04.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Climate Change
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In an earlier opinion piece, I characterized many otherwise caring folks who truly worry about the earth’s survival as “capitalism deniers” because of their unwillingness to utter the “C” word. This, despite the fact that blame for environmental degradation lies squarely with our growth-and-profit-at-any-cost economic system. The system’s apologists exist within and outside government and they will never be the solution.
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Sealife/Pollution
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There’s a ton of trash in the Indian Ocean.
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The UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Japan to halt its Antarctic whaling program as it violates a moratorium on commercial whaling (which is in place since 1986). The court ruled that the whaling program was not for scientific research as claimed by the Japanese government.
Oilsands
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Journalist Dan Grossman and photographer Alex MacLean are in the middle of their week long tour of the Alberta oilsands. Their on-the-scene reporting is meant to bring greater public attention to the scale – and the stakes – of developing oil from the world’s largest deposit of carbon-intensive bitumen.
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Fracking/Gas
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Sparse public data on onshore oil and gas drilling makes full extent of failures in hydrocarbon wells unknown, experts say
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The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced into the US Congress – one in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083) – that attempt to fast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin’s fossil fuels, and enhancing US national security.
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Geologists have for the first time linked earthquakes deep under Ohio’s Appalachian Mountains to hydraulic fracturing, leading the state to issue strict permit conditions Friday on the gas extraction process.
Researchers found that five small tremors last month near Youngstown, Ohio were likely the result of the injection of sand and water that occurs during the hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — process, the Associated Press reports. Fracking involves injecting rocks with pressurized water or other liquids in an effort to extract gas which can be turned into usable fuel.
Because the geology of each shale formation is different, the discovery in Ohio may not apply everywhere across the country. However, other instances of fracking causing small earthquakes have been recorded elsewhere, including in Oklahoma, England and British Columbia, Canada.
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After his recent meeting with EU leaders Obama issued the incredible statement that the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that is being secretly negotiated behind closed doors by the major private multinational companies would make it easier for the United States to export gas to Europe and help it reduce its dependency on Russian energy: “Once we have a trade agreement in place, export licenses for projects for liquefied natural gas destined to Europe would be much easier, something that is obviously relevant in today’s geopolitical environment,” Obama stated.
That bit of political opportunism to try to push the stalled TTIP talks by playing on EU fears of Russian gas loss after the US-orchestrated Ukraine coup of February 22, ignores the fact that the problem in getting US shale gas to the EU does not lie in easier LNG licensing procedures in the USA and EU.
In other recent statements, referring to the recent boom in unconventional US shale gas, Obama and Kerry have both stated the US could more than replace all Russian gas to the EU, an outright lie based on physical realities. At his Brussels meeting Obama told EU leaders they should import shale gas from the US to replace Russian. There is a huge problem with that.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
DRM
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Keurig’s next generation of coffee machines will have a way to prevent any coffee not licensed by Keurig from brewing in the machine as early as this fall. Locking down a thing like coffee seems both trifling and difficult to accomplish—no one has yet described how Keurig can differentiate its own pods enough so that its machines would honor those pods and only those pods.
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Censorship and Links
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Payday lender Wonga has forced Twitter to take down a user’s parody advert by making a copyright claim.
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Megaupload
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Just three days after the Motion Picture Association of America brought a civil lawsuit against Megaupload, the Recording Industry Association of America has jumped in with its own case.
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Hypocrisy
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Every month, reports condemn the general public for downloading movies and TV shows without permission, but perhaps those industries need to look a little closer to home. A new survey among film industry professionals suggests that almost 40% have downloaded movies and TV shows illegally.
Internet
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There’s a European Election coming up. Voting starts in about one month, with the main election days on May 22-25. We’ve had many victories as activists and concerned citizens in the past five years to defend the net and its liberty, but the main showdown looks like it’ll come down in the next five years. Your vote is going to matter.
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On April 4th, 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation was officially incorporated as a going concern. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because the company would eventually change its name to Netscape Communications Corporation when the University of Illinois (which owned the trademark on the name Mosaic) threatened legal action.
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As the European Commission clearly stated in its Communication on Internet Policy and Governance of 12 February 2014, conflicting visions on the future of the Internet and on how to strengthen its multistakeholder governance in a sustainable manner have intensified recently. The next two years will be critical in redrawing the global map of Internet governance. Europe must contribute to finding a credible way forward for global internet governance; it must play a strong role in defining how the internet is run and ensuring it remains a single, un-fragmented network.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Voting/Government
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After spending tens of millions of dollars in recent years on ineffective voting systems, California election officials are planning to experiment with an “open source” system that may prove to be the cure-all for secure, accessible balloting – or just another expensive failure.
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ARM
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Sensor algorithm software company Sensor Platforms Inc. (SPI) is getting into the open-source movement by transforming its internal sensor platform into an open-source platform for sensor hubs. SPI’s Open Sensor Platform (OSP) is aimed at simplifying sensor hubs and data collection, and ARM is on board with the plan.
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Printers
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Guns don’t kill people, people kill people is what guns advocates say. But the guns, well, the guns do play an essential role in killing people. How much blame to place on objects of design is at the heart of MoMA’s Design and Violence ongoing online exhibition and was the subject of the series’ first debate.
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For those not in this niche of hobbies, embroidering your favorite image on something isn’t as simple as grabbing a crappy jpeg off the website and telling the machine “go.” You need an embroidery file, and making that file is called “digitizing.” It’s best to start with vector art, and then you need to understand things like stitch types and when the thread should be trimmed. It takes some effort to learn (like any skill), but to get better at it means sitting in front of that computer with the dongles in it. And with my travel schedule, let’s just say that doesn’t happen very often. I’m excited that now I can have the design software on my Linux laptop and work on digitizing anything anytime I want, whether I’m in an airport or a hotel or a beanbag in my house.
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A new type of open source 3D printer called the Mamba3D has been unveiled this week and its creators MyMatics are shortly set to launch a new Kickstarter crowd funding campaign to help construct the first Mamba3D 3D printers.
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Beehives
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With the help of Open Source Beehives, a do-it-yourself apiary kit, you can build a hive that encourages healthy bees. The hive comes with a sensor system that collects data so that you can keep an eye on the bees in real time.
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NASA
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NASA says it will publicly releases code for many of the systems the space organization has used through the years making your DIY satellite now closer than ever.
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By that time, the code was little more than a novelty. But in recent years, the space agency has built all sorts of other software that is still on the cutting edge. And as it turns out, like the Apollo 11 code, much of this NASA software is available for public use, meaning anyone can download it and run it and adapt it for free. You can even use it in commercial products.
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Robotics
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“The Glaucus, named after the Blue Sea Slug (Glaucus Atlanticus), is an open source soft robotic quadruped from Super-Releaser { http://superreleaser.com }. It is a proof of concept for a method developed at Super-Releaser that can reproduce nearly any geometry modeled on the computer as a seamless silicone skin. The company hopes to apply these same techniques to practical problems in medicine and engineering as the technology develops.
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There isn’t an engineer out there who hasn’t, at one point, wanted a robotic arm. Unfortunately, they’re quite costly. Dan Royer from Marginally Clever, however, has released an open-source 3DOF robotic arm that is sure to get many excited.
Drug Discovery
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India’s Open Source Drug Discovery programme is struggling for lack of expertise and a research ecosystem. However, the programme’s real contribution may be the creation of just such an ecosystem
Starck/Furniture
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…downloaded as data to be 3D printed at home.
Misc.
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If you don’t have a garden or a balcony but fancy growing your own herbs and vegetables you might be interested in a new smart indoor greenhouse called MEG, which has been launched over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website.
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In the open source community, we know the value of collaboration. It’s at the core of everything we do. Some of us are lucky to work for organizations that understand and embrace the power of collaboration. Yet, the silo mentality runs rampant in many organizations where collaboration and internal crowdsourcing is not valued. (Opensource.com readers who are pursuing open source projects on the side, but spend their days working at companies with silos are likely very familiar with this).
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This is especially relevant to software. When we forget to provide software freedom, a collaborative project becomes just another crowdsourced project. This isn’t just a matter of philosophy — it affects the degree and quality of collaboration too. A crowdfunded project will have to be created and maintained solely by the recipient of the funds, even if they claim to be creating an “open community”. Open source is unlocked by the equality of all participants in a given community. When that equality is constrained, the network effect that delivers the benefits the initiator is seeking will be inhibited.
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Though they’re on a trajectory without a clear future, their vision is crystal. To share what they’ve created with the world and allow the natural course of innovation and invention to change lives—without the obstacles of patents and the barriers of cost.
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There are a good number of nice programmable DIY guitar pedals out there. So, the pedalSHIELD is nothing new, except for the fact that I think we’ve strived harder than the rest to keep the project open, simple, supported, and affordable. The idea was to design a platform for Arduino users to learn about digital signal processing, effects, and synthesizers—also to experiment without a deep knowledge in electronics or programming.
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Skirmos Takes Laser Tag To The Next Level By Going Open SourceLaser tag is something that we might have played before in the past. The premise of laser tag is simple: aim for the enemy, pull the trigger, score some points. However a Kickstarter project b y the name of Skirmos is hoping to take a relatively simple game like laser tag to the next level by making it an open source project.
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04.12.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Tabletop Simulator, a game that combines an RPG adventure with classic boards and a physics sandbox, will released on Steam for Linux.
Tabletop Simulator is a title developed and published by Berserk Games and aims to be the only one of its kind. It will allow users to go berserk with anger if they don’t succeed in playing any of the included games and destroy everything in sight.
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As you’ve no doubt heard over the years from writers and enthusiasts far beardier than I, there are all sorts of reasons for switching to Linux, from financial to ideological to functional, and everything in between. For some tasks, Linux is far superior to Windows. More importantly, though, there are many tasks where Windows isn’t significantly better than Linux — such as surfing the web (Chrome for Ubuntu is the same as Chrome for Windows or OS X). Even for gaming, Linux is definitely catching up with Windows, thanks to Steam and the Source engine.
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Football Manager Classic 2014, a simplified version of the famous Football Manager 2014 made by Sports Interactive and heading to PlayStation Vita, will also arrive on Steam for Linux.
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This is the fourth article in a series covering completely free and open-source games available for Linux, usually included in any of the popular distributions. These games are all included in the Ubuntu repositories, so you can install them with APT. The other three articles covering 22 other free games can be found at the following locations:
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After five months of releasing the last alpha, NixNote 2 beta has finally arrived and can be downloaded. Nixnote, which was formerly known as Nevernote is an unofficial Evernote client for Linux. It was initially written in Java. However, NixNote 2 has been completely rewritten in C++ using the Qt framework. The main aim was to enhance speed and reduce the memory footprint. While it still uses Java to encrypt / decrypt text in NixNote 2, it’s available as an option. So those who don’t require this feature don’t need to install it.
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No matter how well organized you are, no matter how well you manage your time, you probably don’t get the chance to read all of the interesting articles that you find when you find them. To get around that, you can use services like Readability, Instapaper, and Pocket that allow you clip articles and read them when you do have the time.
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There’s been a lot of talk about the cloud as of late. Nowadays it seems that everybody’s getting in the game of cloud computing. Even Adobe has cloud offerings of its own and they’re going more towards software as a service as opposed to selling a pricey license every few years.
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FFmpeg developers have released a major 2.2 update only a few weeks ago, and a lot of new features have been added such as HNM version 4 demuxer and video decoder, Live HDS muxer, a complete Voxware MetaSound decoder, WebP encoding via libwebp, VP8 in Ogg demuxing, libx265 encoder, and more.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I decided that 2014 for me was going to be the year of the Network Attached Storage (NAS). Last year was the year that I finally abandoned my desktops and went all laptop for both my Mac-based iOS development workflow and general purpose computing (i.e, everything else on my Acer i5 running Lubuntu). This year I wanted to have a massive centralized storage where I could put all my videos and photos so I can access it from any laptop or mobile device. What follows is what I chose and how to hook it up to Lubuntu.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Spain
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The state aims to criminalize protest with a troubling ‘citizens’ security’ law
Venezuela
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Hollywood liberals Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have paid tribute to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died on 5 March after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 58.
Other Covert Actions
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In an interview, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, 60, warns that American spying has become “boundless” and expresses sorrow that approval ratings for the United States have plummeted in Germany.
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Soon after the 2004 U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide’s lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C.” This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.
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Not that this is news to PandoDaily readers, of course: Earlier this year, we broke the story about USAID co-investing with Omidyar Network in Ukraine NGOs that organized and led the Maidan revolution in Kiev, resulting in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. That revolution hasn’t turned out so well — thanks to the “success” of the USAID-Omidyar-funded revolution, there’s talk of the West going to war with nuclear-armed Russia, Ukraine is losing entire chunks of territory like the proverbial leper on a waterslide, Kiev is run by a coalition of costume-party fascists and a handful of billionaire Mafia dons—and Vladimir Putin has never been more popular, or more tyrannical.
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The truth is, USAID’s role in a covert ops and subversion should be common knowledge—it’s not like the record is that hard to find. Either USAID has developed those Men In Black memory-zappers, or else—maybe we don’t want to remember.
This selective amnesia doesn’t do anyone else any good however, so I figured it might be useful to offer a brief look back at some of USAID’s darkest, ugliest moments. It’s important to note that not everything USAID does is patently evil — in fact, there are many programs that could even be described as good. But USAID, as with any agency of American power, is fully capable of and will continue to be an instrument of geopolitical and corporate force.
As Big Tech becomes increasingly intertwined with USAID’s missions around the world — particularly as USAID’s programs and language merge with the lexicon and interests of Silicon Valley (such as “Global Development Lab,” USAID’s new “DARPA-like” research arm) — now’s a good time to refresh our memories about USAID’s dark past.
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In Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Ukraine, and most recently in Palestine and Israel, too many calamitous scenarios have exposed the fault lines of US foreign policy.
Syria
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Remember the almost-war in Syria last year? An amazing new report — which our media won’t touch — is a must read
Ukraine
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Any report about Ukraine these torrid days needs to come with a political health warning, even if that report originates from what might be called “our own” side. This includes the latest revelation from Nato about Russian troop deployments on the borders of eastern Ukraine.
Over the past six months, but especially since the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February and his circuitous flight from Kiev, there has been as much of a propaganda war as – potentially – a real war between Russia and the west. Two distinct, and for the most part mutually exclusive, versions of the truth have been put about, and have found receptive audiences on either side.
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This disruption is something we have seen in numerous other countries—at this very time from Venezuela to Thailand. The goal of these western-financed attacks has been to make the world safe for the 1%, the global super rich. Ukraine citizens who think they are fighting for democracy will eventually discover that they are really serving the western plutocracy. They will be left with a new government filled with old intentions. Ukrainians will end up with nothing to show for their efforts except a still more depressed and more corrupt economy, an enormous IMF debt, a worsening of social services, and an empty “democracy,” led by corrupt opportunists like Tymoshenko.
Journalism
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The Huffington Post is reporting that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two US journalists who have played prominent roles in the series of reporting about the classified National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will be in the US on Friday, the first time since the news about NSA surveillance programs first broke in the international media.
The two journalists met with Snowden and interviewed him in Hong Kong in June 2013 and helped with breaking the news of the leaks.
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Glenn Greenwald says he wasn’t 100 percent sure he wouldn’t be arrested.
European Privacy
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In 2010, the coalition announced that they would roll back the surveillance state including the “Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason”. The coalition is on the threshold of fulfilling that pledge – at least in relation to data held by ISPs. ISPs meanwhile need to clarify what they are doing now that the law is gone.
NSA PRISM
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Social network says more than 70% of requests in second half of 2013 in connection with criminal cases led to release of content
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Dropbox has been hit with a firestorm of criticism after announcing that Iraq war architect Condoleezza Rice has joined its board.
The cloud-based file-sharing service said it was “honored to be adding someone as brilliant and accomplished as Dr. Rice to our team”.
However, the internet has lit up with anger over the decision, with many Dropbox users threatening to stop using its services – “Drop Dropbox” in other words.
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Rice joining Dropbox is the insult, not the injury, which is in the firm’s DNA: customer privacy as a feature, not a principle.
Torture
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While President Obama forbid via executive order the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding, or confinement in a small box or coffin, the same executive order cemented the use of isolation, forms of sensory deprivation, use of drugs, and sleep deprivation in the Department of Defense’s Army Field Manual 2-22.3, which is now the U.S. standard for interrogation. In that sense, irrespective of the controversies over waterboarding and the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program approved by John Yoo and other Bush-era government attorneys, much of what was KUBARK lives on.
Rights
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Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies mistakenly shot to death a hostage who was fleeing from a knife-wielding attacker at a West Hollywood apartment, authorities announced Thursday.
John Winkler, 30, an aspiring television producer, died at a hospital following Monday night’s confrontation.
“Taking the life of an innocent person is a police officer’s greatest nightmare,” Interim Sheriff John Scott said at a news conference.
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Jonathan Fleming (center) talks with reporters after exiting a courtroom in New York on April 8. Fleming, who spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for murder, was freed on Tuesday and cleared of a killing that happened when he was 1,100 miles away on a Disney World vacation.
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Hoards of internet enthusiasts crowed in unison, when Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer was convicted of computer fraud in 2012 and later sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. And on Friday, those cries were justified. A federal appeals panel just overturned the conviction but not for the reasons some activists might’ve hoped for.
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Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is set to be released from federal prison, following a federal appeals court decision to reverse and vacate his conviction and sentence.
“I’m going to prison for arithmetic,” Weev declared last March. Shortly after, he was incarcerated in the federal prison system, charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that federal prosecutors were invoking against the late Aaron Swartz — a close friend of weev.
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A neo-Nazi mob affiliated to the Greek Golden Dawn party has intimidated a polyclinic of the human rights organisation Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) because it was providing healthcare services and medication to immigrants.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Themes
Unity
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A new video out of Canonical is showing off the Unity 7 desktop with an X11 session running side-by-side with a Unity 8 Mir-powered session.
Stephen Webb, the engineering manager of desktop Unity at Canonical, posted a video of “A demonstration of Unity 8 (Mir) and unity 7 (X11) running on the same machine at the same time.” They’re in different sessions and showing it’s possible with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without too many challenges.
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Meizu
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Canonical announced a while ago that it had chosen Meizu and BQ as the first hardware partners for the first Ubuntu-powered phones, and now an official video of Ubuntu running on a Meizu phone has been made public.
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Later this year the Meizu MX3 will become one of the first smartphone to ship with Ubuntu Linux. An Android version of the 5.1 inch smartphone is already available, but the Chinese phone maker started showing of an Ubuntu version at Mobile World Congress in February.
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Going back to January has been talk about Ubuntu on Chinese smart-phones and in February it was announced that Meizu is one of two Ubuntu Phone launch partners. Meizu dominates the Chinese market while the BQ Ubuntu Phone will target Europe.
More Phones
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Hello Linux Geeksters. Canonical has released yet another three Ubuntu Touch images over the weekend, coming with important fixes for Unity 8, the time zone support has been added to the organizer library, a bunch of boot improvements have been added, an enhanced version of calendar has been implemented, and the latest scopes API changes have been added.
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Ubuntu phone: Are you an Android for the past couple of years but recently you have been looking for a fresh take on your smartphone OS experience? If so, then you may want to check out Ubuntu’s phone which would arrive some time this year.
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Ubuntu for phones and tablets has confronted with a number of blockers in the development, but that hasn’t stopped its makers from implementing new features and fixing some bugs.
Surveillance-Friendly Computing
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Ubuntu One has been shut down and people are seeking alternatives.
The service is not shut down immediately–Canonical announced that the service will go offline as of June 1.
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Canonical – the company behind operating system Ubuntu and founded by open source pioneer Mark Shuttleworth – has discontinued its cloud-based file storage service Ubuntu One.
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Canonical has announced that the service in question will go offline in a couple of months. So you have until June 1 to migrate to a new cloud hosting service, while your data will be accessible until the end of July before it gets wiped clean. The reason behind the shutdown is basically due to high competition where other services are providing good amounts of storage for free and it would take huge investments for Canonical to do the same. To help you choose a new storage service, we’ve compiled a list of viable substitutes.
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Ultimate Edition
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The previous version of Ultimate Edition was a more down-to-earth variant that came up with some interesting features. It was one of the few distros out there that chose to keep Unity as a desktop environment, but the current version is a complete mess.
Elementary OS
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elementary OS “Isis” is the next iteration of the famous operating system that swooped everyone off their feet with some amazing looks and a new desktop concept. The first details about the new version have been revealed and it is going to be one of the most beautiful Linux distributions in the world.
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elementary OS developers are working to integrate a dedicated application for listening to podcasts and leave the Music app to do what it does best, namely play music.
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