “the biggest and most persistent lie in history.” In many countries in Europe, including Germany, it is a crime to dispute, question or openly challenge the official narrative of the Holocaust specifically and WWII generally.
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Privacy
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During the approach to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s re-scheduled visit to the United States there has been much talk about what Brasil can do to improve relations between two of the Western Hemisphere’s largest countries. The majority of reporting focuses on Brazilian failures but most of the problem lies in Washington.
Decades of weak engagement by the United States combined with a willful blindness towards why the Brazilian government is suspicious of the their northern neighbour’s intentions in the region have left relations near stagnant.
As Brasil Wire discussed in Chasing the Dragon the United States has too often confused its own interests with those of Brasil. Brasil is a friend to the United States, but Brazilian leaders, especially those on the left, have had little interest in engaging with Washington as anything but equals. The Brazilian leadership did not pursue closer relations with China, and to a much more limited extent Russia out of an ideological position, but a cold pragmatism that would make Henry Kissinger proud.
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Earlier this year I did an hour long interview with James Risen. We discussed his case with the Department of Justice, where he was being threatened with incarceration for refusing to reveal his source who gave him insights about NSA activities. This was before Obama and Eric Holder decided to drop the prosecution against him. I saw him give the keynote speech at the luncheon for the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2015 conference and after his talk, in which he lambasted former Attorney General Eric Holder, I asked him to do a brief interview, based on his comments on Obama, Eric Holder and their legacies.
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I always knew this day would come. The day that Facebook decided my name was not real enough and summarily cut me off from my friends, family and peers and left me with the stark choice between using my legal name or using a name people would know me by. With spectacular timing, it happened while I was at trans pride and on the day the Supreme Court made same sex marriage legal in the US.
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On this day in 1975, William Colby, director of the CIA, told members of a House subcommittee that they and their congressional colleagues were not “immune” from surveillance by the agency during their travels abroad.
Testifying before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, Colby said “if a congressman appeared abroad with some group that was a legitimate target of this agency that name would undoubtedly appear in the files of that group” and would show up in the CIA’s computer system.
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A CIA-backed technology company has found logins and passwords for 47 government agencies strewn across the Web — available for hackers, spies and thieves.
Recorded Future, a social media data mining firm backed by the CIA’s venture capital arm, says in a report that login credentials for nearly every federal agency have been posted on open Internet sites for those who know where to look.
“The presence of these credentials on the open Web leaves these agencies vulnerable to espionage, socially engineered attacks, and tailored spear-phishing attacks against their workforce,” the company says.
The company says logins and passwords were found connected with the departments of Defense, Justice, Treasury and Energy, as well as the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence.
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WikiLeaks published documents late Tuesday that it says show the US National Security Agency eavesdropped on the last three French presidents, releasing material which appeared to capture officials in Paris talking candidly about Greece’s economy, relations with Germany – and, ironically, American espionage.
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Angry and embarrassed, France summoned the U.S. ambassador Wednesday to respond to the revelations by WikiLeaks that the U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropped on three successive French presidents and other top officials.
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I told you yesterday about the leaked files showing that the NSA wiretapped three French presidents since 1995. France is understandably upset, what with being an ally and all.
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On June 23rd, WikiLeaks unveiled a number of documents from the National Security Agency’s “Espionnage Elysée” program, that demonstrated the NSA’s targeted espionage against high level French government officials, including ministers and three presidents of the French Republic. This espionage against U.S. allies is tactless and is likely to fray relations with U.S. allies and must be reformed.
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Of course, Mr Crypto himself, Bruce Schneier, did spot it, and pointed out it could be one of his “other” US intelligence community leakers, listed a couple of months ago, or even a completely new one. As that post shows, there are now a few people around that are leaking secret documents, and that’s a pretty significant trend, since you might expect enhanced security measures taken in the wake of Snowden’s leaks would have discouraged or caught anyone who attempted to follow suit.
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American and European security agencies are reportedly investigating a possible new whistleblower behind the WikiLeaks publication that exposed alleged NSA spying on top French officials, including three presidents.
The website on Tuesday released what appear to be classified NSA documents alleging the US agency spied on three successive French presidents: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and incumbent François Hollande.
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Barack Obama has assured the French president, François Hollande, that American intelligence services are no longer tapping his phone. During a brief telephone call, the American leader was reported to have reiterated a pledge made two years ago to stop spying on his French counterpart, according to Hollande’s office.
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U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed in a phone call with his French counterpart Francois Hollande on Wednesday Washington’s commitment to end spying practices deemed “unacceptable” by its allies.
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French ministers seemed keen to resume business as usual with the US on Thursday, even though Paris the day before declared American wiretaps on President François Hollande and others “unacceptable”. Despite WikiLeaks’ revelation of the snooping, Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron continued his visit to the US, while promising to raise the question in Washington.
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On Tuesday, WikiLeaks published documents revealing that the NSA had secretly spied on former French presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and current President Francois Hollande over a period of at least six years.
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In another revelation, GCHQ spied on South African Legal Resources Centre and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Britain’s official Investigatory Powers Tribunal revealed.
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During the meeting of the Normandy group in Paris, Russia’s Foreign Ministry noticed how the microphones were operating “strangely”, turning on and off by themselves; the blinking lights caused the diplomats to joke that the US is probably up to its usual tricks again. One however should give it a thought in light of WikiLeaks recent revelations.
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WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said he was confident the documents were authentic, noting that WikiLeaks’ previous mass disclosures — including a large cache of Saudi diplomatic memos released last week — have proven to be accurate.
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Despite the furious protests of France over the latest U.S. spying claims, experts say that in the intelligence game there are no friends or enemies — only interests — and all means are justified to pursue them.
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The NSA’s actions have roots in progressive New Deal ideology, with its contempt for the constitutional separation of powers and private property rights. More specifically, this debate is traced to the New Deal-era erosion of the centuries-old rule of law that only judges may issue warrants, and after a showing of probable cause.
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The NSA’s spying activities in France will have an impact on transatlantic relations, Germany’s foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier told DW in an interview. He also called for new approaches in the attempt to stem violence in Ukraine.
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When it comes to intrusions on their privacy, Americans don’t care as much as they think they should. Most of us feel the same way about privacy as we do about African children: We care just enough to say we care.
According to a Pew Research Center survey last month, 90 percent of Americans consider their privacy to be “important,” but 10 percent or less take significant steps to safeguard it. Lots of people (59 percent) clear their cookies and browser histories — probably because they would be divorced if they didn’t — but only 10 percent bother to encrypt their phone calls, texts or emails. Our privacy is important, but not so important as to require more than three seconds of effort.
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Three days after the New York Times revealed that the U.S. government was secretly monitoring the calls and emails of people inside the United States without court-approved warrants, the National Security Agency issued a top-secret assessment of the damage done to intelligence efforts by the story. The conclusion: the information could lead terrorists to try to evade detection. Yet the agency gave no specific examples of investigations that had been jeopardized.
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Voice recognition technologies are part of the future, but should trigger concern that IT companies are essentially building “listening networks” which can be exploited by the likes of the NSA, Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge told RT.
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By now, most experts will admit that Google is one giant data and intelligence gathering operation. This latest browser revelation (see full story below) only confirms what we already suspected.
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If you’re running Google Chrome as your browser – and we used to – you might want to reconsider it. The bottom line is that Google has built a “feature” into Chrome that, without your knowledge and without your permission, turns the microphone of your computer (and phone?) on and listens to everything you say.
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There’s a curious gap in the documents currently posted on the FISC’s public docket — one that suggests the NSA call records program isn’t the only type of bulk collection the government has asked the FISC to reauthorize following the USA Freedom Act’s passage on June 2. It’s an exercise in reading tea leaves at this point, but the gap raises important and unanswered questions about bulk collection programs we still know little about.
In the weeks since the USA Freedom Act became law, the FISC has published a series of filings and orders on its website. Those documents indicate that the government has submitted at least four applications for orders under the post-USA Freedom version of Section 215. One of them, docketed as BR 15-75, is the government’s application to restart the NSA’s bulk call records program. (The “BR” stands for FISA’s “business records” provision, while “15” stands for the year.) Two others, numbered BR 15-77 and BR 15-78, are addressed by Judge Saylor’s opinion concerning the appointment of an amicus curiae and the question of whether Section 215’s brief expiration made gibberish of Congress’ effort to renew the law in the USA Freedom Act. Based on the description in the opinion and the scope of the issues addressed, one can fairly surmise that these are targeted applications for records under Section 215.
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New documents provided by former American secret service employee-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden claim that the U.S. and UK security services have been carrying out attacks against antivirus developers around the world, including Russian company Kaspersky Lab.
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Popular antivirus company, Kaspersky has made a controversial announcement declaring that it is being attacked by hackers, who have been tracking the activities of the Russian company. A report from Engadget reveals that a few of these unwarranted activities are also sourced from major intelligentsia like the American NSA and UK’s GCHQ.
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The U.S. and United Kingdom have been trying to find ways around anti-virus and security software by surreptitiously studying the products and the companies that make them, according to various published reports.
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The British and American spy agencies deliberately broke anti-virus software so that they could read the messages of their citizens, according to new leaks.
Both the NSA and GCHQ have long been said to have deliberately reversed engineer software so that they could find weaknesses in software and exploit them to read communications. But new documents show that the agencies did so to some of the most popular antivirus software, potentially exposing hundreds of millions of people to dangerous viruses, according to a report from The Intercept.
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Earlier this week, fresh Edward Snowden leaks showed how the National Security Agency (NSA) targeted a range of foreign antivirus firms. It was no surprise intelligence agencies were interested in exploiting antivirus; such security software has access to most files across operating systems, from Windows to Macs.
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Apparently former NSA contractor and secret document leaker Edward Snowden is not planning on leaving Moscow anytime soon. According to Snowden’s attorney Anatoly Kucherena, who was recently interviewed by Interfax, he can’t go back to the U.S. right now given the various legal charges against him are politically motivated.
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The video, which appears to incite rebellion among the ranks of the Ecuadorean police department, is particularly alarming due to the role of the police in a 2010 coup attempt against President Rafael Correa.
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Turkey, as a NATO country near Russia’s border, developed a powerful “deep state” where intelligence operatives, terrorists and gangsters crossed paths and shared political alliances, a grim reality that author Martin A. Lee explored in 1997 and a dark legacy that reaches to the present.
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Now we know that the separatists in Tibet have been in touch with the US government since the 1950s. The CIA and the Dalai Lama have always held hands. His brother, especially his oldest brother Thubten Jigme Norbu, was recruited by the CIA’s “Radio Free Asia.” Gyalo Dondrub was recruited as CIA’s anti-Communism terrorist.
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Recently, President Barack Obama’s friend whom he appointed to represent this Vcountry at the United Nations visited Ukraine and used the Ukrainian-language translation and variant of the German Nazi Party’s “Deutschland über alles,” or “Germany above all,” to honor Ukraine’s own racist fascists, that nation’s ideological nazis, whom the U.S. had used in February 2014 for overthrowing Ukraine’s neutralist democratically elected President. This was not our U.N. Ambassador’s first foray into international nazi political pandering.
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Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko requests the supreme court of Ukraine to declare that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown by an illegal operation; in other words, that the post-Yanukovych government, including Poroshenko’s own Presidency, came into power from a coup, not from something democratic, not from any authentic constitutional process at all.
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Lobbyists representing former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili met with staffers from US Senator Marco Rubio’s office just months before Rubio called for integrating Georgia into the NATO alliance as a way of punishing Russia, a US campaign finance watchdog group said in a blog post.
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“Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.” Such was the lament of Svetlana Alliluyeva, whose life sentence it was to be the only daughter of Joseph Stalin.
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But their dreams of living the life they imagined defectors enjoy – having the run of Europe with new identities, invented histories and flush with money – are long gone. Instead they get to live like so many Americans, struggling to make ends meet, fighting off the debt collectors and worrying about the immigration service banging on the door.
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Menwith Hill is the largest US spy base outside the USA. Run by the National Security Agency (National Reconnaissance Office also present), it is situated in the Yorkshire dales, approximately 8 miles from Harrogate adjacent to the A59.
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Digital liberties groups across the country have both celebrated and criticized the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act. Here at EFF, we did a little bit of both. While USA Freedom will undoubtedly impact the court cases challenging the NSA’s mass surveillance, the full scope of this law and how the courts and even the government will interpret it remains unclear.
However, we do know that the government believes it can renew its daily bulk collection of telephone records during the 180-day “transition period” in which USA Freedom’s amendments to the phone records authority goes into effect. This is particularly troubling given the Second Circuit’s ruling in ACLU v. Clapper that this sort of dragnet surveillance is illegal.
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China has openly denied involvement in the break-in. Obama administration officials have said they are increasingly confident that China’s government, not criminal hackers, were responsible.
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The U.S. military’s top cyber warrior says it’s merely an “assumption” that the Chinese government was behind the recent hack at the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM — and not necessarily one he shares. That puts Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, in opposition to unnamed sources within the U.S. government who blamed Beijing in June 4 interviews with the New York Times and Washington Post.
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Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security correspondent – a difficult assignment – has written a most readable account (Intercept, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) of how computers and the internet have transformed spying, a term I use in this context to include all ways of intercepting communications, including hacking and cyber attacks, whatever the motive.
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The Obama administration refuses to say if Pollard will be released on his scheduled parole date. Pollard can blame himself and Benjamin Netanyahu for the sorry state of affairs.
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FIDH and LDH recall that they filed a complaint in July 2013 aimed at the NSA, the FBI and their surveillance practices under the PRISM programme. After more than 18 months since the opening of the preliminary investigation into the case, the Paris Prosecutor had still not made clear how it would procede with this affair.
Confronted with the Prosecu’s inaction, our organisations filed a new complaint as civil parties before the same court on 8 April 2015, hoping to shed light on the alleged violations of individual freedoms.
FIDH and LDH deplore the fact that the French justice system has not moved forward with this complaint implicating the NSA as well as the companies that provided access to their networks, thereby contributing to the installation of the surveillance programme called PRISM. The lack of progress is all the more unacceptable considering damning new revelations showing the NSA tapped the telephones of three French presidents.
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Brazil is seeking a rapprochement with the U.S. as the Western Hemisphere’s two largest economies try to realign interests after a decade of diplomatic skirmishes.
Brazil president Dilma Rousseff will arrive in New York on Saturday for a five-day tour including San Francisco. It is her first official travel to Washington since she canceled a state visit in 2013 after allegations the U.S. had spied on her.
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Privacy is a non-partisan issue. In the final vote, 88 Members of the House, almost equally divided between the two parties, voted against this pyrite bill.
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The National Security Agency, while primarily occupied by sweeping up billions of phone calls, emails, texts and social media messages each day, wants better visual information about the earth and its residents, too, Admiral Michael Rogers said Wednesday.
“Signals intelligence … ain’t enough, you guys,” the NSA chief told a gathering of contractors in the geospatial intelligence business. “We gotta create a much broader picture.”
We need “the ability to visualize,” he explained, because “man is fundamentally a visual creature.”
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The National Security Agency is moving some of its IT operations to Amazon’s cloud.
The National Security Agency (NSA) was represented by Alex Voultepsis, chief of the engineering and planning process for the NSA’s Intelligence Community Special Operations Group, at a session during the AWS Public Sector Symposium here this week. Voultepsis said during a panel discussion the agency plans to migrate some of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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Civil Rights
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Hastings was known for challenging conventional wisdom and investigating authority at the highest levels. With a Polk Award-winning article in Rolling Stone, he brought down General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and US Forces-Afghanistan.
At the time of his death, Hastings had been working on a story about CIA Director John Brennan. The president of Strategic Forecasting Inc. (“Stratfor”), a CIA contract global intelligence firm, has described Brennan in secret emails as someone on a “witch hunt” of investigative journalists. Brennan, of course, has denied these claims: a CIA spokesperson told reporter Kimberly Dvorak in an email that notwithstanding WikiLeaks, “any suggestion that Director Brennan has ever attempted to infringe on constitutionally-protected press freedoms is offensive and baseless.”
Is it possible that Brennan felt threatened by the content of Hastings’ would-be story? If yes, how would the CIA have responded to such an expose ?
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Australia’s detention centres have become propaganda tools of terror.
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The Intercept has just released an interesting document from its Snowden stash: an unredacted damage assessment of the New York Times’ 2005 exposure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program — a program that saw the agency monitoring the emails and phone calls of US citizens.
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Fundación Karisma is continuing to support Gomez in his case to fight against these excessive criminal charges. The organization says that he has good standing for a strong legal defense for two reasons. First, there was no malicious intent behind his sharing the paper online. Second, there was no actual harm to the author’s economic interests as Gomez made no profit off of the paper. Under Colombian criminal law, the court must weigh both of these factors, and it would take a significant misrepresentation of facts to paint Gomez as a criminal who posted the paper online for private profit.
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Military prosecutors this year learned about a massive cache of CIA photographs of its former overseas “black sites” while reviewing material collected for the Senate investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, U.S. officials said.
The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images be turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.
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Military prosecutors earlier this year learned about a massive cache of CIA photographs of its former overseas “black sites” while reviewing material collected for the Senate investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, according to US officials.
The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand all of the images be turned over to them and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.
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Speakers at a seminar on the occasion of the International Day in Support of Torture Victims on Friday demanded to end the custodial torture by the state institutions and urged the government to Pakistan to form the anti-torture law in the country to provide justice to the victims, their families and punish the preparatory.
Pakistan had ratified the Convention against Torture (UN CAT) in 2010 but despite passage of five years, no legislation is made against torture in Pakistan, said the speakers at a seminar on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture jointly organized by Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER), Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) at Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi.
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The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) supported a call from international rights groups on “the need to ensure accountability for the United States CIA torture programme”.
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Last December, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the summary, findings and conclusions of its four-year investigation into the Detention and Interrogation Program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Since then, the international human rights community has reiterated the call for full transparency about and accountability for this unlawful program, in which systematic human rights violations, including the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance were committed. Last March, more than 20 human rights groups called on the Council to take action and demand that the United States fulfill its international human rights obligations on truth, accountability and remedy, including by appointing a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive and credible criminal investigation of alleged serious crimes described in the report and to establish a special fund to compensate victims.
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The Vietnam War had any number of controversial battles, but the invasion of Cambodia stands out—an unnecessary, bloody move that cost the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers on the ground and led to widespread rioting at home, including the Kent State tragedy.
Remarkably, a new book based on information from recently released documents confirms that one of the key rationales for this act was a mirage, a conspiracy theory. President Nixon had embarked on a mad hunt for the “Bamboo Pentagon,” a shadowy headquarters and command center from which the Communist forces were directing their side of the fighting.
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In May 2005, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick appeared at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington to rally support for CAFTA, a free trade agreement between the US, the Central American countries, and the Dominican Republic.
In his remarks, Zoellick played up the notion that, for Central America and the DR, the agreement would “strengthen democracy through economic growth and open societies based on the rule of law”, while also entailing various perks for the gringos; a T-shirt reading “Made in Honduras”, he enthused, would likely contain over 60 percent US content.
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More than half a century ago, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy conducted secret negotiations aimed at normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba. Robert Kennedy Jr., nephew of the assassinated President, recounts these events and praises Obama’s policy of rapprochement, which is making his uncle’s “dream” a “reality(1)”.
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President Barack Obama announced several changes to U.S. hostage policy on Wednesday, including that the government will no longer threaten to criminally prosecute families who pay terrorists for the release of loved ones.
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Barack Obama’s decision to relax Washington’s blanket ban on paying ransoms to free hostages will be seen as belated American acceptance of an unpleasant but unavoidable necessity by west European countries criticised in the past for buying off terrorist kidnappers with cash.
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Following months of pressure from grieving families, President Barack Obama unveiled a slate of new policies on Wednesday intended to bring some level of standardization to how the federal government deals with international hostage situations.
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The U.S. State Department has accused China of wide-ranging and routine human rights violations, prompting Beijing to shoot back with its own report slamming Washington’s “increasingly grave” rights record.
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On Thursday, the U.S. State Department released its annual report on human rights around the world, finding fault with the records of Cuba, Iran, Russia, Myanmar, and China, among other nations. In China, the report said, “repression and coercion were routine” against journalists, dissidents, ethnic minorities — Uigurs and Tibetans, especially — and lawyers that took on sensitive cases, and censorship was rampant.
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A day after the US released its country report, China answers back with its own, calling the US ‘a country with grim problems’
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At the same time there is almost no debate over the redeployment of military forces in Iraq. There is almost no information about the ongoing war in Syria. Most people in the U.S. who watch the news originating from inside the country are barely aware of the war in Yemen and the role of Washington in this genocidal process.
Consequently, we need to intensify our activism aimed at ending racism domestically and imperialist militarism around the world. These two imperatives merge when we look at the growing militarization of the police in the U.S. and the vast prison industrial complex.
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After the United States released a report on human rights in China on Thursday, the communist country hit back with its own report on the “terrible human rights record” in the US.
In a scathing report, titled ‘Human Rights Record of the United States in 2014′, China rebuked the US over its problems of “rampant use of guns, frequent violent crimes and the excessive use of force by police”.
“Plenty of facts show that, in 2014, the US, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems,” the report said.
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On June 25 local time, the State Department of the United States released its country reports on human rights practices once again, making comments on the human rights situations in many countries while showing not a bit of regret for or intention to improve its own terrible human rights record. Plenty of facts show that, in 2014, the U.S., a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems. While its own human rights situation was increasingly grave, the U.S. violated human rights in other countries in a more brazen manner, and was given more “red cards” in the international human rights field.
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Bruce Jessen has been called a war criminal. A torturer. An “American Mengele.” The retired Air Force colonel and trained psychologist was, according to a 2014 report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, an architect of the “brutal,” “inherently unsustainable” and “deeply flawed” detainee-interrogation program that “damaged the United States’ standing in the world” in the years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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US President Barack Obama needs to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention facility to end the suffering of detainees victimized by CIA torture techniques, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Advocacy Program Manager Aliya Hana Hussain told Sputnik during a rally in Washington, DC.
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CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou speaks out on the threats the Justice Department should be targeting and how the FBI’s warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement has been forgotten. Alyona cuts through the spin on Free Speech Zone.
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Megyn Kelly invited anti-LGBT hate group leader Tony Perkins to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of marriage equality. Kelly’s insistence on inviting Perkins highlights the host’s cozy relationship with the ardent anti-gay group.
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How do you know that the women whose murders the Washington Post is reporting were sex workers or dealing with substance abuse?
Because if they weren’t, they would not be unfeelingly described as “washing up dead.”
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They would also be wise to pay attention to the news. A few days before this vote, a new report from The Guardian explained how our use of torture against detainees in the war on terror occasionally crossed the line into human medical experimentation. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins talks about this story with attorney Michael Burg.
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Non-consensual experimentation on institutionalized children and adults was common in the United States before, during, and even more so after the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Nazis for the practice in 1947, sentencing many to prison and seven to be hanged. The tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, standards for medical practice that were immediately ignored back home. Some American doctors considered it “a good code for barbarians.”
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A vast majority of people around the world say they are opposed to the US government’s enhanced interrogation techniques following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and consider them torture, according to a new poll released by Pew Research Center on Tuesday.
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Omar, also known as Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, brought the case after kidnapping convictions against top Italian spies were overthrown on appeal last year.
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Italy denied any involvement on Tuesday in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of an Egyptian imam kidnapped in Milan in 2003 on charges of terrorist connections.
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Italy has denied having any involvement in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of an Egyptian imam who was kidnapped by US officials in Milan in 2003 on charges of having terrorist connections.
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Italy denied any involvement on Tuesday in the CIA s “extraordinary rendition” of an Egyptian imam kidnapped in Milan in 2003 on charges of terrorist connections.
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More than once, I begged my torturers to kill me. Years later, I think about it and wonder if I really meant it. I think I did, at the time.
I was tied up, nude and blindfolded, and electrically prodded all over my body. Twice they pretended they were executing me by placing a gun to my head or in my mouth and clicking the trigger.
To my abusers, who interrupted this torture with question after question, this was merely “enhanced interrogation.”
That was decades ago, in Argentina. But today, U.S. political figures — including presidential candidate Rick Perry — are using this same euphemism to describe the CIA’s torture and ill treatment during its secret detention operations from 2002 to 2008. And earlier this month, John Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight” reported that of 14 declared U.S. presidential candidates, only four said they would keep an executive order put in place by President Barack Obama in his first days in office that seeks to ensure the U.S. does not commit torture.
When U.S. media and political figures repeat the euphemism enhanced interrogation, they reframe the debate in a way that implicitly downplays the pain and inhumanity of torture. Instead, torture becomes a matter of rational decision making and calibrated legality.
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Three major rights groups called on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate the CIA for alleged torture and other rights violations of prisoners in the agency’s custody.
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A joint letter sent by human rights groups to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Tuesday called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques revealed by a Senate report released late last year. The letter, signed by Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, asked Lynch’s office to investigate “torture and other violations of U.S. law” in connection to the programs.
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“Won” is not really an accurate description of the election result; as the chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress, Merera Gudina, put it, this “was not an election, it was an organised armed robbery”.
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Two South Korean citizens arrested in North Korea in March on charges of spying have been sentenced to hard labour for life, South Korea said.
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Behind all the manifestations of rape-skeptic journalism lie the interests of the 1%, who want to preserve the exploitative, oppressive relations that exist under capitalism and prop them up.
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The controversy over the CIA torture is very similar to another debate raging within the US medical community – that over doctor involvement in the death penalty.
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The amendment would require USA government interrogators to adhere strictly to techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, which would have to be updated every three years to ensure it complies with USA law and “reflects current evidence-based best practices for interrogation that are designed to elicit reliable and voluntary statements and don’t involve the use or threat of force”.
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The Pentagon secretly repatriated two Tunisians who were interrogated at a CIA black site in Afghanistan and imprisoned by the U.S. military in that country for more than a decade, U.S. officials said.
A U.S. military cargo plane flew Lutfi al-Arabi al-Gharisi and Ridha Ahmad al-Najjar from Afghanistan to Tunisia on June 15, according to U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a detainee transfer that had not been made public.
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The Pentagon secretly repatriated two Tunisians who were interrogated at a CIA black site in Afghanistan and imprisoned by the U.S. military in that country for more than a decade, U.S. officials said.
A U.S. military cargo plane flew Lutfi al-Arabi al-Gharisi and Ridha Ahmad al-Najjar from Afghanistan to Tunisia on June 15, according to U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a detainee transfer that had not been made public.
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Today is the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
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The US Department of Justice must speak out against Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture practices, Amnesty International Director of Security with Human Rights Naureen Shah told Sputnik in an interview.
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This Friday, the world will mark International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. This day is commemorated every year to reaffirm the universal commitment to the total eradication of torture, which is categorically prohibited under international law.
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Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Amnesty International called on United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a June 23, 2015 letter to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture and other violations of US law in connection with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program. The letter was attached to petitions signed by 111,788 concerned individuals supporting appointment of a special prosecutor.
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“If our laws have meaning, we can’t accept that some of our country’s most senior officials authorized criminal conduct and were never held accountable. Torture is a crime,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We know it happened. The Senate torture report documented it in excruciating detail. It’s up to Attorney General Lynch to uphold the laws of our land and ensure that a criminal investigation of the U.S. torture program is conducted.”
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My favorite story about American spying is one I’ve never been able to verify with the Central Intelligence Agency, and not for lack of trying.
At the height of the Cold War, the story goes, officials in the United States hatched a covert plan to keep tabs on Russians in Washington, D.C. They would, they decided, deploy surveillance cats—yes, actual cats surgically implanted with microphones and radio transmitters—to slip by security and eavesdrop on activity at the Soviet Embassy. The project went by the thinly disguised code name “Acoustic Kitty.”
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It is also a day to stand up to prevent torture from occurring. For years, I have been advocating for New York State legislation to prevent health professionals from participating in the torture and mistreatment of detainees. We know from the release of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Summary that U.S. health professionals played a central role in the design and implementation of the CIA’s torture program, making this legislation timelier than ever.
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A human rights organization hosted demonstrations in nine cities Friday to raise awareness about government torture, including a rally in Minneapolis.
Amnesty International wants to pressure the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute torture committed by people working in the name of the United States government.
A spokesman for Amnesty International says the department’s stance on the Senate report on CIA torture is contradictory.
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Last December, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the summary, findings and conclusions of its four-year investigation into the Detention and Interrogation
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They held signs in Raleigh on Friday stating: “Take a moral stand vs. torture,” “No to government secrecy,” “Like genocide & slavery, torture is always wrong,” and “North Carolina hosts CIA torture planes.”
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Amnesty International is holding rallies across the nation, including Amherst, to shed light on a senate report on C-I-A torture.
Thousands of people have been tortured all around the world. According to a senate report, the C-I-A is ALSO responsible for carrying out torture tactics.
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More than 6 months ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the Executive Summary of its investigation into CIA torture practices during the Bush Presidency. The process of producing the report itself was highly controversial with the CIA doing everything in its power to stymie the investigation, including spying on Senate members of the committee.
The actual report itself remains classified but there is now enough information in the public that questions are arising about why there has been no legal action taken. If the CIA has been documented as having tortured detainees captured during the so-called War on Terror in the report, then why has the Obama Administration and its Justice Department, not built on the Senate report? That question troubled human rights organizations so much that several of them signed onto a letter this week calling on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to conduct a truly independent investigation and push for accountability for what was done.
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Soon after I was tortured, in the late 1970s, I joined a worldwide Amnesty International campaign against torture premised on the notion that, with a consistent, determined effort by democratic governments and international organizations supported by common men and women across borders, torture could be abolished in our time just as the African slave trade had been abolished a century earlier.We have come far. Today, laws against torture are in place almost everywhere.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Lots of attention was paid this week to a study showing that major ISPs are throttling traffic. At first glance, it seems a clear test case for the FCC’s Net neutrality rules, which prohibit blocking, throttling, or creating special “fast lanes” for content. The problem is, this is not the throttling you’re looking for, Obi-Wan.
The new rules went into effect a fortnight ago, and aside from scattered accounts of consumers who wrangled price breaks from their cable companies after filing complaints with the FCC about unfair billing practices, and news that Sprint stopped slowing traffic for customers who use a lot of data, very little has changed for Internet users — or is likely to anytime soon.
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Federal Communications Commission member Michael O’Rielly yesterday argued that “Internet access is not a necessity or human right” and called this one of the most important “principles for regulators to consider as it relates to the Internet and our broadband economy.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Lest it be left behind by other countries bullied into submission by US trade agreements, the Canadian government has now expanded copyright terms for recording artists from 50 years to 70 years. (It was previously passed, but has now received the Official Royal Assent.) While not as obnoxiously long as the terms afforded to songwriters (life plus 50 years… which will probably be life plus 70 before too long…), it’s still a needless expansion that does little for living artists while carving another 20-year hole in the public domain.
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Send this to a friend
06.26.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Customers already pay Docker to host private image repositories on Docker Hub. But the subscriptions are cheap and the initial plans lacked features that enterprise customers demand, like granular access controls and the ability to integrate with their existing authentication systems.
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Docker and CoreOS today are jointly announcing that they’re working with several major tech companies on a new Linux Foundation initiative called the Open Container Project. The idea is for everyone — users and vendors — to agree on a standard container runtime and image format and prevent unnecessary fragmentation.
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The wrap up of DockerCon on Tuesday also marked the ushering in of a new era for the convention’s namesake company and the containerization ecosystem in general. One visible, real-world sign of the shift came when Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes and CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi met on stage to shake hands and announce the launch of the Open Container Project.
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If you only read the press release — or worse, if you only read the business press produced by people who only read the press release — you’d have gotten the impression that the likes of Microsoft, Google, HP, Cisco, Red Hat, and Goldman Sachs had all rallied together under a flag of truce to declare the existence of a new standard for virtualization that the whole world would agree upon forever.
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Kernel Space
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Version 4.1 of the Linux kernel was released this week, and it includes a number of new features in the following areas.
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A few days ago I set out to try out BCache on the Linux 4.1 kernel now that this caching feature has matured in the mainline Linux kernel for a while. BCache serves as a cache to the Linux kernel’s block layer whereby a solid-state drive (or other faster drive) can serve as a cache to a larger-capacity, traditional rotating hard drive.
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The libata updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel may be of interest this time around for solid-state drive owners thanks to some NCQ TRIM improvements.
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Lead developer and SUSE employee Jean Delvare announced the LM-Sensors 3.4.0 update a short time ago for this Linux sensor monitoring project. For the LM-Sensors library and sensors command is now support for temperature min and critical min hysteresis. The fan control program of LM-Sensors has been updated with reduced memory consumption and other fixes. Lastly, the sensors-detect utility has detection support of new devices and avoids probing graphics cards by default.
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Graphics Stack
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For X11 the library consists of 3 layers:
QObject wrapper for XInput (XInputDevice, XInputDeviceManager)
Adapters that map XInput objects to the common interface (XInputDeviceAdapter, XInputDeviceManagerAdapter)
Interface classes (InputDevice, InputDeviceManager)
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Applications
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The GStreamer development team had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the second milestone towards the highly anticipated GStreamer 1.6 open-source and cross-platform multimedia backend.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.46 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
Improvements in the BITS file transfer service.
Still more progress on DirectWrite implementation.
Support for shared user data on 64-bit.
Various C++ runtime improvements.
Some more support for the 64-bit ARM platform.
Various bug fixes.
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The chains are loosening. DirectX still binds many PC games to Windows. Now, CodeWeavers expects CrossOver to support DirectX 11 by the end of the year, with Wine gaining compatibility shortly afterwards.
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Games
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Her Story is a new game developed by Sam Barlow, the creator of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Aisle. A Steam for Linux version is also available for purchase.
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After three weeks from the release of Unreal Engine 4.8, Epic Games announced recently the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance release, Unreal Engine 4.8.1, which fixes over 30 bugs that were present in the previous version.
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Crytek’s powerful game engine, CryEngine, just got more powerful than ever.
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Valve has just published a new stable version of SteamOS, which brings a number of security updates and a new font for the main interface. It’s not a big update, but the addition of the new font should make it interesting.
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The release candidate to the Unigine 2.0 Engine is now available.
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Ticket to Ride, an adaptation of the well-known Days of Wonder board game, is now available on Steam for Linux with a massive 80% discount that will only last for a few more hours.
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The Spring 99.0 release features improved performance, custom menu support, support for recursively drawing exploded pieces, a new rotateable default camera, Lua improvements, internal weapon refactoring, and many other changes.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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For those closely following the work on Enlightenment, there’s now work finally materializing in supporting XWayland.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME software stack is home to a lot of applications and Notes is just one of them. The developers are looking to make some serious improvements to it in order to make it more appealing and more useful.
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When the time comes around for your distribution of choice to release a new iteration of its platform, you are faced with a seemingly simple choice—to upgrade or do a fresh installation. On one hand, you wind up having to do less work. On the other, the end result is a clean, fresh start.
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New Releases
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The special release of Makulu 9 Aero edition might seem like one flexible Linux offering too many. However, anyone hankering for a Windows-like operating system and the best of what is easy about using Linux could not make a better choice.
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I am happy to announce SparkyLinux 4.0 code name “Tyche”.
Sparky 4 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 9 testing “Stretch”.
The new iso images feature a set of applications for daily usage, wireless drivers, multimedia codecs and plugins, and they are available in a few flavors, such as :
– LXDE
– LXQt
– KDE
– MATE
– Xfce
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The SparkyLinux developers were more than happy to inform us a few minutes ago about the immediate availability for download of the final release of their Debian-based SparkyLinux 4.0 distribution.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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openSUSE developers are preparing a new major release, but they are going to call it 42 and not 13.3 or something else. The changes are so profound that a completely new release was needed.
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Deep thought and some additional core SUSE Linux Enterprise source code have given The openSUSE Project a path forward for future releases.
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Red Hat Family
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Does technology really matter? Craig Muzilla, Red Hat, Inc. senior vice president, Applications Platforms Business, kicked off his keynotes at Red Hat Summit 2015 asking attendees that very question.
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While there has been a lot of oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over what’s been coming out of the Red Hat Summit in Boston this week, probably the most intriguing news to come out of the proceedings is that Red Hat and Samsung Electronics America “announced a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise,” according to Red Hat’s PR department.
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Red Hat has ratcheted up its software defined storage portfolio, taking the wraps off Ceph Storage 1.3 and Gluster Storage 3.1 at its marquee customer event in Boston this week.
The vendor played up the ability of both products to help customers manage storage at “petabyte scale”. Which one matters most to you depends, of course, on exactly what you’re looking to do with your infrastructure in general, and storage in particular.
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If Red Hat wasn’t a “container company” before, it’s one now — and in ways that matter to more than just admins dealing with Red Hat products.
Among the announcements the company put out this week at its annual Red Hat Summit, the two biggest were about Red Hat as a container (and, by that token, application) platform. Both expand on existing work Red Hat has done with containers, and both are aimed at app developers, rather than just those tasked with keeping installations of Red Hat products fed and happy.
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RED HAT is continuing its slew of announcements from its Boston Summit with the reveal of a preview edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM processors (RHELA).
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Fedora
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After proposing Frappe Web framework, two-week Fedora Atomic Host releases, system firmware updates for UEFI, default local DNS resolver, and SELinux policy store migration, Jan Kurik comes today, June 26, with the proposal of a Fedora Astronomy Spin.
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Varnish is a high-performance HTTP accelerator, widely used over the Internet. To use varnish with https, it is often fronted by other general http/proxy servers like nginx or apache, though a more specific proxy-only high-performance tool would be preferable. So they looked at stud.
hitch is a fork of stud. The fork is maintained by the Varnish development team. stud seems abandoned by its creators, after the project was taken over by Google, with no new commits after 2012. The varnish developers have tried to contact the old stud upstream without success, so they forked and took up development again.
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This is a post oriented to Fedora, Centos and RedHat distributions, although, most of the info is valid for any RPM distribution, with some minor differences
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The Release Tools and Infrastructure Fedora Activity Day happened recently at the Red Hat office in Westford, Massachusetts. The goal was to bring our release tooling and processes up to speed with the current and future demands of the Fedora Project. Since there are a ton of moving parts of the Fedora Release Engineering community that need work, many of us split out into groups to tackle various components.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu Touch family has just received a new member, and the developers will need to take into account the fact that a new platform is out there, in the hands of regular users. It also means that a new code name is needed, and in this case it’s “arale.”
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Canonical and Meizu have set up a rather complicated way of getting the new Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, but it’s all done on purpose. Unfortunately, not everyone sees this and this has led to some strange conclusions and comments from the community.
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On June 26, Canonical’s David Planella sent in his regular report to inform Ubuntu developers and users alike about the work done by Ubuntu Community Team in the week that passed.
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Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions — arguably the most popular — which is very much deserved. Canonical has taken the complicated and intimidating world of Linux and transformed it into an inviting operating system for the masses. While not as user-friendly as Windows or OS X, Ubuntu is certainly easier to use than Fedora or the dreaded Arch.
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Flavours and Variants
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TheeMahn, the creator of the Ultimate Edition (formerly Ubuntu Ultimate) GNU/Linux operating system, announced a few days ago that testers are need to test the Beta release of the upcoming Ultimate Edition 4.7 release.
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The first Alpha for Kubuntu 15.10 was made available yesterday, but the announcement itself was overshadowed by a worrying statement from the developers. It looks like the future of Kubuntu, in the greater Ubuntu family, is uncertain.
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Marvell unveiled two new Kinoma IoT prototyping mini-PCs, including a “Kinoma HD” stick running Linux and the open source JavaScript 6 KinomaJS framework.
Marvell successfully launched its Linux-based $99 Kinoma Create JavaScript prototyping device on Indiegogo in March 2014, and sold it retail at $150. In March of this year, the company open sourced the KinomaJS JavaScript framework that runs on the Create, and now it has announced two new IoT-focused Kinoma devices — the FreeRTOS-based Kinoma Element and Linux-based Kinoma HD — with tempting pre-order price tags of $20 and $25, respectively. The devices ship in the fourth quarter.
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96boards is an idea from Linaro to produce some 32 and 64-bit ARM boards. So far there were two boards released in “consumer” format and few more announced of rumoured. The specification also lists “extended” version which has space for some more components.
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Phones
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Android
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The Google Play Store has come a long way since its humble beginnings. It’s no longer known solely for apps with viruses in them and illegal emulators—some of the best apps in the world live on the Google Play Store. We’ve put together a list of the apps that we think pretty much everyone needs to have on their Android devices.
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That second-gen FLIR One thermal camera we saw earlier this year is now available for iPhones and iPads, with the Android version shipping in July. If the last time you’ve heard about it was back in 2014, this might come as a surprise, as the first-gen camera was embedded in an iPhone 5/5s case. This one is is a standalone accessory with a built-in battery that attaches to iOS devices via a Lightning connector and to Android phones and tablets via microUSB. It also has an updated thermal camera with four times the resolution of the one inside the first-gen cases.
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If you own a smartwatch, put it to work! After all, there’s a fine line between wrist-worn gimmick and ever-accessible information machine. The difference is in the software. Here are some handy-dandy Android Wear apps to get you started.
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To streamline Android development efforts, Google will focus on building tools for Android Studio. The company will also stop supporting other Integrated Development Environments (IDE) at the end of this year, like Eclipse.
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The Verizon Motorola DROID Turbo is still running Android 4.4 KitKat nearly 8 months after it was announced, and the update to Android 5.1 Lollipop has been rumored for months. However, the past few weeks have been promising, and now it looks like Verizon and Motorola are finally ready to deliver the highly anticipated Android 5.1 update for the DROID Turbo.
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The company is now readying a Kickstarter campaign for the Remix Mini, a small box much like a Chromebox that runs the Remix OS. It is aimed at those wanting a cheap system in a tiny form that becomes a desktop system with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
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Recognizing successful open source projects need a variety of “developers” to create everything from code to community, the OSI Internship Program seeks participants from across academic disciplines–Business, Communications, Sociology, Informatics, and of course Computer Science to name a few–the program seeks to provide real life experiences common across open source projects and the communities that support them, giving students first hand experiences as well as opportunities to work with some of the most influential projects and people in open source software and the technology sector.
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Events
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The next (virtual) Ceph Developer Summit is coming.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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New Chromium builds will no longer download/install the Hotword Shared Module and will automatically remove the module on startup if it was previously installed.
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SaaS/Big Data
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BlueData Software Inc., an infrastructure startup focused on Big Data, is working on solutions to the problem. The company recently announced that it is adding support for Docker containers on its BlueData EPIC platform. BlueData was founded by VMware veterans, and is focused on making Hadoop and Spark easy to deploy in a lightweight container environment.
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BSD
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If you use a free and open source operating system, it’s almost certainly based on the Linux kernel and GNU software. But these were not the first freely redistributable platforms, nor were they the most professional or widely commercialized. The Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, beat GNU/Linux on all of these counts. So why has BSD been consigned to the margins of the open source ecosystem, while GNU/Linux distributions rose to fantastic prominence? Read on for some historical perspective.
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Notes and thoughts on various OpenBSD replacements and reductions. Existing functionality and programs are frequently rewritten and replaced for the sake of simplicity or security or whatever it is that OpenBSD is all about. This process has been going on for some time, of course, but some recent activity is worth highlighting.
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Project Releases
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Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user.
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Public Services/Government
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The government has played an important role as champion of open source in the public sector and this has been essential to the great progress that has been made to date. As the new government lays out its strategy, it should publicly reaffirm its commitment to open source software. This will add impetus to those in the public sector considering open source if the government acknowledges its value in relation to its agile vision.
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Given the growing need for advanced databases with multiple levels of security to store geospatial intelligence, NRO contractor Lockheed Martin along with partners like Red Hat and Crunchy Data Solutions rolled out an open source relational database at a geospatial intelligence symposium in Washington this week that is billed as supporting multilevel security.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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It’s an open source project designed for home use, and Felfil is an extruder for plastic 3D printing filament, designed by a team of young makers from the Politecnico of Turin.
They say the device was built in answer to a desire by users of 3D printers to produce their own plastic filament. It’s all about reducing the cost of printing, saving on materials, and being able to experience the potential of 3D printing.
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Programming
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With an uncharacteristic lack of fanfare, Google has decided to hang around the kitchen at the code repository party.
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Literacy used to be the domain of scribes and priests. Then the world became more complicated and demanded that everyone read and write. Computing is also a form of literacy, but having it only understood by a priesthood of programmers is not going to be enough for our complex, online world. “Learn to code” has become a mantra for education at all ages. But after clearing away the hype, why do people need to learn to code? What does it get us exactly?
Not everyone needs to become a software engineer, but almost every office worker uses a laptop as a daily tool. Computers are such a huge productivity booster because they support a large market of programs and apps designed for these workers. But commercial and open source software have a “last mile” problem: that they don’t automate every conceivable task. There are still computing chores that require a lot of repetitive (and fairly mindless) typing and clicking. Even if you have an intern to push these tasks on, they’re tasks that require a human because there’s no software to automate it. These tasks are too small-scale or specific to your organization’s workflow for it to be economical for a software company to create a custom solution.
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libnice, everyone’s favourite ICE networking library, is now mirrored on GitHub (and GitLab), to make contributing to it easier — just submit a pull request. The canonical git repository is still on freedesktop.org.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Friday’s attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait came at roughly the same time, and days after the Islamic State terror group called for such operations during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. But there was no immediate indication that they had been coordinated.
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Privacy
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The hated Care.data programme is one of four government IT projects progressing so poorly its delivery has been deemed “unachievable”, according to a government watchdog report.
The scheme has been flagged with the highest “red” risk rating by the Major Projects Authority, along with the NHS choices website, the Health and Social Care Network, and the Ministry of Justice’s National Offender Management Services ICT programme.
The scheme has encountered serious delays, following an outcry from the public who largely objected to the idea of their personal information being shared with world+dog without their consent.
So far, 700,000 individuals have requested to opt out of having their data shared with third parties. However, concerns have been raised that the Health and Social Care Information Centre has been unable to implement those objections.
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Wikileaks has published some NSA SIGINT documents describing intercepted French government communications. This seems not be from the Snowden documents. It could be one of the other NSA leakers, or it could be someone else entirely.
As leaks go, this isn’t much. As I’ve said before, spying on foreign leaders is the kind of thing we want the NSA to do. I’m sure French Intelligence does the same to us.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Americans won big on net neutrality in February, when the FCC voted to adopt new rules that would allow it to rein in the abusive and discriminatory practices of big telecommunications operators, such as blocking or throttling of Internet data, and charging content providers for access to an Internet “fast lane.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It is the so called freedom of panorama, which of course has its roots in a beloved piece of EU legislation, the InfoSoc Directive, more specifically its Article 5(3(h). This provision allows Member States to introduce into their own national copyright laws an exception to the rights of reproduction, communication/making available to the public and distribution to allow “use of works, such as works of architecture or sculpture, made to be located permanently in public places”.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In a previous post I discussed how to introduce users to Linux, where the focus was on the software side of the conversation. This post is all about the hardware.
The reason I put hardware second is because if we can’t provide the user with the software they need there is no point in swapping out their hardware. Hardware is always a compromise, whereas software is not.
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WOW. Fifteen years ago today I made the first post ever at LQ, introducing it to the world. 15 Years. I know I’ve said it before, but 5,354,618 posts later the site and community have exceeded my wildest expectations in every way. The community that has formed around LQ is simply amazing. The dedication that the members and mod team has shown is both inspiring and truly humbling. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member for their participation and feedback. While there is always room for improvement, that LQ has remained a friendly and welcoming place for new Linux members despite its size is a testament to the community. Reaching this milestone has served to energize and refocus my efforts on making sure the next fifteen years are even better than the first fifteen.
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While part-time hobbyists do plenty of great work on GNU/Linux, most of the code thesedays comes from paid developers. So for our upcoming podcast, we want your opinions: which company does the most for Linux? You might argue that Red Hat or SUSE contribute the most with their patches and efforts to get Linux into enterprises, or you may say that Intel or Canonical are doing the best work.
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Desktop
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I don’t know how many of you out there are aware of a new TV series called Mr. Robot starting Rami Malek as a computer hacker that goes by the name of Elliot and uses Linux kernel-based operating systems to hack various entities.
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Server
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I have been writing this blog since 2012 and I have been asked a number of times by other bloggers why I still use Google’s Blogger service as opposed to a hosted WordPress site.
The truth is that I still very much see Everyday Linux User as a hobby. It isn’t a job and I am not actively trying to make money by doing it. I find the Blogger interface easy to use and the spam filters work quite well. I tried using WordPress a while back and it became quickly apparent that with more power came more responsibility as I spent more time trying to keep WordPress from being bombed by spammers than actually writing.
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Kernel Space
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Based on the native encryption support added to EXT4 with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Linux 4.2 is bringing encryption support to the F2FS file-system.
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Ted Ts’o has sent in the big batch of EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window.
Following EXT4 adding encryption support to Linux 4.1, there’s many fixes/clean-ups in Linux 4.2 for the new encryption code. Beyond sprucing up the EXT4 encryption code there’s many other cleanups and fixes, including some xfstest failures that have been taken care of.
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The release of the Linux 4.1 kernel is more significant than most, and not only because it was designated as a long term stable (LTS) release, or that it included contributions from 1,539 developers, the most in in Linux history. The release improves Btrfs file-system support for massive servers, adds encryption support to the latest ext4 file system, and offers enhanced support for Chrome OS, RAID 5/6 storage, and ACPI power management on 64-bit ARM systems.
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David Airlie has sent in the main DRM driver updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel. There’s a lot of open-source graphics driver work represented by this pull request, but sadly no Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA) changes were incorporated for Linux 4.2
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Interested in starting a new career in IT? Linux is one of the hottest technologies in the market today, with tens of thousands of job openings, and salaries outpacing many other IT specialties. This presentation demonstrates the steps you should take to launch your career in Linux.
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The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative has selected three security-oriented projects to receive a total of $500,000 in funding.
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Linux 4.1 was officially released by Linus Torvalds on June 21, marking the first major update to the Linux 4.0 kernel which first debuted in April.
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Applications
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Oracle announced just a few moments ago that the second RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.0 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software was available for download and testing for all supported operating systems.
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On June 25, Paul Davis from the Ardour project had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Ardour 4.1 DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, a major release that adds new functionality and fixes bugs.
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The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of 4.1 with a great line-up of new features such as input gain control, Save As for projects, click-free changes to processor order and meter position, relative snapping, faster waveform rendering, Hi-DPI/Retina support and more! As usual, quite a few bugs have been mercilessly slayed. Encouragingly, we also have one of our longest ever contributor lists for this release.
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The Mars release (v4.5) of Eclipse is now available as the tenth annual release train. Eclipse Mars brings many new features to this popular, cross-platform integrated development environment.
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Proprietary
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Today we have some great news for all you WhatsApp fans out there, as it appears that there’s now an unofficial desktop client for all mainstream operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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CodeWeavers, the developer of the commercial and cross-platform CrossOver application that lets Linux and Mac users run Windows apps and games, wants to know on which Windows programs they should concentrate their efforts.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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This has been a long time coming, as the request for the Linux editor is very high on their voting system. This request has also been updated to state that it has been started.
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Looks like an early birthday present is on its way to me, as the Terraria developers have officially stated Linux & Mac builds should be out in July.
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The list of the most sold games on Steam for Linux is a very good tool to find out what the community is preferring and what they are playing right now. If something ends up on this rather exclusive list, then you know you’ll probably have a great time with it. Some of the games have been around for some time now, so we already know that they are good, but there are also a few new entries that should prove more than interesting.
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LEGO Minifigures Online originally appeared on SteamDB back in March, but the developers Funcom said to us directly Linux wasn’t planned. Their official site, and SteamDB entry now officially mention Linux as a supported platform. Bring on the bricks.
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Imagine you find yourself trapped in another world. You’re not entirely sure how you got there, other than that you tripped through a rift, more or less. Your surroundings are a mysterious mix of city ruins, wrecked pirate ships and space-ships from an unknown future. You seem to be trapped there, and to make matters worse, monstrous giants roam the land.
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Looks like an early birthday present is on its way to me, as the Terraria developers have officially stated Linux & Mac builds should be out in July.
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Just days after pushing out Dota 2 Reborn for Linux gamers, Valve has released a massive update to this Source Engine 2 game and it includes some driver/rendering fixes.
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Valve developers have issued a new patch for Dota 2 Reborn, and it looks like they managed to fix some important problems, including the support for the AMD open source drivers.
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Well I do love SteamDB, as it appears STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II – The Sith Lords™ has a Linux icon added, so it looks like the previous ESRB leak about a Linux version could be true after all.
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Geometry Wars 3 has been out on Linux for a while now, but sadly it was left outdated for too long with issues. The update is out, so how is the game on Linux?
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ARK: Survival Evolved sadly won’t hit the release date today for the Linux & Mac versions, but they sent word that it will release on Tuesday the 30th of June.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Cinnamon 2.6 has been officially released with many interesting changes and improvements. Cinnamon 2.6 will be used in Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” that is planned to be released in end of June. In this article I’m going to review this release and tell you how you can install it on Ubuntu or derivatives. I hope you will like to use it. One more thing, when you use it please give your feedback.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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To be fair, Plasma is not the only desktop whose development has become cautious. The years 2008-2012 saw user revolts against major changes to GNOME and KDE, and a mediocre reception to the introduction of Unity. In the aftermath, the developers of desktop environments were left understandably nervous, and remain concerned about the pace of change.
Also, in the last few years, Plasma has been ported to the Qt5 framework, and much of it rewritten. This process was unavoidable, and seems to have resulted in greater responsiveness, although questions of speed are notoriously subjective in computer interfaces.
Yet at the same time that this process has happened, KDE as a community has done little to extend the concept of the desktop. The innovations that marked Plasma 4, such as Activities, tabbed windows, and desktop layout, have received only minor tweaks — the Activities window, for example, scrolls vertically in the latest Plasma releases instead of horizontally as in the first releases.
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We are in good way to have a stable version for 15.08.
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After several month of packaging in kde overlay and almost a month in tree, we have lifted the mask for KDE Plasma 5.3.1 today. If you want to test it out, some infos how to get it.
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Jaroslaw Staniek, one of the developers of the Kexi open-source database creation tool distributed as part of the Calligra office suite for the acclaimed KDE desktop environment, has unveiled details about the development progress of Kexi 3.0.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Carlos Garcia Campos had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of a new snapshot towards the upcoming WebKitGTK+ 2.10 WebKit rendering engine for the GNOME desktop environment.
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The GNOME Project will soon release the third milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, GNOME 3.17.3, which means that most of the core components have been updated in the last couple of days, including the GNOME Boxes virtual machine manager tool.
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The GNOME developers are hard at work these days, preparing to unveil the third milestone towards the highly anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many of the core components received major updates, including GTK+.
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The development of the next GNOME release, 3.17, is going on and a new snapshot, 3.17.3, is now available. Give it a shot! Some of us will gather in San Francisco next week for the West Coast Summit 2015, and a month later we will all gather for GUADEC in Gothenburg, Sweden (no relation whatsoever with a conspiracy that doesn’t even exist).
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Since last blog post I have been designing and implementing a room menu for Polari.
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Frederic Peters has just informed us about the immediate availability of the third snapshot for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.
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This is the second in a series of posts about recent design work for GNOME’s core applications. As I said in my previous post, the designs for many of these applications have evolved considerably, and we have major plans for them. Help is needed if these plans are going to become a reality though, so we are looking for contributors to get involved.
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MythTV is a free, Open-Source and a complete Home Media Center Hub also available for Linux. MythTV is capable to record videos. It is an alternative to Windows Media Center or Tivo. Personally I like MythTV very much. This tutorial will walk you through a quick look at the interesting features of MythTV and also How to install MythTV Latest version 0.27.5 on Ubuntu 15.05/14.10/14.04 or Linux Mint Rafaela/Rebecca or Other Ubuntu Derivatives.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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It has been around 10 days since the last update to opensuse Tumbleweed. That would have been snapshot 20150612. This is a brief note to explain the delays.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the first Development Preview of their upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.1 for ARM operating system.
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The way that DevOps can work in an enterprise organization is to first understand that innovation is de-centralized, with the best ideas coming from the best sources, wherever they might be.
It’s also important to have an open and collaborative culture in order to facilitate innovation and organizations need to be modular to be able to react to change.
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Paul Cormier, Red Hat EVP and president of products and technologies, discusses two new products announced today at the Red Hat Summit.
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Chris Wright, chief technologist for Red Hat, sat down with theCUBE cohosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman to discuss new developments in the open source world and NVF in telcom networks.
As the person who helps define Red Hat’s strategic vision, Wright has seen conversations shift from cost of ownership to innovation. “Today, there is a shift to operationalize complex systems,” he says. “There has been a change in open source technology from commoditization to a place where real innovation is happening, and new services are introduced quickly.”
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RHEL 7.2 will also bring live kernel patching to RHEL, which Dumas sees as a critical security measure. Using elements of the KPATCH technology that recently landed in the upstream Linux 4.0 kernel, RHEL users will be able to patch their running kernels dynamically.
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Yes, Red Hat is a Linux company. But, it’s more than that. Back in 2011, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud would be Red Hat’s future. Today, at Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat made it clear that it wants to be a cloud analytic powerhouse as well.
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Red Hat hasn’t shirked with its latest product release in this vein and has labelled its most recent release the Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform.
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Red Hat is adding features to its virtualization software to stay competitive, but is also worried about staying relevant as the industry moves to embrace cloud and containers.
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This release of OpenShift, traditionally known to techies as a platform-as-a-service or PaaS, hits lots of buzzwords. First, it embraces the popular Docker container technology. That means a developer can, theoretically, build an application, test it, and run it in its own server room or on a variety of clouds. Second, it supports Kubernetes, an orchestration scheme backed by Google GOOG that promises to ease the placement and management of lots and lots of containers across environments.
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Attendees went nuts on social media – displayed on the big screen at the Summit – as they awaited a keynote from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
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At its recent Summit, Red Hat announced that the preview version of its latest enterprise-class operating system (OS) was running on AppliedMicro’s 64-bit ARM server processors. At the event itself, HP had a live demonstration running on 10 X-Gene m400 cartridges in one of its ProLiant “Moonshot” servers. The demo was running Red Hat Development Preview Edition 7.1 and showing enterprise-class real-time data analytics. The key take away from the announcement and the demo is that ARM servers are available today and are fully capable of supporting enterprise-class data analytics workloads. This example system at the Summit showed a full functioning enterprise stack – including 64-bit ARM processors, the server platform, the Red Hat operating system, hypervisor, and Apache Spark applications. There is a “top-to-bottom” solution available for ARM.
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Looking to establish itself as the leader in the nascent container technology market, Red Hat has enabled one of its flagship products to support containers fully and released a new container management platform, too.
Containers are a hot topic at the Red Hat Summit taking place this week in Boston, the same week the container industry is meeting in San Francisco for Dockercon, a conference dedicated to the operating system-level virtualization.
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Red Hat thinks the 64-bit ARM architecture will be ready for the data center and cloud someday soon. The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM (RHELA) to beta may be this year or early 2016.
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Red Hat continues to make inroads into the enterprise storage software market, improving two of its core storage technologies and striking partnerships with key IT system resellers.
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Red Hat have announced two new products at its Red Hat Summit event: OpenShift Enterprise 3 and Red Hat Atomic Enterprise. Both of these will both incorporate the Docker and Kubernetes projects, two hugely successful container projects.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst discusses how he considers potential acquisitions and where he might be looking for new companies.
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Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, scale-out software-defined storage solutions that run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures. Validated to work with leading partner hardware and software solutions, each Red Hat Storage product is well-suited for different enterprise workloads, bringing compelling benefits to enterprises.
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RED HAT has announced the release of OpenShift Enterprise (OSE) 3, a new version of its Platform-as-a-Service offering.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)7, Openshift is built on Docker Linux containers with Kubernetes orchestration using technology developed in collaboration with Google.
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Forget that software is eating the world. By now, it’s a foregone conclusion.
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Equities researchers at Oppenheimer upped their target price on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to $88.00 in a research report issued on Thursday. Oppenheimer’s price target indicates a potential upside of 12.07% from the stock’s previous close.
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Wall Street analysts liked what they heard at Red Hat’s annual Analyst Day, which was held in Boston on Wednesday.
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Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Buy rating and price objective of $90, following the Red Hat Summit and Analyst meeting
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Red Hat has used its 2015 ‘Summit’ event in Boston to take the wraps off of JBoss Fuse 6.2 and Red Hat JBoss A-MQ 6.2 – with both products introducing new capabilities for developers working on enterprise application and messaging initiatives.
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Red Hat has launched its Mobile Application Platform, at the company’s Summit under way in Boston.
The Mobile Application Platform consists of tools and templates for building mobile applications combined with back-end services to handle features including authentication, data, and integration with existing systems. It is based on FeedHenry, which Red Hat acquired in October 2014.
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Developers traveling to Boston for the Red Hat Summit, one of the industry’s premier open source technology events, are in for a treat! They will get a sneak peek at some exciting new 64-bit ARM® development platforms featuring the AMD Opteron™ A1100 Series processor (codenamed “Seattle”).
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Shortly after I joined Red Hat, we had nothing short of a revolution when organizational changes led to the content services teams being positioned alongside customer-facing roles such as technical support, account managers, and customer experience managers.
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I’m probably one of the last people you want to comment on how to effectively lead and develop an organization. During my career, I twice held team lead positions. Both times I… well, I wasn’t a disaster, but I do feel I could have been more effective.
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Fedora
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Yet another feature being worked on for Fedora 23 is to make it easy to test cloud images locally from the Fedora Workstation/Server.
Currently this program only works on Fedora Linux and requires libvirt, libguestfs, and python-requests for supporting this local cloud testing. Testcloud makes it a one-step process for downloading, booting, and gaining access to a cloud image on your local system.
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Since we use Fedora as the base for our distribution and thus follow the Fedora Project’s life cycle, it means that Korora 20 Peach reached it’s End Of Life status yesterday on June 23.
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Korora Project has informed its users that the Korora 20 “Peach” Linux distribution reached EOL (End of Life) status on June 23, 2015, which means that it will no longer receive security patches and software updates.
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I’d written about pdfpc earlier. I packaged it for Fedora and you can now install it directly using DNF. It’s still in the testing repositories, so you’ll need to enable the repository for the time being. I’m leaving the copr repository as it is, but please note that I will not update the packages there any more.
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Kiara spoke about the importance of using Fedora on engineering careers. Then I shared the new features that Fedora 22 include. After that, we ate pizza.
I appreciate the work done by Luis Segundo and Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá coordinating the space.
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I indent to discontinue and remove perl-Mail-GnuPG from Fedora.
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Basically, it integrates with the vacation calendar of fedocal to show on the packager’s info page if the person is on vacations or not.
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Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Brewmaster is Valve’s codename for the next version of SteamOS currently available in a preview state. SteamOS Brewmaster is based on Debian 8.1 stable.
SteamOS Brewmaster is in an early preview state where Valve is soliciting the feedback of the gaming community. SteamOS Brewmaster is available in ISO and ZIP format and is the successor to SteamOS Alchemy. Brewmaster is powered by the Linux 3.18 LTS kernel with various SteamOS patches on top.
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On June 25, Valve was more than happy to announce the immediate availability for download and testing of the first preview release of the next major version of its SteamOS Linux distribution, dubbed Brewmaster.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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System76 teased all Ubuntu users with their brand-new Twitter campaign, which starts today, June 25, on Twitter, of course, as the well-known hardware company plans one of its biggest sales ever on July 4, 2015.
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This week, Dustin Kirkland announced the Ubuntu Fan Project.
To steal from the description, “The Fan is not a software-defined network, and relies on neither distributed databases nor consensus protocols. Rather, routes are calculated deterministically and traffic carries no additional overhead beyond routine IP tunneling. Canonical engineers have already demonstrated The Fan operating at 5Gpbs between two Docker containers on separate hosts.”
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In a recent email entitled “Getting ready for Python 3.5,” Canonical’s Barry Warsaw unveils the company’s plans for switching to the Python 3.5 dynamic programming language as the default Python 3 version in the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, due for release on October 22, 2015.
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Entroware is a UK-based company that specialized in selling hardware powered only by Linux operating systems. Proteus is the top-of-the-line laptop from Entroware, and it comes with either Ubuntu 15.04 or Ubuntu MATE 15.04.
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After announcing the implementation of the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu Linux, Canonical’s Ben Howard had the pleasure of introducing the first ever cloud images that contain the new technology.
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Red Hat is dominating the headlines today with their announcements and related from the Red Hat Summit 2015, but several interesting tidbits appeared from other projects as well. Tumbleweed hasn’t been updated in quite a while, Neil Rickert knows why. Christine Hall reviewed Mageia 5 Monday and Dark Duck posted more screenshots today. Fedora and Korora 20s have reached their end of life and a new Ubuntu phone hits e-shelves.
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Another Ubuntu phone, the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, has been made available in Europe – but you’ll have to jump through a few hoops to secure one.
Canonical finally delivered the first smartphone powered by the Linux-based Ubuntu OS earlier this year. It swiftly followed up on the launch of the BQ Aquarius E4.5 with news of a follow-up, the Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, which will also be made by Spain’s BQ.
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It’s only been a few weeks since Canonical unveiled a new Ubuntu phone, but the company is already back with another handset for the European market. This time the hardware comes from Chinese firm Meizu, packing a slick design and some pretty nice specs.
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Canonical has announced that a few Tomcat vulnerabilities have been identified and corrected in its Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.
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Canonical published details about a couple of Python vulnerabilities that had been found and corrected in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
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Canonical, through Adam Conrad, announced earlier the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha versions for some of the official flavors of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
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Meizu announced yesterday that the new MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone would be made available on its website through a system of invites, and that system is now live. If you’re lucky enough, you might be able to buy one.
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It has just been brought to our attention that there’s a video on YouTube where a guy shows us how easy (or hard) it is to install the Ubuntu 15.04 distribution on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 laptop.
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Over the last few years, there have been several releases of mobile phones designed with open-source operating systems: Mozilla, Canonical, Samsung, and Jolla to name a few companies that have ventured into that industry. Their operating systems aim to break through the global dominance of Android and iOS — although Android has been their biggest challenge as phones based on it are the most popular in countries in which those companies have targeted customers. But none of these companies has been successful on a large scale; they have seen success with niche groups of customers, but nothing that can make a dent in Android’s global presence. Still, they haven’t thrown in the towel, and in some cases, have done quite the opposite.
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After months of anticipation, the high-end Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone is going on sale—sort of.
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The MX4 Ubuntu Edition will be available in Europe starting tomorrow, Canonical announced on the Ubuntu Insights blog, but will only be available to those who obtain an invite through an “interactive origami wall” on the Meizu website. The origami wall will be “filled with fun and interesting glimpses” of the latest Ubuntu phone, alongside the occasional randomly-generated invite.
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Flavours and Variants
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There is no doubt that Ubuntu MATE is slowly becoming one of the most used operating systems in the Ubuntu family and the Linux ecosystems as well, but it’s interesting to see that the Raspberry Pi version is one of the most downloaded.
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Jonathan Riddell is no longer a member of the Kubuntu Community Council and the situation created by the Ubuntu Community Council, and the Kubuntu developers seems to have ended peacefully.
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We reported earlier that the first Alpha releases of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system are now available for download and testing, as announced by Canonical’s Adam Conrad.
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Lubuntu is one of the Ubuntu flavors that participates in the Alpha 1 release of the upcoming Wily Werewolf (Ubuntu 15.10) operating system, so we took it for a quick test drive to discover what is new.
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Attendees were treated to a peak into upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 with Denise Dumas today during Red Hat Summit 2015. Elsewhere, Jonathan Riddell resigns his post at Kubuntu and Bodhi Linux founder Jeff Hoogland describes the four basic types of Open Source users. Lastly, Linux Voice wants to know which company does the most for Linux.
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Today, June 24, the Ubuntu MATE team had the great pleasure of announcing that the Ubuntu MATE Boutique is now open for business and will offer you all sorts of interesting products.
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Whether you want to keep an eye on devices on your home network or wish to monitor the performance of your website, the open source Nagios monitoring tool should be your first port of call. Although you’ll need a Linux box, the Nagios software is quick to install and straightforward to configure.
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The Internet of Things is big marketplace and we keep hearing about companies like Intel, Dell, and Canonical who are trying to make some headway, but there are other competitors out there that are working just as hard and who are also using Linux as backbone, like Sierra Wireless for example.
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Spire Payments’ new suite of Linux-based POS terminals (the SP range) continues to gain global acceptance by achieving Compass Plus approval for TranzWare system.
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Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:ARW) today announced at the Freescale Technology Forum that it is now offering an open-source, specification-compliant board that is based on the new Freescale i.MX 7 microprocessor. Arrow also collaborated with Qualcomm Atheros Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, on the board’s Bluetooth & Wi-Fi capabilities and with Linear Technologies on the board’s power supply.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The current “Tizen community” setup is transparently “community theater” rather than being a real community model.
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Tizen’s architecture is appealing to both Web and Native developers alike. We have a Web API that allows app developers to create programs using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and also a Native API that allows you to code in C / C++. Tizen is going to target a whole array of devices including TV’s, smart phones, watches, tablets, In-Vehicle Infotainment, and smart appliances.
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The Schedule for the upcoming Tizen Developer Summit India 2015 in Bengaluru, India 30-31 July. This is a technical two day event aimed at application and platform developers that want to learn more about the Tizen Operating System (OS). There will be technical content for App developers, platform designers, ISVs, OEMs, hardware vendors, software vendors, open source enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to learn more about Tizen.
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Android
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There are a few big changes to the Google Play Music app in v6.0, but there are changes coming to your wearable too. There’s a new Android Wear companion app in there (v2.0), and with it comes real download management for music synced to the watch. Finally!
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Kenwood today announced that its two aftermarket CarPlay and Android Auto systems unveiled at CES 2015 are now shipping to retailers with a suggested price of $900 to $950 each. The Kenwood DDX9702S and Kenwood Excelon DDX9902S are the only aftermarket units that allow drivers to switch between CarPlay and Android Auto without having to manually change settings or reset the unit.
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As much as I wish the Apple Watch could do more, I find it the best smartwatch available, given its polished design and wide range of apps.
But there may be reasons to consider something else. For one thing, Apple Watch requires an iPhone. Pebble Time, in particular, works with both iPhones and Android devices and excels at battery life. But it falls short elsewhere.
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The case that BlackBerry should give up development of its own platform and switch to using Android is one that never seems to lie down. One of the pioneers of the mobile phone industry, BlackBerry followed in the footsteps of the others – Nokia and Motorola – who helped shape the industry but unlike its peers, BlackBerry refuses to go down without a fight.
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Amazon, following its monthly schedule, has made live a new Amazon Appstore for Android Free App of the Day Bundle, which features a total of 22 paid apps and games worth over $50 (roughly Rs. 3,150) available for free until Wednesday 11:59pm PDT (Thursday 12:29pm IST).
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Medium made the announcement through a quirky blog post, explaining that the app went through a lot of testing before reaching the public.
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We’ve never really been fans of skinning Android. Adding new features is fine, but OEMs try to “brand” the software by changing the colors and icons, which usually makes things look worse and really only serves to make things harder for new users. No OEM tries to “brand” the Windows UI—you can happily hop from one computer to another and all the icons and buttons will be the same. Similarly, on Android, when you hop from phone to tablet to watch to TV to car, if would be nice if all the designs and buttons on those devices looked the same.
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Just over a week after LG said that it currently has no plans to update the G3 to Android 5.1 Lollipop, the company has given a similar heads-up about the G4 Android 5.1.1 update.
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You might be forgiven for thinking that the Apple Watch is the only smartwatch worth buying. But watches running Android Wear are alive, kicking, and getting better.
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Automakers like Chevrolet, Buick, and Hyundai have committed to offering Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity in their production vehicles, but there’s still a big aftermarket community clamoring for smartphone functionality.
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From the variety of devices and apps available to the near-endless array of customizations — everything from basic home screen arrangements to advanced tools that change how a phone or tablet is used — there’s practically no limit to the possibilities for making the operating system your own.
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Like many walkers and runners, I like to do walks/runs with RunKeeper and Pandora. Before I got my Sony SmartWatch 3, if I needed to see the name of a song or my RunKeeper stats while I was running, I would need to dig my phone out of my pocket, press the button to activate it, unlock it, navigate to the appropriate app, try to see the data in the bright sunlight by cupping my hands over the screen, then re-lock the phone, and try to put it back in my pocket without accidentally unplugging my earbuds. Needless to say it tended to take me out of the zen of my run.
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The open-source nature of Android means that you can run the mobile operating system on just about anything if you’ve got the know-how. Case in point: A YouTube user named Josh Max has managed to get it running on his Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX. If that name conjures up images of middle school algebra exams, it’s because it’s a graphing calculator.
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Today in our ongoing series of people putting one thing into another thing, we present Android running on a Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX, a robust graphing calculator popular with the pre-calc set.
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Over the last fifteen years, I’ve tailored most of what I do personally and professionally to the open source way. It puts the needs of others first in my life, and I love showing people how they can use a secure and stable operating system on new or aging hardware to accomplish all of their technology needs and desires. I’ve also seen the open source community grow and hundreds of new, and constantly improving, projects and products emerge. I’m a regular user of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And, I use Firefox, Audacity, OpenShot, VirtualBox, WordPress, Drupal, Moodle, and more!
It’s been exciting to see open source software and the open source way arrive from the periphery to center stage.
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Source code repository company GitHub today released version 1.0 of its Atom text editor for working with code.
Contributors to the Atom open-source project have made several improvements to the software in recent months, adding features like preview tabs, cutting down on memory usage for large files, making text more readable by default, and, of course, squashing bugs.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has removed an extension from Chromium, the open source sibling to the Chrome browser, after accusations that the extension was installed surreptitiously and subsequently eavesdropped on Chromium users.
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After including closed-source code that enabled Chromium to listen in to a computer’s microphone, Google bowed to backlash and removed it from the open-source browser.
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Mozilla
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We’re happy to announce the completion of the first release cycle after Rust 1.0: today we are releasing Rust 1.1 stable, as well as 1.2 beta.
Read on for details the releases, as well as some exciting new developments within the Rust community.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mirantis, Inc. have announced the general availability of Mirantis OpenStack 6.1, which is based on the Juno release 2014.2.2 of OpenStack. The release is optimised to run on Ubuntu 14.04.1 and CentOS 6.5.
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Databases
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Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc. (Crunchy), a provider of enterprise PostgreSQL support, technology and training, today announced the release of Crunchy MLS PostgreSQL, an open source database distribution supporting multi-level security.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Libreoffice is steadily nearing its 5.0.0 release moment. According to the release schedule, this is supposed to be unearthed somewhere early August. The source code for its first release candidate was made available a few days ago.
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In LibreOffice 5.1 I’ve added an equalize width/height pair of adjustments to the “shapes” submenu when multiple objects are selected. Equalize Width and Equalize Height which adjusts the width/height of the selected objects to the width/height of the last selected object.
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Business
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So many companies fall prey to the idea that “If you build it, they will come” that it is refreshing to encounter a CEO who accepts the brutal reality of business, that no one cares, that nobody wants your product unless they are systematically convinced, that creating successful company goes far beyond building a technology product but actually involves building a business.
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Funding
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Redis Labs says a $15m funding injection announced today will help the NoSQL database firm expand sales and marketing, as well as step up its software engineering activities.
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Project Releases
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The wonderful developers behind Git, the world’s most popular open-source distributed version control system, were more than happy to announce the immediate availability for download of Git 2.4.5.
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Openness/Sharing
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In 2002, an article in the Washington Monthly explored a new trend called “open-source biology.” It asked, “Can a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate corporate researchers?” The basic idea: Instead of squirreling away their research so no one else could use it, scientists would pool their findings.
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But this week, researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Biology Is Technology” conference have a reality check to share: Open-source scientific data is grossly underutilized and kind of a mess.
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Open Hardware
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Despite the involvement of the military and private companies, the robotics field has had a remarkably open ethos. With robots in their toddler stage, it has still proven worthwhile to share research and techniques widely. The Open Source Robotics Foundation are working to keep it that way, with an open ethic that might just shape our future with robots.
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Programming
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Google hasn’t announced it yet, but the company earlier this year started offering free beta access to Cloud Source Repositories, a new service for storing and editing code on the ever-expanding Google Cloud Platform.
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BMW is bringing software back in-house so it can deliver seamless digital experiences for its customers – something more valued than horsepower or engines in today’s market, its digital business models lead said.
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Science
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Digital tape is about the hardest-to-kill storage IT there is, unless you count carving out data onto rocks, the way it was done hundreds of thousands of years ago. Tape technology celebrated its 63rd birthday on May 21; IBM first made available its IBM 726 Magnetic tape reader/recorder in 1952. Strangely, unlike later IBM tape drives, the original 726 could read tape backward and forward. Tape has managed to get better with age. When tape first went to market, the media itself weighed 935 pounds and held 2.3MB of data. In 2015, that much tape weighs closer to 12 pounds, and 2.3MB would comprise one large photo or a short pop song. Tape storage densities are broken regularly; IBM’s tape team recently demonstrated an areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low-cost, particulate magnetic tape. The breakthrough represents the equivalent of a 220TB tape cartridge that could fit in the palm of your hand. Companies such as Iron Mountain, Spectra Logic, IBM and others maintain large installed bases of tape storage around the world. Here are some key facts about tape storage.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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When a white male kills people in a mass shooting in the US, the corporate media follow an algorithm not unlike the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief.
First, media deny that the attack constitutes terrorism. In their view, acts of political violence carried out against civilians are indisputably terrorism when they are committed by a Muslim, but this is not necessarily the case when they are committed by a white person.
This is the stage in which most media coverage of shootings by white Americans remains stuck. When Elliot Rodger massacred six people and injured 14 more in May 2014, he was not classified as a terrorist–even though he explicitly stated that his attack was motivated by an intense hatred of women, and that he sought to “punish” women, collectively, for “rejecting” him in the past.
Yet because of mounting pressure and criticism from independent media, activists and social media, in the wake of mass shooting after mass shooting carried out disproportionately by white men, corporate media are no longer able to remain in a state of such denial.
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The “surprise” is that more people are killed by “white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims”: 48 vs. 26 since 9/11, according to a study by the New America Foundation. (More comprehensive studies cited in a recent New York Times op-ed–6/16/15–show an even greater gap, with 254 killed in far-right violence since 9/11, according to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, compared to 50 killed in jihadist-related terrorism.)
The Times suggests that “such numbers are new to the public”–but they won’t come as much of a surprise to those familiar with FAIR’s work. In articles like “More Terror, Less Coverage” (Extra!, 5/11) and “A Media Microscope on Islam-Linked Violence” (Extra!, 8/13), FAIR’s Steve Rendall has debunked the claim that terrorism is mostly or exclusively a Muslim phenomenon, pointing out that white, right-wing Christians are responsible for the bulk of political violence in the United States.
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Transparency Reporting
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Classified documents appear on WikiLeaks.org, revealing that the American government is spying on its allies. American officials rush to deal with a sudden diplomatic crisis while publicly refusing to comment on leaked materials. And WikiLeaks proclaims that it’s just getting started.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young’s incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.
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Then there’s pollution of the eight-wheeled sort: untold truck trips to service each fracking site. Per a recent report from Colorado, it takes 1,400 truck trips just to frack a well — and many hundreds more to haul the wastewater away and dump it into evaporation ponds. That’s a lot of diesel soot per cubic foot of gas, all in the name of a “cleaner-burning” fuel, which is how the industry is labeling natural gas.
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Finance
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We are in the middle of the first great mass extinction since the end of the age of the dinosaurs.
That’s the conclusion of a shocking new study published Friday in a journal called Science Advances.
The study, which was conducted by a group of scientists from some of the United States’ leading universities, found that over the past century-plus, vertebrate species have gone extinct at a rate almost 114 times faster than average.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
That’s right – not one, not two, not 50, but 114 times faster than average!
The study also found that as many 477 different vertebrate species have disappeared since 1900, a mind-boggling statistic because it usually takes between 800 to 10,000 years for that many species to disappear.
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The U.S. Senate has paved the way for the passage of Fast Track legislation, to give the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative almost unilateral power to negotiate and finalize secret anti-user trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday a “cloture” vote was held—this was a vote to end debate on Fast Track and break any possibility for a filibuster, and it passed by the minimum votes needed—60 to 37. Today, the Senate voted to pass the legislation itself. TPP proponents only needed 51 votes, a simple majority, to actually pass the bill, and they got it in a 60 to 38 vote. Following months and months of campaigning, Congress has ultimately caved to corporate demands to hand away its own constitutional mandate over trade, and the President is expected to the sign the bill into law as early as tonight or later this week.
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he Senate voted Wednesday to approve fast-track authority, securing a big second-term legislative win for President Obama after a months-long struggle.
The 60-38 Senate vote capped weeks of fighting over the trade bill, which pitted Obama against most of his party — including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Passage of the bill is also a big victory for GOP leaders in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The Republican leaders worked closely with an administration they have more frequently opposed to nudge the trade bill over the goal line.
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The government says it will delay or cut back a number of modernisation projects planned for Network Rail.
Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin says rising costs and missed targets make the £38.5bn plan untenable.
He blamed Network Rail, saying it should have foreseen the improvements would cost more and take longer.
Labour said it had warned the government needed to change how the railways were run but had “dithered” over taking action.
Network Rail said the plan, which was launched last year as the “largest modernisation of the railways since Victorian times”, was too ambitious.
Network Rail controls 2,500 stations as well as tracks, tunnels and level crossings.
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Pope Francis’ much-anticipated climate change encyclical, released last week, is every bit as strong as environmentalists and other proponents of dramatic action on climate change had hoped. The pontiff affirms the scientific consensus that climate change is largely the result of human activity, calls for “urgent action” to develop renewable energy alternatives, and slams global development paradigms that create an “ecological debt” between the Global South and the wealthier North.
Many are predicting that the encyclical will be a game changer that will mobilize religious groups and galvanize lagging western nations, particularly the United States, to address climate change. And the encyclical will undoubtedly give the cause a huge moral push, especially at the upcoming international climate negotiations. But there are ominous warning signs already that a significant percentage of American Catholics — the very faith constituency that should be most receptive to the pope’s message — may turn a deaf ear to Francis. This means that not only are they unlikely to give up their SUVs, but also to support policies to address climate change or the candidates that back them.
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Scott Walker is taking heat for claiming that supporting equal pay for women “pit[s] one group of Americans versus another.”
Here in Wisconsin, howls of laughter could be heard echoing through the marble walls of the state capitol: after all, this is a governor whose divisive approach has helped make his state one of the most bitterly polarized in the country.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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This fact—that there are always young kids at Mondawmin (it’s a major transportation hub, and the only way thousands of kids can get home)—is erased entirely from the equation. The use of the term “juveniles” is meant to prejudice the reader and criminalize otherwise legal and peaceful assembly. From the beginning of the Baltimore Uprising, in other words, it’s been evident the Baltimore Police Department was far more interested in manipulating the press and hyping the threat than they were protecting First Amendment activity and people’s property.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No. 2 Box and No. 3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.
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Poor Microsoft. The beleaguered company just can’t catch a break. We’ve already told you about how Snowden’s revelations have forced the pride of Redmond to spend who knows how many millions opening two “transparency centers” to allow government IT experts to pore through source code to prove there’s no back doors baked into Windows or other Microsoft products. Trouble is, while its engineers have been busy plastering over all traces of old back doors, they’ve left a side door standing wide open, waiting to be exploited.
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The spooks have been reverse engineering. They’ve been dismantling Karpersky’s software, searching for weaknesses. They’ve been mining sensitive data by monitoring the email chatter between Kaspersky client and server software. In other words, while IT security folks outside the U.S. have been keeping a wary eye on their Windows servers while trusting their antivirus to be a tool to help them secure the unsecurable…well, their antivirus software has been being a Trojan in the truly Homeric sense of the word.
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In the meantime, Windows becomes less safe by the minute for corporations and governments hoping to keep private data private. I’m certain that Red Hat, SUSE, and even Ubuntu are taking advantage.
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On the 16 of June, Ministers in the Justice Council have sealed a general approach on the Commission proposal on the Data Protection Regulation. Modern, harmonised data protection rules will contribute to making Europe fit for the digital age and are a step forward to the EU Digital Single Market. Trilogue negotiations with the Parliament and the Council will start in June; the shared ambition is to reach a final agreement by the end of 2015.
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La Quadrature du Net, French Data Network and the FDN Federation are publishing an essay to accompany their legal action before the French Constitutional Court against the French Surveillance Bill. The three associations, opposed to the French Surveillance Bill since its introduction in the Council of Ministers on 19 March, continue their mobilisation against this unjust law, in spite of its adoption in the National Assembly1 and the Senate2. Citizens are invited to support this approach by sharing and commenting on this essay by Thursday 7am to bring their thoughts or suggestions for improvement before sending it to the Constitutional Council.
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Would you change what you said on the phone, if you knew someone malicious was listening? Whether or not you view the NSA as malicious, I imagine that after reading the NSA coverage on Linux Journal, some of you found yourselves modifying your behavior. The same thing happened to me when I started deploying servers into a public cloud (EC2 in my case).
Although I always have tried to build secure environments, EC2 presents a number of additional challenges both to your fault-tolerance systems and your overall security. Deploying a server on EC2 is like dropping it out of a helicopter behind enemy lines without so much as an IP address.
In this article, I discuss some of the techniques I use to secure servers when they are in hostile territory. Although some of these techniques are specific to EC2, most are adaptable to just about any environment.
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Civil Rights
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The French proposal would grant for-profit arbitrators, working in a system that creates perverse incentives, vast discretionary powers. This creates a serious risk on expansionist interpretations. Foreign investors would be able to use this biased system to challenge governments. As it is practically impossible to withdraw from trade agreements, the EU would be locked in.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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BT is calling on the communications watchdog to let it scrap the traditional telephone network, as part of a campaign to loosen regulations that it says will help telecoms companies compete better with US internet companies such as Apple and Facebook.
The telecoms giant is planning to move all domestic and business customers to internet-based voice calls within a decade, but under current Ofcom rules must continue to provide a traditional phone service.
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Study finds significant degradations of networks for five largest ISPs, including AT&T and Time Warner, representing 75% of all wireline households in US
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Cox Communications, one of the largest Internet providers in the United States, has asked the court to order anti-piracy firm Rightscorp to hand over its tracking source code. The ISP describes the company’s settlement scheme as extortion and hopes to punch a hole in its evidence gathering techniques.
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