06.04.14
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Google at 11:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Examples of dubious media coverage about GNU/Linux, Android, and FOSS matters
There is a disturbing new pattern in the corporate media other than Microsoft openwashing [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (Microsoft actively recruits and pays for this perceptions-distorting campaign), as we last covered yesterday with an example from CNET (its chief editor became some kind of Microsoft propaganda front). Well, compare to this mirror of a new article to the original from CNET and notice how the editor deleted mentions of Linux.
The article used to say “The $130 Linux-based Crock-Pot”, but it sure looks it the editor has quietly deleted Linux (unless the author rewrote the article hours later to that effect, which is unlikely). Something fishy is going on at CNET. The CBS-steered openwashing of Microsoft seems to be more than just an editorial preference and one has to pay careful attention to what editors do when accepting sponsors (e.g. advertisers). It’s hard doing version control (other than mental, i.e. observations-based) without access to the back end/CMS, seeing exactly how censorship (like watering down of text) really works. This time my wife caught it and showed it to me. I saw it from the inside as a writer for Datamation over half a decade ago. Writers are not allowed to criticise certain companies or use ‘strong’ opinions. In CNET, Linux may have become a forbidden word, apparently with the goal of appeasing the sponsors, if not because of some warped ideas in the editor’s mind (one deserves the blame here).
Speaking of openwashing, Black Duck, which has openwashed Microsoft for years (it is connected to and partly funded by Microsoft), rears its ugly head again with the whole compliance FUD. The opening seems promising: “Open source software has become ubiquitous, which means CXOs need to understand its benefits and its challenges, says Black Duck Software execs. Find out which open source trends to follow.” From there onwards it is subtle FUD and the FOSS-hostike site is happy to give it a platform.
A platform is given to Microsoft mouthpieces also at ECT, which helps the seeding of negative spin about Android, using an article that is quoting extensively FOSS-hostile and Microsoft-linked people or groups, notably Yankee Group and Rob Enderle. There is also a Russia angle. Why is Richard Adhikari choosing known Microsoft moles to be quoted as experts on Linux matters? Well, with Enderle it’s complicated because ECT gave him a platform for years (even as author) and Yankee people have been quoted on occasions also. Have they learned no lessons? They are seeding FUD and they hide the conflicts of interest.
There is generally much of the same rhetoric in some other sites, including from Microsoft boosters like Reisinger, who chose the headline “Samsung’s Tizen-Based Z Handset Poses Future Challenge to Android”. His colleague Michelle Maisto published a more balanced article.
All in all, let’s hope that journalists will choose to write more objective articles or speak to people who are objective, rather than those who are paid by Microsoft to smear Microsoft’s competition. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Contents
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I did a full review of an earlier version of North Korea Linux on Desktop Linux Reviews a while back. There are some interesting and scary videos in the review of what life is like inside of North Korea. I’ll certainly take a pass on running North Korea Linux as my primary distro, but I’m sure it will appeal to somebody out there.
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Desktop
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In a blog post constructed as rhythmic verse, Google has confirmed that Chromebooks–portable computers running the Chrome OS platform–are coming to nine new global regions: Norway, Denmark, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Belgium, New Zealand, and the Philippines. As we’ve reported,
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Server
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The NUCs run Ubuntu server and are storage hosts and the primary interface to the external world. The system has 8x Parallella boards and a shared gigabit Ethernet switch, giving a peak performance of around 208 GFLOPs.
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Kernel Space
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Linux has already transformed data center economics on the server side, and Cumulus Networks is set to do it again – this time through the network. The company behind Cumulus Linux, the first distribution for data center switches and other networking hardware, is part of a broader enterprise movement toward open networking.
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Intel will begin shipping the Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” processor this month and thanks to Computex now getting underway we’re able to publicly talk about this high-performance chip.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent out his various pull requests for the Linux 3.16 kernel. Of the subsystems maintained by Greg KH, the staging area again represents a bulk of the user-interesting changes.
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The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward.
Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the ‘merge’ window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.
For the Linux 3.16 kernel cycle, that tried and true system will change somewhat.
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Among other pull requests in the past day like the new staging work and the plethora of ARM enhancements, Ingo Molnar sent in his scheduler changes for the Linux 3.16 kernel.
Of the highlights for the scheduler tree with the Linux 3.16 merge window are NUMA scheduling updates for better performance, CPU idle changes to improve the high level idle scheduling logic, standardized idle polling across architectures, and continued work on preparing better power/energy-aware scheduling. Another change to point out is for using the deepest C-state always when in the “freeze” sleep state.
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With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.
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Benchmarks
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I’ve tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.
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Applications
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0.27.1 is more than your traditional point release: 0.27.1 is our best release ever. While it doesn’t have major new user features, it has received over 340 improvements.
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Samba 4.1.8, an app that seamlessly integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, is now available for download.
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Psensor, a hardware temperature monitoring tool, was updated recently with an option to display the temperature on the panel (next to its AppIndicator icon), along with other improvements and bug fixes.
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Proprietary
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Intel has published a new Linux kernel patch-set that adds Quick Assist Technology support to Linux along with a driver to handle their DH895xxC hardware accelerator. This is a new chip for trying to accelerate cryptography and data compression tasks.
Quick Assist Technology is a new Intel technology for better accelerating cryptography and data compression operations. The Linux implementation consists of a kernel driver to connect to the Linux kernel crypto framework and a Linux user-space library with a QuickAssist API for application porting. Intel Linux developers have already patched OpenSSL’s libcrypto and Zlib for taking advantage of this Intel technology.
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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 KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.
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Amarok is the default application installed with openSUSE but I would certainly recommend using Clementine instead.
Clementine feels lighter, has a nicer interface, the online options work better and there is better support for external audio devices.
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This year, it is besides the recurring multimedia topics, a lot about improving the new KDE Frameworks, the related documentation and the development experience with IDE’s and such.
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The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).
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Though the Krita team was one of the first to start the tradition of having sprints, with the first Krita Sprint in Deventer, in 2005, Krita sprints are rather infrequent! But, of course, we also meet each other during the more regular Calligra sprints.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.12 was released on March 26 (2014), but it didn’t start shipping on many distributions until very recently. In this post, I’ll let you in on what I think about it; the cool (good) features and those features I think the developers need to take a closer look at and try to make it better and more user-friendly.
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Initially we were thinking to go with libical ( an open source reference implementation of the icalendar data type and serialization format .) But GTG is not a calender, that’s why we dropped the idea.
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There a few reasons why you might want to build your own distribution. You might want to build a custom install CD to match the policy of your organisation. For example, a GNOME desktop with Chrome as the web browser might be the standard desktop where you work. That touches on another motivation for wanting to create a customised installer: sometimes the creator of the distribution makes a decision that you simply don’t like. Canonical’s decision to switch to its own UI, Unity, ranks amongst its most controversial decisions. However, by using some of the methods that we explore here, you could create a distribution that is standard Ubuntu, but with a traditional desktop that you are more comfortable with.
There are other, niche reasons for wanting to build your own distribution. You might need to put something small and lightweight together for an older computer. You might need to build a live media ISO that you are able to carry around with you and to bring your favourite set of tools to bear when you need them.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” LXDE, Razor-Qt and Enlightenment 18 is out.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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The latest update to Slackware-current brought us a new kernel (3.14.5) and a new gcc compiler (4.8.3).
This warranted a build of new multilib gcc packages. Get them from your nearest mirror. I also refreshed the “compat32″ layer of packages – this is the set of converted 32-bit Slackware packages which you’ll need at a minimum, so that you will be able to run most of the 32-bit software that is out there.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has expanded the company’s strategic alliance with SAP AG to make it easier for customers to adopt and run the SAP Data Management portfolio, including the SAP HANA platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), SAP IQ software, and the SAP SQL Anywhere suite on Red Hat’s open source solutions.
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Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat’s announcement that it will support SAP’s HANA is good news for SAP and Red Hat hardware partners like Dell and IBM.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron to lead the next Red Hat community Linux distribution.
Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.
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Last month Robyn Bergeron stepped down as the Fedora Project Leader while now Red Hat has found her replacement.
The Fedora Project team has selected Matthew Miller to be the new Fedora Project Leader, a long-time Fedora community member, member of Red Hat since 2012, and was the founder of Boston University’s BU Linux distribution.
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I’m proud to have been part of the Fedora community since the early days. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Fedora as my full-time job for the past year and a half. And now, I’m excited to be stepping into a new place within the community as Fedora Project Leader. These are incredible times in computing and in free and open source software, and we have incredible things going on in Fedora to match — the next years are full of opportunity and growth for the whole project and community, and I’m thrilled to be in a position to help.
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Debian Family
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Six months after the release of the first version, we are pleased to announce the updated of ISOs Tango Studio to version 2.2. This new version has been updated to Wheezy 7.5, contains some new features and bugfixes, as well as an update of the best open-source applications available for sound creation.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next Ubuntu Linux release, Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” will likely be powered by the 3.16 kernel.
Given that Linux 3.15 is being released this week and Linux 3.16 should be christened around the end of July or early August, it makes sense that Canonical developers are focused on shipping the 3.16 kernel for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu 14.10 has a feature freeze on 21 August, the final kernel freeze on 9 October, and the official release on 23 October.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is strengthening its ties to system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturer Cavium through expanded support for the ThunderX family, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.
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It is not a coincidence that Cavium, a maker of MIPS processors aimed at networking equipment and other embedded uses chose the Computex 2014 conference in Taipei, Taiwan to announce its entry into the ARM server chip space. Many of Cavium’s customers for its ThunderX processors will come from Taiwan, where a large percentage of the world’s servers are designed and manufactured these days – and usually for the hyperscale datacenter operators who will be on the cutting edge of the ARM adoption curve for servers.
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Canonical, Microsoft, and Apple want the same thing from their operating systems, but they go about it in different ways. It’s only possible to estimate for Canonical how long it will take them to achieve their goal because their product is open source, but it’s much harder to do this for the other companies.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is among the most popular Linux desktop distributions in use today, thanks in large part to its core focus on improving the desktop experience for users. It’s a focus that has been in place for Linux Mint since day one. When Clement Lefebvre developed Linux Mint in 2006, he did so with the goal of creating a user-friendly desktop version of Linux. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux, adding new desktop, setting and configuration elements. The latest version of Linux Mint, version 17 (code-named Qiana), is based on the recent Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” release, which is what is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Lefebvre has pledged that Linux Mint 17 will also be an LTS release and will continue to receive security updates for five years, until 2019. Lefebvre has also pledged that until 2016, the core package base will remain the same, which is intended to make it easier for users to upgrade to new versions of Linux Mint. As is the case with other Linux distributions, there are multiple desktop user interfaces that are available to users. With Linux Mint, however, there is a particular focus on the Cinnamon desktop, which was created by the Linux Mint distribution itself. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of the Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon release.
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The $130 Linux-based Crock-Pot WeMo Smart Slow Cooker was unveiled at CES earlier this year, and will be available in stores soon. I got to spend some time with one this week and thought I’d share some early impressions ahead of the full review. Belkin and Jarden Home Brands’ app-controlled slow cooker struck me as an unlikely smart home contender at first. Slow cookers are about as low maintenance as possible, so how much value could WeMo integration add to something already so straightforward?
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Phones
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There are a lot of headlines being generated about open phone platforms this week. Apple CEO took a shot at Android at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, even as he announced that many APIs and platform-level features in iOS are going to be opened up for developers for the first time.
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Ballnux
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Dell has added two new Android-based models to its Venue lineup of tablets. Both the Venue 7 and the Venue 8 tablets now run Android 4.4 KitKat and come with budget specifications.
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Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).
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The Korean electronics company, which earlier this week unveiled a new smartphone running the open-source operating system, on Tuesday showed off Tizen-based TVs, cameras, and wearables — some of these devices for the first time. The gadgets, displayed at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, all are part of Samsung’s efforts to create a broad ecosystem for Tizen, its alternative to Android.
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Zettaset has expanded its Big Data security offerings with the announcement of support for Hortonworks and other open source Hadoop 2.x distributions in its Orchestrator management and security platform.
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With fewer defects being found in major open source projects than in large proprietary software packages, what are the security strengths and weaknesses of open source development?
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It was HP Networking’s Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer who said seven months ago that she couldn’t see why anyone would use an OpenDaylight controller in their SDN. But it was also Bethany Mayer, now senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business, who drove HP to raise its membership investment and participation in OpenDaylight just two weeks ago.
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In today’s Linux news, a new project manager is named for Fedora. Nick Heath says Open Source is more secure because of a “heightened focus on quality controls.” And a team of developers are trying to save TrueCrypt one way or another.
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Perforce Software todayannounced it has released open source versions of P4CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is a conference all about open source video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities and educational organizations, healthcare, media broadcasters and new-media publishers.
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Web Browsers
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In 2013 the browser wars sprouted a new rendering engine: Blink. When Blink forked in April 2013, Webkit had a total of 1.8 million lines of C++, 2,500 commits per month and was the most popular browser engine. On mobile, Webkit backed the top 3 browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Android Browser), accounting for the majority of mobile eyeballs. This post is a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?
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SaaS/Big Data
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Want a fully open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud framework? Apache’s just made Stratos a top-level project.
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Education
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At Opensource.com, we love sharing stories about the ways open source tools and principles are changing the nature of teaching and learning today. Over and over, we’ve seen how approaching education the open source way can transform classrooms all over the world.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year’s GNU Tools Cauldron is taking place next month at the University of Cambridge where some very interesting compiler-related discussions will be taking place.
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His talk was quite how I expected it to be. He was idealist – Aditya and I discussed that he had to be it, as the face and primary driver of Free software. Richard spoke of the advantages of Free software, where he pointed out the numerous back doors that have been found in proprietary software to spy on users. He spoke of the GNU time line, how he had started it, how Emacs and other things came about. At some point of time, he expressed his annoyance to the fact that people confuse GNU and Linux, and free software and open source software. He spoke of how people think Linus is the father of free software etc. I quite enjoyed his talk. At some points, though, I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t really need to use negativeness to put his point across. He didn’t just differentiate between free and open source software, and he didn’t just say how free software is better than the open source philosophy, he went on to stress on why open source wasn’t good enough. If you’ve seen his sessions, you’ll probably understand what I mean.
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Openness/Sharing
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When one thinks of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology, they probably think of the large industrial level printers by 3D Systems, that cost in the $XXX,XXX range. These certainly are not 3D printers that an ordinary person would have in their home or garage. They aren’t even printers that the ordinary person has direct access to.
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Hardware
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Given this ASUS ultrabook is only a few months old, hopefully the ultrabook will be able to work out fine until the mobile Broadwell processors hit the market when I decide on my next laptop/ultrabook or end up back with a MacBook Pro.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP in April was met with a collective gulp by the IT community. For good reason: Approximately 30 percent of all desktop systems continue to run XP despite Microsoft’s decision to stop offering security updates. Furthermore, a critical security flaw in Internet Explorer 8 disclosed recently by HP’s TippingPoint Division opens the door to remote attacks on XP systems that use IE8.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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There is a tendency to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin is orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, sending in irregular Russian forces to stir up pro-Russian separatist sentiment.
As guesses go, this might not be a bad one–but journalism is supposed to be about presenting evidence to confirm such speculation. The New York Times clearly has a hunch about deep Russian involvement in Ukraine. The ways it tries to confirm this hunch are curious.
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What you’re left with from the Times is the suggestion that the lack of direct evidence is probably proof that Russia is up to something– i.e., “leaving no fingerprints.”
During the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists spent their time poring over state propaganda in an attempt to understand what was really going on in the USSR. It bears some resemblance to what one might be seeing in the New York Times now.
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The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster, often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.
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The California State Senator, Leland Yee, has been charged with the conspiracy to deal firearms, as well as wire fraud. Yee was arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI-agent in exchange for donations towards his campaign. The allegations towards Yee outlined in an affidavit from an FBI agent were not only pointed towards the Senator, but to twenty-five other people as well. According to the court documents, the allegations against Yee included a number of favors that he had requested in exchange for campaign donations. He also performed “official acts” in exchange for donations to get himself out of a $70,000 debt that he acquired during a failed San Francisco mayoral bid.
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The Country Ratings Poll asked more than 24,500 people from 24 nations whether they felt positive or negative about 16 countries and the EU. The UK finished third, with 56 per cent of those surveyed saying they thought it was having a good influence internationally.
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On Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from retweeting delusional sycophants begging him to run for president to comment on the successful rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States’ last (and only) prisoner of war in Afghanistan.
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The Fierce Take: There is no doubt that Skype Translate could be an invaluable business tool, though the skeptic can’t help but wonder if the NSA would also utilize this to bolster its various wiretapping efforts.
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In that sense, we as a country are paying another price as a consequence of the Republican clown show. Blind trust in government is never a good thing for a civilized and free society. But when the opposition is so blinded by its own ideology that it is deaf to the facts and mute to a constructive discussion to prevent mishaps from occurring again, it means they cannot be trusted to hold the government accountable.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, Sting of the Drone. We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, tells Democracy Now! he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Clarke says. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least — were war crimes.”
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The relatives of three United States citizens killed in American drone strikes without trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit they filed against Obama administration officials.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has quite rightly called on the Obama administration to publicly disclose its legal justifications for the claimed power to order the killing, without trial or hearing, of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being terrorist leaders planning attacks against the United States. The dispute came up, most recently, in the context of David Barron’s successful nomination to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. As a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron reportedly co-authored at least two memos providing the legal rationale for the administration’s decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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Wherever there is the threat of war there are always people banging the drum—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is among the worst.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork.
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The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
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Charity calls on EU to end reliance on imported and domestic fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency and boost renewables
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Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan announced Monday is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power.
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Finance
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Class and ethnicity, rather than ability, will probably determine the adult lives of Channel 4′s 11-year-old dinner guests
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I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man
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It’s well-established by now (Extra!, 7/06) that political reporters prefer to talk and write about Democrats who stay close to the “center” instead of placating the left-wing party base. This is simply smart politics, these observers note, since it’s always better to be in the middle, because that’s where most people are.
The problem is that pundits’ idea of the “middle” doesn’t seem to correspond to reality.
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How opposing a minimum wage increase and keeping taxes low for corporations and the wealthy centrist? These are not popular policies in general, and certainly not among Democrats in the state Cuomo governs. Nonetheless, Bruni is keenly worried that Cuomo may be promising too much to other Democrats, who might tug him away from this “middle” and “hijack his legacy.”
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Yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the highest minimum wage in the country. Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the bill into law this afternoon, just after 1 p.m. in Cal Anderson Park. The first phase of the wage raise is scheduled to start April 1, 2015, and headlines around the country seem to be asking if Seattle, the progressive urban utopia, is just the beginning of a nationwide trend.
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Censorship
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Given the many porn stars on Twitter, it’s unclear why Pakistan went with Knox; perhaps the fairly widespread national dislike of Duke* is international. “Dear Twitter Team,” writes Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority in his request, which was posted on Chilling Effects by Twitter. “Please block the following unethical links.” In the list that follows is the “videos and photos” portion of Knox’s account: https://twitter.com/belle_knox/media, which is thoroughly NSFW (not safe for work) as well as NSFP (not safe for Pakistan). Apparently, Batin doesn’t mind her tweets; he just doesn’t want his country to see her photos and videos. The same request asks for the removal of a url that would perform a search on Twitter for “Burn Quran” photos, calling it blasphemous.
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Google and other internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the top world search engine took a first step towards upholding an EU privacy ruling.
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State claims Mordechai Vanunu is still a threat to security a decade after his release from prison.
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Privacy
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The move came just hours after Google called out email providers, including Comcast, for not using encryption. Google Tuesday publicized for the first time the share of its email traffic with other providers that remains encrypted. According to Google, fewer than 1% of Gmail messages sent to Comcast.net addresses remained encrypted on a sample day last month.
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The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was “probably not” working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA’s allies to the contrary.
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Says lying does more harm than good
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The National Security Agency hasn’t exactly stopped spying on Americans en masse just yet, but a new court filing accuses the NSA of unlawfully destroying the evidence it collected against United States citizens for years.
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With the tap of a finger, iPhone users will soon be able to lock their doors, turn off appliances and even use a baby monitor, all thanks to Apple’s new software “Homekit.” However, not everyone is convinced creating a smartphone with your smartphone is entirely secure.
“What I would really be concerned about is that data. The secure data that is opening your doors and turning your lights on and watching your baby, where is that being stored?” said Christian Argie, owner of Top Notch Computers in Charlottesville.
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Edward Snowden’s latest revelation about the NSA’s snooping inspired an extra dose of shock and disbelief when he said the agency’s hackers can use a mobile phone as a bug even after it’s been turned off. The whistleblower made that eye-opening claim when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, holding his iPhone aloft during last Wednesday’s interview, asked, “What can the NSA do with this device if they want to get into my life? Can anyone turn it on remotely if it’s off? Can they turn on apps?
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit an Idaho woman filed against President Barack Obama and other federal officials over the National Security Agency’s collection of cellphone information.
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A federal judge in Idaho urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule against the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of telephone records while saying his own hands are tied by legal precedent.
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However, Rogers insisted the agency was not collecting such images of U.S. citizens, unless they were linked with an investigation of a foreign subject, and then only after taking the appropriate legal steps.
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The Snowden revelations hit like a bomb, sending out shrapnel which risked severing US ties with friendly and not-so-friendly states alike. Here are the top eight bilateral debacles sparked by NSA spying, whose fallout could be felt for years to come.
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Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range has decided to launch a criminal investigation into alleged hacking of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA), a German daily reported Tuesday.
The mass spying on German citizens by the NSA, however, will at least provisionally not be placed under formal investigations, Xinhua reported citing German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
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Foreign technology services providers such as Google and Apple can become cybersecurity threats to Chinese users, security analysts said, one week after China announced that it will put in place a security review on imported technology equipment.
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A Bahamas foreign service team will travel to Paraguay this week to address the Organization of American States (OAS) on the controversial allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States is recording and storing audio from every cell phone conversation in The Bahamas.
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A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
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Over the past year, as the Snowden revelations have rolled out, the government and its apologists have developed a set of talking points about mass spying that the public has now heard over and over again. From the President, to Hilary Clinton to Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others, the arguments are often eerily similar.
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Australia “pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Most Australians want their government to spy on other countries, including allies like the United States and New Zealand, the 2014 Lowy Institute poll has found.
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In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.
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On June 4, 2014, one day before the anniversary of the Snowden revelations, Poland celebrates 25 years since the fall of an authoritarian regime. On this occasion, President Obama is visiting Poland and meeting with many heads of states—including officials who were affected by the mass surveillance scandal carried out by the NSA. The United States and Poland have a long tradition of official visits between their leaders. These visits symbolize a close, allied relationship between the two countries and “help advance many political and economic issues.” Since October 2013, the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish NGO, has tried to understand the relationship between the Polish and United States’ secret service organizations. Panoptykon believes that the Polish government, by accepting mass and pre-emptive surveillance, is reverting back to the much contested practices of the former, authoritarian regime—practices that triggered the revolution 25 years ago. Thus, the NGO has organized a user-generated campaign for June 4, urging people to welcome President Obama to Poland by vocalizing their thoughts on mass surveillance.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has accredited Lockheed Martin for its Cyber Incident Response Assistance program to help users of national security systems respond to cyber attacks.
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Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called the USA Freedom Act. The bill was intended by its authors to end the National Security Agency’s broad and privacy-shredding bulk data collection program, but the final version that passed is so weak that bulk data collection will still be permitted.
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A year ago tonight, the world confirmed what most people already suspected. Privacy is dead and the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984 is alive. An obscure technician, Edward Snowden, began releasing documents stolen during his work on behalf of America’s most shadowy intelligence group. He proved the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people.
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Almost a year after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency, some people are still wondering how he had access to so many classified intelligence documents.
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Posted at 7am on Tuesday on the website Change.org by French daily L’Express, the petition had garnered over 33,000 signatures and counting by 5:30pm.
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Back in December of 2012, we wrote about (and agreed with) Julian Sanchez’s suggestion that Google should do end-to-end encryption of emails, even if it (only slightly) mucked with its advertising business model. The impact on overall security would be great (and this was before the Snowden revelations had even come out). As Sanchez pointed out, not only would this (finally) drive more widespread adoption for email encryption, it would create enormous goodwill among privacy advocates. About six weeks ago, we mentioned this again, when it was rumored that Google was trying to make encrypted email easier, though it was said that it wouldn’t go “site-wide” on end-to-end encryption.
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In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, ” No Place to Hide.”
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Apparently, the UK government worked very hard to get the Guardian and others not to publish certain details about how GCHQ (and NSA) tap certain underwater cables that connect the internet around the globe, as it turns out that they get lots of help from BT and Vodafone Cable (via its purchase of Cable & Wireless). Those two companies apparently get paid handsomely for helping the government tap into these undersea cables.
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Greenwald responded with a column that included a statement from Snowden saying he had not worked with Campbell and speculating the documents were actually by the British government as part of an attempt to make the case his leaks were “harmful.”
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Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme – including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East – have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.
The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.
British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.
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Last month, ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy.
Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.
In a letter sent Thursday to the bankruptcy judge in the case, Jessica L. Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice.
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We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. In response, the DOJ apologized, insisting that it didn’t think the data was relevant — but also very strongly hinting that it used that opportunity to destroy a ton of evidence. However, this appeared to be just the latest in a long history of the NSA/DOJ willfully destroying evidence that was under a preservation order.
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Civil Rights
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Hundreds of Amazon chiefs clashed with police in Brazil last week as the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 12, draws closer.
According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s copy1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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The government may not mean to kill people with mental disabilities but it’s deeds, not motives, that matter, and when the coalition subtracted political cost from economic gain, it found those with disabilities were the easiest people in Britain to dispose of.
Mental health is the NHS’s Cinderella service, even in good times. In recession, it’s hammered. Simon Stevens, the new chief executive as NHS England, has given us his priorities. He gabbles that he wants to “future proof” the NHS “against challenges ahead”.
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Weinstock, who reportedly felt pressure from the judge to convince his client into waiving his right to a speedy trial, snapped back in defense. Then Murphy challenged Weinstock to a fist fight outside.
“You know, if I had a rock, I would throw it at you right now,” Murphy says in the video above. “Stop pissing me off … If you want to fight, let’s go out back and I’ll just beat your ass.”
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He blew the whistle on CIA waterboarding, but the government keeps trying to sweep the issue, and him, out of sight. From prison, John Kiriakou says it’s time for a special prosecutor.
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Maybe if schools stop handing misbehaving students over to police officers, aggrieved parents won’t be nearly as aggrieved… or so likely to sue. Schools are publicly funded already, but that’s no reason to keep dipping into homeowners’ wallets to pay out settlements for schools’ bad decisions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Rep. Bob Latta achieved an impressive feat last week in introducing some legislation, which he claims is to make sure the internet remains “open and free.” While we’re big supporters of an “open and free” internet, what’s most amazing here is that almost everything that Latta claims about the bill is not true — including the whole “open and free” bits.
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If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the whole net neutrality fight, you’d know that the key issue is whether or not broadband services should be reclassified under Title II of the Telecom Act. In the early to mid-2000s, the FCC declared both cable and DSL broadband to be information services under Title I, rather than telecommunications services under Title II. This basically means they are not subject to common carrier rules, including non-discriminatory rules that are the key issue around net neutrality. And, of course, the telcos are putting up a big fight over this, listing out a supposed parade of horribles that would happen if they were reclassified under Title II.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Possibly one of the last bits of cultural detritus from the extremely bizarre Flappy Bird story makes its way to us via chiptune artist Ben Landis, who spotted a rather audacious claim from an entity calling itself “Samuel David Entertainment.”
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Over the past few days, an IP battle has erupted at print-on-demand service Zazzle over a 3,000-year-old Greek letter. New York artist Paul Ingrisano was granted a trademark for the following symbol, apparently in reference to his initials.
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This may be the biggest legal controversy to engulf the mathematical constant pi since that time in 1897 when the Indiana legislature tried to declare it equal to 3.2: A Brooklyn artist is claiming a broad trademark in T-shirts, jackets, caps, and other apparel featuring the Greek letter, resulting in the mass, temporary removal of thousands of products from the custom t-shirt printing site Zazzle.
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Copyrights
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A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), urging the Senate to push back on an amendment to the House’s recently-passed defense funding bill that would keep the Obama administration from going forward with its plans to shift Internet oversight.
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We’ve written a few times about Spanish company Ares Rights, which presents itself as an “anti-piracy” firm, but rather than searching the internet for unauthorized movies and music, has a long history of working for Latin American governments, using questionable copyright claims to censor the internet and take down content those governments don’t like. The latest example may be the most extreme, as Ares Rights used a DMCA claim in the US to block the website of Ecuadorian newspaper La Republica for a period of four hours last week.
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As the discussion over the EU’s decision to force Google to uphold a “right to be forgotten” continues, various industry heads have begun to weigh in on the subject, pointing to this as evidence that Google could do more to combat piracy.
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06.03.14
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Openwashing still the focus of Microsoft’s strategy
MICROSOFT IS hiring staff specifically for the task of openwashing the company and it very much shows, especially in recent months [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The corporate press is helping Microsoft here. It does not care about facts, it cares about its sponsors.
The NSA‘s most notorious whitewasher CBS (which ran an infamous 60-minute propaganda piece for the NSA) continues to give a platform to radicals like Hayden this week. It also gives Microsoft a “propaganda platform” (State Department terminology), with one of the top people in CNET serving this propaganda (Charles Cooper is an executive editor at CNET). FOSS people don’t believe it for a second. It’s the strategy which relies for whitewashing on pseudo-leader Nadella (Gates is still in charge), despite the fact that he has changed nothing (criminal activity continues). It also relies on Microsoft staff and Microsoft-funded ‘analysts’ such as Forrester. The propaganda can be seen here. It’s a collection of talking points, including:
“There has been a real change,” said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, noting that while that shift hasn’t yet permeated the entire Microsoft organization — particularly the Windows team, “it’s seeped into enough of the organization that it’s more than just window dressing. There are many example where Microsoft is integrating with, and even creating open source in an effort to grow market share and support customers.
It should not be so shocking that CBS does this hogwash. It loves Microsoft just like it loves the NSA. Speaking of which, Bill Gates not only promotes the NSA's mass surveillance (publicly) but slams Snowden too (in the popular mainstream fashion of false dichotomy). Will Hill notes that Gates indoctrination attack persists in the US (fighting freedom of thought with corporate schooling):
New Orleans public schools are gone. Schools in New Orleans have been converted into segregated, private schools. In general, these don’t perform better than the public schools they replace but they do channel money and power to rich people. Private schools put student records into private databases and give oligarchs even more power over what we think.
There is tremendous resistance to this especially in places where Gates and Broad got their way. Here’s a report about how privatization has hurt poor people which cites the harm done in charter school pioneer, Milwaukee. In New York, Education Historian, Diane Ravitch has some very insightful criticism. In Seattle there is the wonderful Seattle Education Blog with this update about pushback.
In this recent article Ravitch explains the attack on public education as class warfare. That’s true and it’s bad news because the only reliable indicator of academic performance is household income. The rich and powerful don’t want to reform education, they just want to take more money for themselves. Ruining public education gives them money and control for more of the same. [...] more of the same, “character growth” as judged by your corporate overlords, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117615/problem-grit-kipp-and-character-based-education
Perhaps we can sum it all up by saying that Microsoft and Gates are waging a war on people’s minds. █
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Codenomicon (where the ‘former’ Chief Security Officer for Microsoft is now the Chairman of the Board) is back to smearing FOSS projects whilst ignoring back doors in proprietary software such as Apple and Microsoft operating systems
SO-CALLED ‘SECURITY’ firms should spend more time finding flaws in secret (and most likely broken-by-design) encryption, such as the nefarious NSA stuff in Microsoft software. If they cannot gain access to the code (never mind the build process), then they should assume it to be insecure, by default. NSA is all over proprietary software, but it hides behind secret deals and arrangements with a blanket of NDAs (PRISM for instance). There is a lot of stuff in secret code which is designed to subvert encryption; we already have evidence of it, thanks to Edward Snowden.
Earlier this year we saw some FUD thrown at GnuTLS [1, 2], despite the fact that — or because — flaws had already been patched. That’s what makes Free software so powerful; fixes are almost immediate.
Then there was the whole “Heartbleed” hype [1, 2, 3], which came from Codenomicon, a firm headed by Microsoft’s ‘former’ chief (who also has FBI history and probably knows how the FBI and Microsoft created their now-infamous back doors). The whole thing stinks very badly and we have already explained why.
Now there is this new attack on the reputation of GnuTLS. Guess who’s behind it? Here’s a quote: “Codenomicon, which found the Heartbleed flaw, discovered another SSL flaw, this time in the open-source GnuTLS library. GnuTLS is part of many Linux distros.
“Security firm Codenomicon has found a new Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) flaw in the GnuTLS open-source cryptographic library. Codenomicon rose to notoriety in April as the security firm that found and branded the Heartbleed flaw in the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library.”
Codenomicon did not discover it. It was the opportunist. The flaw was discovered by another company (a person in Google), but Codenomicon marketed the flaw, hyped it all up (later bragging about the business it brought), and then disclosed it prematurely and irresponsibly, before all sorts of crucial sites had been patched. Codenomicon is a nasty Trojan horse in the security world and it has an agenda. As we showed before, Codenomicon is also a Microsoft partner, never mind the staff’s high-level connections to Microsoft.
The GnuTLS flaw which Codenomicon speaks about is already patched [1] and a Red Hat employee explains why — if anything (contrary to media reports [2]) — this demonstrates the advantage of Free software [3].
In other security news, the proprietary TrueCrypt is seemingly under some kind of fight from the outside (or infighting). Nobody seems to know for sure what’s going on there yet [4] (maybe a split among the developers or some coverup), but theories with supportive evidence get posted [5]. GNU/Linux distros drop TrueCrypt [6] as soon as possible. The Linux Foundation is still focused on OpenSSL [7,8] these days.
It should be noted that the likely cause for issues in TrueCrypt is US government overreach (back doors or request for back doors). These days, making encryption that works is seen like some kind of crime as if it directly facilitates crime [9]. It’s possible that a move to some place like Switzerland will help dodge these issues. Red Hat too should move to some place like Switzerland, for several reasons we wrote about before (security, not just software patents and trolls).
Finally, in some other security news, notice how Apple is deviating further away from standards [10,11] whilst attacking a Free/Open Source operating system (Android) over “security”, as if Apple with PRISM and back doors is somehow more secure than Android. How does Apple do all this? Well, citing some gossip bloggers from the CBS-owned tabloid ZDNet (CBS is paid by Apple), the CEO of Apple had this to say:
To illustrate his point, he quoted the title of a recent article by ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, a self-described “big fan of Android.”
The article’s title? “Android fragmentation turning devices into a toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities” – and Cook’s slide of that quote added animated flames to the word “hellstew.”
Wait a second, Mr. Cook. Your operating system (core) has back doors which Apple designed and bragged about, never mind the NSA and PRISM. These back doors are now misused by non-government crackers. How can Cook claim security advantage with a straight face? The British press (above) ought to have pointed out these issues.
Speaking of British press, watch the Microsoft-controlled BBC spreading some FUD without naming Microsoft, even though only Microsoft is the culprit. One has to read many paragraphs before reaching the part where it says: “If your computer does not run Windows, stop right here. This does not affect you – but other problems might, so always keep your antivirus up to date.”
GNU/Linux does not require antivirus, unless it’s a server that serves files to Windows clients. But never mind all that, the BBC supports the antivirus myth (some antivirus companies do the same to Android), pretending that all platforms are not secure. The fact that this is a Microsoft-only problem should have been stated in the headline, but it’s not. Therein lies the typical bias of the BBC and some other Bill Gates- and/or Microsoft-funded press (BBC is funded by both). Microsoft is simply not being mentioned when there are Microsoft-only security problems, only when there is good news (promotion).
Watch out for FUD; lots of it exists, but it’s well concealed. A lot of it is bias by omission or bias by emphasis/selectivity. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The maintainers of GnuTLS, a secure communications library used in Red Hat, Ubuntu other Linux distributions, have released fixes for a critical bug affecting the client-side of the software.
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I don’t fear the bugs that get fixed (in OpenSSL and now GnuTLS) in an open, transparent way we open source people do. I fear the bugs in proprietary stuff where I can never be sure if they get fixed and how.
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Looking at the sudden new content on the TrueCrypt site, the most plausible explanation for me was that it was an attempt to tip people off that they had been tracked down and sent a National Security Letter, without actually breaking the law. Why else would they advocate using Apple’s disk encryption with no encryption selected? Why else would they advocate use of software from Microsoft, who we know cannot be trusted? It smelled like a warrant canary.
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Due to various concerns, TrueCrypt is about to be replaced in Tails, either by tcplay or cryptsetup.
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A month ago we announced the Core Infrastructure Initiative, a project to help fund critical open source projects that we all rely upon but that are in need of support. We moved quickly to organize the initiative and the industry reaction was swift and enthusiastic. I am proud to report on significant progress that I believe matches the quality of the reaction to the formation of the project.
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Some of the world’s best-known security researchers claim to have been threatened with indictment over their efforts to find vulnerabilities in internet infrastructure, amid fears American computer hacking laws are perversely making the web less safe to surf.
Many in the security industry have expressed grave concerns around the application of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), complaining law enforcement and lawyers have wielded it aggressively at anyone looking for vulnerabilities in the internet, criminalising work that’s largely benign.
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At Apple’s WWDC conference today they have just unveiled Metal, a new 3D graphics API to compete with OpenGL.
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 10:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Newcastle wraps itself in shackles for the next three years
Summary: The latest example of the British public sector snubbing local software companies, instead bringing malicious software from abroad (land of economic and political espionage) via a local proxy (reseller)
Three years ago I traveled to Newcastle in order to configure GNU/Linux servers there; I was surrounded by a Windows-dominated environment and a systems administrator who was only skilled enough to handle Microsoft stuff. The sad thing is that in the public and private sector in the UK there is a lot of software with NSA back doors, including (and primarily) Microsoft software.
According to this news report, the latest Newham-style nonsense has spread to Newcastle, with cost analysis totally ignoring the worth of security and autonomy. To quote the article: “Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has chosen to renew its enterprise agreement with Microsoft rather than opt for cloud-based service provision or open source products.”
Well, cloud-based services usually mean “surveillance-friendly” or “surveillance-ready”, so these are not the real alternative anymore. The article continues: “The deal, for the provision of software assurance and server licences through a certified reseller for the next three years, replaces the council’s previous five year Microsoft Enterprise Agreement which expired on 31st May 31.
“The renewal, which commenced 1st June, will ensure that the corporation’s desktops and servers can be used and updated within legal requirements.
Why choose spyware and why not explore Free/Open Source software? Well, the article says: “Having considered options such as subscription-based agreements, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) provision and open source products, which are already in use by the council for its anti-virus and email filtering systems, Newcastle-under-Lyme decided it was better to renew its existing agreement – expected to total £263,284 in costs over its three-year lifetime.”
This does not even seem to cover support. They have just paid for spyware to go inside their server room/s, negatively affecting many British citizens. Did they even consult the public at all? As Munich has demonstrated, nobody needs Microsoft in the public sector; all it does it spy on everything and everyone. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Want a brand new desktop, media centre, gaming machine or server? Build it yourself! You’ll save money and have complete control over what components go into the PC. We show you what you need to consider, and what software, distros and tools you need to build your very own Linux PC.
We show you how to install Linux on a Chromebook.
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Server
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Linux server demand is rising due to demand from cloud infrastructure deployments, according to IDC, and is expected to continue to grow in the future. In the first quarter of 2014, Linux server revenue accounted for 30 percent of overall server revenue, an increase of 15.4 percent, IDC said.[1] IBM has supported development of Linux on System z for more than a decade, and today there are over 3,000 certified applications for Linux on System z. In addition, IBM is supporting the development of skills to take advantage of these applications through the IBM Academic Initiative.
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Kernel Space
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It’s always a great show of solidarity when two organizations with similar values figure out a way to support each other, and that’s exactly what the Linux Foundation and Code.org are doing.
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Olof Johansson sent in a bulk of the new ARM work on Monday that’s targeting Linux 3.16. Among the highlights of this Linux ARM work include:
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The eighth release candidate for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been released. The official release of Linux 3.15 should happen next week, but meanwhile Linus has decided to open the merge window for Linux 3.16 one week early.
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The first pull request for the Xen virtualization updates for the Linux 3.16 kernel have now been submitted.
David Vrabel sent in the early Xen features and fixes this morning for the Linux 3.16 merge window. Most prominently to Xen in Linux 3.16 are ARM architecture improvements. In particular, there’s now ARM suspend/resume support and ARM multi-call support.
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Merged for the Linux 3.13 kernel was the multi-queue block layer allows for better SSD performance with reduced latency and by balancing I/O workload across multiple CPU cores and supporting multiple hardware queues. With the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel, the “blk-mq” code is expected to be feature complete and deliver great performance.
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Graphics Stack
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After sharing the views of another developer this weekend about OpenGL being broken compared to Mantle and Direct3D, another game developer has come forward with his own “rant” that also says OpenGL has problems but it also has potential.
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Support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 and the Present Extension are finally supported by the mainline Intel X.Org graphics driver.
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Similar to functionality offered by other drivers, Mesa might finally have a shader compiler cache to save compiled GLSL shaders to the disk in an effort to reduce the start-up time for modern Linux games.
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Benchmarks
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Before moving to the raw number, lets first clarify the terminology.
A lossless compression algorithms is a mathematical algorithms that define how to reduce (compress) a specific dataset in a smaller one, without losing information. In other word, it involves encoding information using fewer bit that the original version, with no information loss. To be useful, a compression algorithms must be reversible – it should enable us to re-expand the compressed dataset, obtaining an exact copy of the original source. It’s easy to see how the fundamental capabilities (compression and ratio and speed) are rooted in the algorithm itself, and different algorithms can strongly differ in results and applicable scopes.
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To complement the recent ACPI CPUfreq vs. Intel P-State Scaling With Linux 3.15 testing that was done using an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system, here’s some similar tests done using a low-power Intel Celeron N2820 “Bay Trail” SoC within the Intel NUC.
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While yesterday’s Linux testing at Phoronix revealed Intel Bay Trail graphics are slower than Windows when running in comparison the updated open-source Intel Linux graphics stack, at least the Bay Trail performance for Intel’s N2820 NUC has improved in the past few months under Linux.
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Applications
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Maybe you already heard of the cwrap project. A set of tools to create a fully isolated network environment to test client/server components on a single host. socket_wrapper is a part of cwrap and I released version 1.1.0 today. In this release I worked together with Michael Adam and we implemented some nice new features like support for IP_PKTINFO for binding on UDP sockets, bindresvport() and more socket options via getsockopt(). This was mostly needed to be able to create a test environment for MIT Kerberos.
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Nuvola Player, a web interface for cloud music services that runs in its own window and provides integration with a Linux desktop, has advanced to version 2.4.0.
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ASCII art is a graphic design technique that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures put together from characters defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. These characters are letters, numbers and special characters such as # / and \. ASCII art is as much a constituent element of the Internet as emoticons, cats, or acronyms such as ROTFL.
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Proprietary
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If it hasn’t happened already, there will come a time when you’ll wish your computer was running a different operating system. Whether you’re a competent software developer or simply a user desiring an application exclusive to an OS other than your own, there are plenty of valid reasons for why you’d want to use another OS. Despite what you might think, however, you don’t necessarily have to adhere to your supposed monetary and spatial restraints given the amount of available virtual machines.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Nuclear Throne the excellent 2D procedural death labyrinth that becomes quite the bullet hell has been updated with alpha #29 with more weapons!
I don’t say “bullet hell” lightly either as it gets increasingly frantic as you reach higher level enemies and I’ve not made it very far at all due to the game being so unforgiving at times.
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Steam Skin Manager is a tool developed by +Martin Kozub for changing the Steam for Linux appearance. The app comes with 4 skins by default: Ambiance, Radiance, Light and Blue and it also lets you easily add more themes.
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The latest monthly update to the popular Unvanquished open-source game is now available.
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Crytek has just announced Homefront: The Revolution as a new first-person shooter game that will feature native Linux support with the CryENGINE and launch on the same-day as for other platforms.
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After Homefront developer Kaos Studios was shut down the property was passed on to Crytek, who quickly got to work on a sequel and acquired the franchise rights after THQ filed for bankruptcy. Crytek and Deep Silver have now announced that Homefront: The Revolution is coming in 2015, and have revealed the first cinematic trailer. The game is exclusively new-gen, and is set for release on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?
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We are pleased to announce Plasma Media Center 1.3 beta release!
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The previous week i was working on the Activity Switcher (it is the sliding button on right of your screen), which is written in QML2. The activity Switcher is reusing the activities component for managing the activities. So the only real difference between the Activity Switcher and the desktop Activity Manager, is its layout which has been created with QML2.
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The most famous and loved will always be the balad of the Active lands of Plasma where the society became so enlightened they managed to expel the Royal Society for Putting Things on top of other things.
What the future (KF5) brings?
Ok, stopping with the story now.
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Almost two weeks have passed since we returned from the sprint, but we are now only beginning to sort out and formalize all the data and notes we did during the meeting. The point is, this time (as well as during the last sprint in 2011) we had three painters with us who gave us immeasurable amount of input about how they use Krita and what can be improved. This is the case when criticizing and complaining was exactly what we needed
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Apple has just announced OS X Yosemite, the new and improved Mac OS, but it turns out that at least one of the design decisions from the new operating system is not “original.”
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A candidate vying to become one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation has raised the issue of Red Hat’s “domination” of development of the GNOME Desktop Project, claiming that “for the last several years, Red Hat’s wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME.”
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New Releases
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Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. I am pleased to announce the release of Finnix 110, which includes Linux kernel 3.13, updated Debian upstream software, bug fixes and feature enhancements.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Summary: The companies expect the effort to enable customers to take their existing SAP license to the cloud and add Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA to their service mix on the SAP Marketplace.
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Here’s a list of activities and bugs fixed the KDE team has been working on the past month.
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Fedora
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SnowBird Linux 20.1 has been dubbed Misha and is based on Fedora 20. This distribution is considered to be a respin of Fedora, which means that it shares most of the features, but there are also a few major differences.
“Run any of the Windows Flavours (XP, Vista, 7 or 8) and want to give SnowBird a try but don’t know where to start? Run SnowBird Linux directly from the disc. Download the latest version and burn it to a dvd using your favourite burning tool. In case you need a free disc burner, download CDBurnerXP. Keep the disc in the drive and restart your computer to boot from SnowBird Linux without modifying your computer,” reads the website.
The distribution uses the same GNOME 3 desktop environment like Fedora, but the developers have also integrated a number of GNOME extensions that should make users’ lives much easier. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is pretty far from anything done in Windows operating systems, so the potential Windows users will have to be pretty open to new things…
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Debian Family
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Overclockix, like KNOPPIX STD (remember that one?), is one of those rare use specialist distributions that will always prevent it from widespread adoption, but that’s not the point. It was discontinued in 2005 and has recently been revived by several enthusiasts on the Overclockers forum. Read the full announcement here. Back then it was built around the KDE 3 desktop, but the new development team have held a poll where Gnome Shell came out top as preferred environment.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Linux-based Ubuntu OS is finding its way into tablets with Dell’s latest Inspiron hybrids, which can function as tablets and laptops.
The PC maker is offering Ubuntu as an OS option alongside Windows 8 on its new hybrids, the Inspiron 11 3000, which has an 11.6-inch screen, and Inspiron 13 7000, which has a 13-inch screen.
The hybrids turn from laptops into tablets when the screen is rotated 360 degrees, much like Lenovo’s Yoga, which pioneered the design. Dell announced the 19.4-millimeter thick hybrids at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Monday.
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The Ubuntu Software Center has been around for quite some time and it changed a lot since its launch. The project hasn’t been improved in a while and it looks like things are stagnating a little. This is where the App Grid comes into play, an application that is fully capable of replacing Ubuntu Software Center right now.
There is no doubt that some of Ubuntu’s success as an operating system can be attributed to the Software Center.
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Although most people think of Windows-based PCs when they think of Dell Computer, Dell has actually been more friendly to Linux over the years than any of the other major hardware makers. The company has delivered computers running Ubuntu in both India and China, and the company’s “Project Sputnik” effort involved customizing a Linux-based laptop for developers. Now, Ubuntu has found its way onto tablets from Dell, under the Inspiron hybrid product line.
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The Linux ecosystem is full of Ubuntu-based distributions, but building such a Linux OS is not as hard as you might think, especially if you have the proper tools – in this case Ubuntu Mini Remix. Users don’t need to be programmers (although it’s useful) in order to build a custom Ubuntu OS.
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OpenStack has been in the news a lot… well, we have just had the OpenStack summit in Atlanta after all.
Many say that the “problem” with OpenStack is that it is still regarded as a “moving target” and work in progress, augmenting and updating as it does twice a year.
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Flavours and Variants
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1. Mint (3546 average number of hits per day) / 2. Ubuntu (2028) / 3. Debian (1851) / 4. Mageia (1401) / 5. Fedora (1353) / Source: DistroWatch
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Minimalist distros are an important option for many Linux users. Not everyone wants tons of desktop glitz and zillions of bells and whistles. Lubuntu has always been a terrific option for minimalists who prefer to stay within the Ubuntu family. Now Lubuntu 14.04 LTS is available and it follows in the footsteps of previous releases by providing a high-quality desktop distro that is light-weight and fast.
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Linux Mint has long been one of the most popular desktop distributions, so it’s always a big deal when a version is released. This time around it’s Linux Mint 17. This review covers the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 17, but much of it also applies to the MATE version with the exception of changes to the MATE 1.8 desktop.
As to which desktop environment you should use, I think it just gets down to your own personal preference. MATE is a more traditional desktop while Cinnamon has a more modern feel to it. If you aren’t sure which one you might like better, my advice is to try both of them and then make your decision.
Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release. It will receive security updates until 2019. The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016, so upgrading should be a piece of cake once you start using Linux Mint 17.
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Ah Linux, we meet again. I am on a perpetual journey to find the perfect Linux distro. Sadly, I am finding it not to be elusive, but downright non-existent. You see, operating systems based on the open-source kernel are very fragmented in experience. It is hard for the stars to align and have everything you want be represented. Maybe you like the available environments for a distro, but hate the package manager. Or maybe you love the community support, but find the release schedule too slow.
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Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is now available for download and it looks like this flavor is gaining more popularity with the community. Let’s take a closer look at this MATE-powered version and see some of its features in this screenshot tour.
Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is in the first tier of flavors that usually ships and it’s one of the most used versions from the entire Mint family. It all has to do with the MATE desktop environment, which is much appreciated by the fans of the former GNOME 2.
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The good news is that Mint 17 isn’t just another update to an increasingly popular Linux distro – some would claim the most popular distro.
The really good news is that Mint 17 is a great release on which Mint can build a solid base. Of course it remains to be seen whether Mint can get the software updates and backports that users might want and need while remaining with the LTS base. In the mean time though, Mint 17 is off to a great start.
You’ll get Mint 17 in two different flavours, both of which feature the project’s homegrown desktop environments – MATE and Cinnamon.
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When most people think of Ubuntu derivatives, they usually categorize them into an “Ubuntu with a different desktop environment than Unity” category. However, according to Ubuntu, they refer to Ubuntu-based distros with different desktop environments as a derivative as well as distros using their own tools/apps/goals as customizations.
In this article, I’ll be exploring the upside and downside to Ubuntu-based customized distros.
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The OpenPandora is a handheld, Linux-based game system with the guts of a low-power PC and the ability to emulate classic video game consoles. It’s based on open source software… and now the hardware designs are also open source.
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The autonomous Raspberry Pi-powered robot yacht built by British students that competes worldwide
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Anyone looking for an extraordinarily small Linux mini PC might be interested in the new AsiaRF Linux mini PC which has this week launched over on the Indiegogo crowd funding website looking to raise $6,000 to make the jump from concept into production.
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Aaeon announced a compact, wireless IoT gateway that runs Linux on an Intel Quark X1000 Series SoC, and works in conjunction with an Asus Cloud Service.
The Aaeon “AIOT-X1000″ IoT gateway supports the Gateway Solutions for IoT architecture (aka “Moon Island”) unveiled by Intel in April. Aaeon’s product joins other “Moon Island capable” gateway systems previously announced by ADI, Adlink, Advantech, Eurotech, and Portwell, not to mention Intel’s own Gateway Solutions for IoT reference design. Although Intel’s reference design supports a choice of either Atom or Quark processors, Aaeon’s device, introduced this week at Computex in Taipei, casts its lot squarely with Quark.
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Company executives announce the new center at Computex, and say it will be established in Taiwan.
ARM is ramping up its efforts in the increasingly competitive markets of the Internet of things and wearable devices with the creation of a new chip design center in Taiwan.
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LG is today congratulating itself on selling one million of its webOS smart TVs. After announcing the new Smart+ TVs at CES in January, the Korean manufacturer released a range of models in March, and took just under four months to hit today’s milestone. It’s now predicting it will sell 10 million by “the first half of 2015.”
“Rather than continuing to add more and more functions into our smart TVs that few people will ever use,” says LG’s head of TV In-kyu Lee, “we’ve decided to focus on simplicity … consumers seem to share our view that this is the right direction for the evolution of smart TVs going forward.” The new models are still in the process of being rolled out globally, and LG says webOS TVs will be in over 150 markets by the end of June. It’s also planning to bring more “LG Smart+ TV Experience Zones” to retail outlets in order to better promote the range.
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Phones
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The Nokia N900 smartphone launched in 2009 and for a time was quite popular with Linux enthusiasts, now has a modem driver within the mainline Linux kernel.
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Ballnux
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With Computex Taipei happening this week and the Tizen Developer Conference starting tomorrow in San Francisco, Samsung has finally announced their first Tizen smartphone. The Samsung Z is this forthcoming Tizen phone.
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After years of rumoured launch dates, Samsung has unveiled its first smartphone powered by the “open source” Tizen operating system, the Z
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Android
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Officials in China have pushed for domestic operating systems on both PC and mobile for some time now, but they’ve never been able to unseat the foreign standard bearers on either platform.
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It looks like major computer makers are finally warming up to operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, and they are also experimenting with open source operating systems. Not onlly is Dell out with new tablet hybrid devices that run Ubuntu, but Hewlett-Packard has announced a new Android-only laptop. The 14-inch, Tegra-driven Android system is called the HP SlateBook 14, and will be available on August 6 for $399.
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While Samsung is trying to create an early-bird monopoly in the smartwatch market, Apple and Google are busy working on a smartwatch of their own. Though both the smartphone giants haven’t announced anything yet, it’s only natural to assume that they’re not going to overlook such a huge market. Samsung, with their Galaxy Gear smart watches was the first big company to make a foray into wearables. Serving as a mere companion to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, these smart watches haven’t been met with glowing reviews. Many find the Gear smartwatch clunky, lacking features, and overall, an unbaked product. Though Samsung made the first Gear watch based on Android, it has quickly realized its mistake and switched to Tizen instead. Thus, we don’t have any major Android-based smartwatch available yet. Given that the smartwatch competition has just commenced, we, as tech fans, have some seriously high expectations from Google. If Android were to make its face shown on a watch, it better be good. That’s why we’ve listed some of the things we want from an ideal Android smartwatch.
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Dell also is adding a new entry-level all-in-one (AIO) system, the Inspiron 20 3000 Series, which offers a 19.5-inch high-definition display and is powered by quad-core Pentium chips. In addition, Dell rolled out new Venue 7 and 8 tablets that run Google’s Android mobile operating system.
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Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed.
Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday.
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The FreeXperia team of contributors help maintain CyanogenMod support for Xperia devices, and they’ve done such a great job that Sony has decided to hire one of the group’s developers. Alin Jerpelea was one of FreeXperia’s founders in 2010, and he is now the newest member of Sony’s Developer Program. Having already built up a reputation for his work bringing the freshest CyanogenMod ROMs to Sony devices, he will now help the company with its open source initiatives.
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What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.
angular-rt-popup (New, github)
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Skymind is providing commercial support and services for an open source project called deeplearning.4j. It’s a collection of of approaches to deep learning that mimic those developed by leading researchers, but tuned for enterprise adoption.
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Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni solved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.
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Telecom service providers may acknowledge the value of open source technology, particularly as they adopt virtualization, but they are not entirely ready to embrace it warmly, a panel discussion here revealed.
Five large service providers — AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), and Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI) — were represented on a single panel as part of a pre-conference NFV workshop, and while they agreed on a lot, open source technology didn’t get a consensus vote.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Do you trust the National Security Agency or the Internal Revenue Service more than Google or Facebook? If so, you’re not alone. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that most Americans do not trust big tech companies.
Mozilla’s Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, says “data hygiene” should be something every new or established tech company should be thinking about. Dixon-Thayer sat down with Reason TV at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas this year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now in the development phase for its next major release code-named Juno, set to debut in October. Among the major new features in development is a technology known as “Ironic,” which provides bare metal server provisioning capabilities.
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Another Big Data analytics company has entered the open source realm. Guavus has become an official sponsor of the AMPLab, a research initiative hosted at the University of California at Berkeley to drive open source Big Data innovation.
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In historical terms, NASA worked with Rackspace to develop OpenStack back in 2010.
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ownCloud announced in their blog that Claudine Bianchi has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The move aims to secure a stronger position in File Sync and Share for the most popular open source software in this category.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the first Release Candidate for 4.2.5 branch and it comes with numerous changes and improvements.
According to the changelog, the text rotation has been fixed, the upper margin of multi-page floating table has been fixed, the set-all language menu has been added, output file extension is now adjusted when exporting, accepting and rejecting changes in a selection is now allowed, the strange brightness and contrast adjustment from Microsoft Office has been corrected, and the mapping between ATK and UNO roles has been improved.
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CMS
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Who has time to handle post-CMS deployment needs when there’s so much to do developing the platform? That’s the thinking of the creators of Tendenci, an open source content management system (CMS) project for associations and other nonprofits (NPOs).
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Funding
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Trifacta, which specializes in data transformation to help companies prepare data for analysis and interpretation, has secured $25 million in series C funding.
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BSD
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Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there’s support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple’s MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This month, we welcome: Mohammed Isam Mohammed, author and maintainer of the new package GnuDOS. Edscott Wilson, author and maintainer of the new GNU package libdb. Vaibhaw Pandey, new maintainer of GNU groff. Sebastien Diaz, new maintainer of gnukart, along with his work on many other GNU packages. * Amadeusz Slawinski, new co-maintainer of GNU screen. Thanks to all.
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Public Services/Government
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Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.
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The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We’ve looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He’s got a knack for communication: concise with impact.
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IT strategists working for the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch municipality of Ede will participate in a conference organised by South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National IT Promotion Agency, to be held on 3 June in the capital Seoul.
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The press has taken a near-sighted view of the crisis, spinning in ways that only create a partial picture.
The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)
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Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, highlighted at the conference that an open and transparent government is not enough if it lacks civic participation. “In my view, openness and transparency should stimulate their sense of ownership in open government.”
Dr Alanna Simpson, Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank-Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, told me that the Indonesian Government is a leader in making open data and open source available.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.
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The highly publicized journey of HealthCare.gov has major implications for the relationship between open source standards and government technology.
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Programming
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But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash makes manipulating the game’s source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.
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Family members said one of the other victims was the wife of a New Jersey borough commissioner. James P Leeds Sr told the Associated Press that his 74-year-old wife, Anne, died Saturday night in the Massachusetts crash. Leeds said he got a text from his wife from the plane at 9.36 p.m, four minutes before the crash.
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The island’s appeal is simple: couples of mixed religion can have a civil ceremony that, though not allowed back home, will still be recognised in law
[...]
In 1980, 61 Lebanese brides and 78 Lebanese grooms were married there, as well as 98 Israeli grooms and 99 Israeli brides. In 2013, there were 2,131 Israeli weddings, 581 Lebanese ones, and 35 Syrian unions. Some municipalities, such as tourist-friendly Livadia, report even more startling figures; last year, of the 1,000 or so weddings it recorded, 350 were Lebanese, 425 were Israeli, and 20 were Syrian.
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Science
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Soviet cosmonaut and first spacewalker in the world, Aleksei Leonov, celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday. In March 1965 he was outside his spaceship for 12 minutes, connected to the craft by a 5.35 meter tether. Later, Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leonov is also an accomplished artist, whose works are displayed in many art galleries in Russia and abroad, and an author of several popular books about space. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have congratulated the legendary cosmonaut, who was twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title, on his anniversary and wished him good health, happiness and success. “Your professional biography, rich in significant and truly historical events, and all your life is a worthy example of unblinking devotion to the cause and of enormous personal courage,” Putin said in a telegramme, published on the Kremlin website on Friday.
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“It’s interesting that 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, the early Earth experienced a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment where there were a lot of impacts, including large impacts, and this period also overlaps with the evidence of the earliest life on Earth,” said Haley Sapers, an astrobiologist at the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program at McGill University in Montreal. “One might ask why life arose during such an inhospitable part of Earth’s history. Maybe impact cratering had a role in the origin of life.”
Impacts on a water-rich planet like Earth or even Mars can generate hydrothermal activity — that is, underwater areas boiling with heat. Seafloor hot springs known as hydrothermal vents more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface can be home to thriving ecosystems on Earth, including giant tube worms 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The impact that created the Ries crater may have generated hydrothermal activity lasting as long as 10,000 years, given microbes time enough to colonize the area.
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Health/Nutrition
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An unholy alliance of pro and anti- GMO countries have struck a deal that will sweep away the obstacles to genetically engineered crops in the EU. By allowing – under limited circumstance – individual member states to prohibit the growing of GMO crops on their territory, the European Commission expects to boost GMO cropping in the EU overall.
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Belinda worked as a model, lived in a nightclub and often went to noisy parties. There was loud music wherever she went. Then she went to art school, where she listened to music through headphones while she painted. Now, with a quieter job in finance, she lives with the legacy of irreversible damage to her inner ear.
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Security
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Both prosecution and defense lawyers have begun to present their closing arguments as the trial against several News Corp. employees for compromising the privacy of crime victims, royalty, celebrities, and politicians.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It’s not surprising then, that, picking up on one of the latest technology trends, the United Arab Emirates’ Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum would launch a “Drones for Good” competition, offering $1 million for the best positive drone design. The UAE will be taking international entries for drone ideas in categories like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, economic development until August.
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The American government has killed four Americans with drone strikes since 2009, all of which were completely detached from any notion of due process. At best, the DOJ builds a case against the foreign-located citizen and, if the target resides in a nation where the US can get away with utilizing weaponized drones, the American citizen is sentenced to death via push-button operator.
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A four-year-old girl whose face was blown off during a US drone strike in Afghanistan was kidnapped by American troops and hidden by an international organization, her family says.
The child, named Aisha Rashid, was travelling with her parents, a sibling and several other relatives from Kabul to their home in the village of Gamber in Kunar province on a hot September day, when the drone exploded, Expressen.se reported. An uncle, Meya Jan, is at home on his farm in that village when he receives a phone call about the strike from the neighboring village. He and others rush to the strike.
Suddenly they hear a voice. “Water, water…”
It is Aisha. She is missing a hand, her leg is bleeding, and there is nothing left of her eyes or nose.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting of the Drone.” We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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A few days ago, Phil reported on Yousef Munayyer’s take on the nauseating Wolf Blitzer interview with “CNN analyst” (and former Israeli Ambassador to the US) Michael Oren on the recent IDF sniping murders of two Palestinian teenage boys.
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Every time the working class and poor of Latin America try to take a step forward and write their own history they confront the power of U.S. imperialism. It uses whatever is in fashion at the time — coups, blockades, manufactured protest movements, referendums or trade sanctions — to turn back the clock.
When longstanding polarization in Venezuela erupted into street protests in February and March, the United States, true to form, played its usual role in the unrest. Using money, tough talk and lobbying among Latin American countries, the U.S. tried to shore up opposition to the elected government of Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor.
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Not wavering from his foreign policy mission of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to restore an Islamic Caliphate under their control, Mr. Obama has ordered the training and arming of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Assad. Current reports indicate that the forces loyal to Assad are gaining ground against the Muslim Brotherhood–supported rebels.
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The release of U.S. government contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban prison depends solely on the “political will” of President Barack Obama, a Havana spy who spent more than 15 years behind bars in the United States said on Monday.
To support that assertion, Fernando Gonzalez cited Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban members being held at Guantanamo for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American POW in Afghanistan.
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Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China’s spreading Communism in the early 1950’s, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy’s spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.
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Last weekend, a White House press report distributed to 6,000 journalists, included the name of the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, alongside said title.
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A night-time car chase in Cleveland that ended on a schoolyard where more than 100 shots were fired at the suspect’s vehicle appeared to be over when an officer opened fire again, a prosecutor said in announcing charges against the patrolman and five police supervisors.
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President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials.
On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans.
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Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes that captured weaponry appears to be the most important fuel of the armed rebellion, followed by self-made arms and materiel, and then foreign-supplied items.
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The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation mandating sanctions against Venezuela as officials there presented evidence of US involvement in a plot to bring down the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
The bill, passed in a voice vote by the House with only 14 members in opposition, demands that the Obama administration draw up a list of Venezuelan officials allegedly responsible for repression during violent protests that have been organized across the South American country since last February. They would be sanctioned with the freezing of any assets in the US and the denial or revocation of visas.
Washington’s step closer toward another blatant imperialist intervention against Venezuela came on the same day that government officials in Caracas publicly presented what they described as evidence of US involvement in a plot by the far-right in Venezuela to overthrow the government and assassinate President Maduro.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.
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A group of people, including religious leaders in Berrien County, are taking to the road from Chicago to Battle Creek to protest what they see as a menace from the sky.
The participants will walk from Chicago to Battle Creek on June 3-14 to protest the use of armed drones in the “War on Terror,” that they say kill innocent civilians, create more enemies and undermine America’s standing in the world.
“The use of armed drones pose many legal, strategic, tactical, and ethical problems,” said the Rev. Dan Scheid of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Benton Harbor, who will walk and host discussions on the issue. “As a citizen of the United States and of the world, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is bad public policy. As a follower of Jesus, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is immoral, and my baptismal and ordination vows compel me to witness against them.”
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According to local officials in the eastern province of Kunar, the US-launched drone was on a targeted attack which killed and injured unknown people, some of them civilians.
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San Salvador – Sanchez Sanchez Ceren, 69, a former leader of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front(FMLN) was sworn in as the president of El Salvador. He had won the presidency in a close March runoff vote against his conservative opponent.
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Bay Area officials in Oakland are reviewing seven years of police disability retirements after learning last month that one of their former officers was collecting a disability pension even while he was working for the FBI.
Former Oakland police officer Aaron McFarlane received more than $52,000 in disability benefits each year while he was working as an FBI special agent in Boston.
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His parting shot was a call for a European FBI to tackle cross-border crime gangs and the call for UKIP to follow in the footsteps of Sinn Fein ex-MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who did not take up the seats they won in the Commons.
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In the words of Charles Krauthammer, a strong critic of Obama and supporter of the George W. Bush administration who has neoconservative tendencies: “And you didn’t hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism. It was the rhetorical equivalent of that classic national security joke in which the presidential aide, devoted to policy option X, submits the following decision memo…
[...]
The difference between Bush and Obama is that the latter is much more selective in his interventions. Such a correction was what the American people wanted when they elected Obama in 2008 — and inevitable after the two unsuccessful wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson characterized the naysaying surrounding climate change as par for the course in footage aired on Monday from his interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes,
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Friends of the Earth claims chancellor handed out £2.7bn of incentives to North Sea oil and gas firms
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Even as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny at home, America’s dirty and unwanted coal is being embraced in one of the world’s cleanest energy markets: the European Union.
At the biggest power plant in the U.K., operated by Drax Group PLC, a small black mountain of a million tons of coal sits at the base of a dozen 374-foot cooling towers.
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A fierce debate has been raging between climatologists and Superfreakonomics authors Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, culminating in an impassioned New York Times blogpost yesterday by Dubner. From RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network
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Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.
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Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.”
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Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday.
After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered evidence of systematic abuse and a flawed monitoring system that contradicts the Brazilian government’s claims to be coping with the problem of deforestation in the Amazon.
In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace cited five case studies of the fraudulent techniques used by the log launderers, including over-reporting the number and size of rare trees, logging trees protected by law, and over-extraction. It notes how forest management officials are implicated in the wrongdoing and several have previously been fined or detained for similar crimes in the past.
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During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a “creeping national security crisis” that will require the armed forces to “respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food.”
The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.
A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a “threat multiplier,” but now – even worse – a “catalyst for conflict”, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades…
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Finance
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With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.
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As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.
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We are joined by Aviva Chomsky, whose new book, “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” details how systemic prejudice against Mexicans and many other migrant workers has been woven into U.S. immigration policies that deny them the same path to citizenship that have long been granted to European immigrants. She also draws parallels between the immigration laws now in place that criminalize migrants, and the caste system that has oppressed African Americans, as described by Prof. Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow.” Chomsky’s previous book on this topic is “They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths about Immigration.” She is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
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Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the city’s minimum wage to the highest level of any major US city – $15 (£9) per hour, twice the national minimum.
Wages would begin to rise next year, ultimately reaching $15 from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 over three to seven years, depending on the business.
A councillor who supported the push said the vote “sends a message heard around the world”.
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Well, this ought to cause a stir at this summer’s garden parties among Canada’s elites.
Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada Governor (now the Governor of the Bank of England) has come forward to condemn what he calls “unchecked market fundamentalism.”
He delivered the remarks last week at the Conference for Inclusive Capitalism, an annual gathering of global political and financial elites that featured keynotes by Carney along with Prince Charles and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
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Residential and commercial buildings are seen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Home prices in major Chinese cities registered their first monthly decline in 23 months in May.
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Amid the upheavals in Thailand, Ukraine and Egypt, wealthy elites have used popular movements and elections to ratify decisions in their favor.
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Except for one big difference. By early 2016, the era of record-low interest rates is over. Borrowing is getting steadily more expensive. And the result is starting to destabilise our entire economic model.
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A few weeks ago, an official from the Cabinet Office gushed on his blog about a jolly exciting trip, a kind of pilgrimage, to Amazon and Google in Seattle and San Francisco. Francis Maude, the unofficial government minister for paperclips and parsimony, led the expedition. It was mindblowing, the official reported afterwards.
They looked at the IT, were given a sneak preview of the cutting edge innovations. It seemed they had unlimited time to talk about all manner of things. But there was no indication that anyone raised the fact with these multinational behemoths, that on any right-thinking estimation, they owe us billions of pounds in tax. Amazon’s UK subsidiary paid £2.4m in corporate taxes in 2012, despite sales of £4.3bn. Google paid £11.6m in the same period despite sales of £506m.
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Senior football officials in Africa received over $5 million in bribes to make sure Qatar won the bid for the 2022 World Cup, the Sunday Times reports citing leaked documents.
According to the paper, the money came from former FIFA vice-president and infamous Qatari businessman, Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Bin Hammam reportedly used 10 slush funds controlled by his private company – as well as cash handouts – to make dozens of payments of up to $200,000 to the heads of the 30 African football associations.
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The front page of USA Today (5/23/14) blew the whistle on federal workers: They are tax deadbeats who owe billions in back taxes.
The story also revealed that they owe less than most people.
Confused?
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A new progressive tax code would end the assault on shared prosperity, create jobs, and help save the planet, says Nobel Joseph Stiglitz
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Serbia’s prime minister accused Europe’s chief security and rights watchdog of lying on Monday after it alleged his government tried to smother online criticism of its handling of devastating floods last month.
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Google has had one demand every seven seconds to suppress information about people’s pasts, it was revealed on Sunday.
The rush of censorship requests follows the internet giant’s move to provide forms allowing people to ask that certain information about them be hidden when their name is searched online.
The figures indicate that large amounts of material could disappear from public reach as a direct result of an EU court decision that search engines must enforce a “right to be forgotten”.
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Egypt’s internationally renowned satirist, Bassem Youssef, has announced the end of his popular television show, citing pressure from the authorities.
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I’ve avoided talking about this story until it progressed further. Historically Google has had many take-down requests, many to do with “piracy” and there’s also court order’s for ISP blocks on domains – we already have an increasing trend towards censorship. But is some censorship good? Whilst the copyright take-down’s and ISP blocks are mostly useless, with the recent ruling involving Google removing search results for you and me, requires further examination.
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Bold initiatives characterize India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who famously lives in a 27-story building in Mumbai, a city where most people languish in slums. Last month, his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., sought to prevent circulation of a new book which claims that Reliance successfully pressured the previous Indian government to double the price of natural gas. Amazon received a cease and desist notice, as did even an individual who had merely forwarded an e-mail invitation to the book’s launch. And Thursday, Ambani moved to buy a whole swath of the Indian media: Bloomberg News reports that Reliance, which has already invested $11 billion in a high-speed cellular network, will now spend $678 million for majority stakes in two major media companies, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. and TV18 Broadcast Ltd.
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Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools–a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities–are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.
The first step came in January 2011 with new regulations for online media that could be used to restrict coverage, including applying the kingdom’s already highly repressive press law to online media. Shortly after, the Ministry of Culture and Information began blocking local news websites that failed to register, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.
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Privacy
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But as documents released by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed last year, the hijacking of our civil liberties has continued, albeit surreptitiously and sleazily by functionaries at NSA. Snowden’s revelations showed the agency had been secretly harvesting millions of emails and instant-messaging contact lists of everyday Americans. Judges have challenged the practice’s constitutionality with one calling it “almost Orwellian.” – See more at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2014/jun/02/dont-let-us-freedoms-tumble-in-balancing/#sthash.V2lRraKK.dpuf
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On Sep. 1, 2013, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that in 2012 the NSA had spied on the email of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the latter case during his presidential campaign.
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Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, wanted by US authorities and currently living in Russia, said in a TV interview Sunday that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
“I would love to live in Brazil,” Snowden told Brazil’s Globo TV.
Snowden’s temporary asylum in Russia expires in August. Washington has revoked his US passport, so his travel options are limited.
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Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance and data collection by the government-corporate complex.
Halfway across the ornate sitting room, Julian Assange stands with his back to the door, drinking a bottle of beer. It is early on a summer evening, June 22, 2013, and the Embassy of Ecuador in London is hosting a small party to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of his arrival in need of asylum. While Assange stands chatting calmly about the future of his anti-secrecy enterprise, Wikileaks, few people in the room know that he is worried. Sarah Harrison, his principal researcher and confidant, is only hours away from slipping out of Hong Kong with Edward Snowden, who, at that moment, is fast becoming the most hunted man in the world.
Close friends and supporters of Assange mill around the room, helping themselves to the buffet and arguing about software and the state of the world – in that order. Assange himself, with his longish white hair and black jeans, looks slightly out of place in the scene, bordered as it is by stiff-legged, gilt-painted settees. After a year, however, he’s completely at home here, laughing and joking with the security guys, lawyers, and hacker guests, talking thoughtfully about the escalating struggle for control of electronic information.
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Facebook just announced a new feature to its app, which will let it listen to our conversations and surroundings through our own phones’ microphone. Talk about a Big Brother move.
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A new email service being developed by a group from MIT and European research center CERN promises to bring secure, encrypted email to the masses and keep sensitive information away from prying eyes.
“We guarantee only the sender and receiver can read the messages,” said Andy Yen, a co-founder of ProtonMail. “We have zero access to user data.”
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This will be the occasion for us to brief colleague ministers on the most recent developments here in The Bahamas with regard to the recent allegations of the recording of Bahamian mobile phone calls by the United States.
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Nearly one year on from the first revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is still business as usual. The NSA continues to scoop up all the data it wants, while the technology companies which have co-operated with it all along continue to try and convince the public that they are doing what they can to curtail such activity.
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Canada’s next privacy Commissioner is a federal Justice Department lawyer who counsels the government agencies that impact privacy in Canada the most—agencies such as the NSA’s Five Eyes cyber surveillance partner Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which operates an extensive, secretive metadata collection program that the country’s citizens know very little about.
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In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, NSA secret-leaker Edward Snowden set himself a low bar and claimed success: His leaks, he said, have gotten us talking about these important issues. Mission accomplished? Let’s think about that…
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Ben Wizner, attorney for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, got into it with Up host Steve Kornacki Sunday morning over whether Snowden had sacrificed his moral authority as a whistleblower by fleeing the United States (and eventually ending up in Russia) rather than accepting the legal consequences of leaking classified information. To this Wizner posed: “Do you think people who used the Underground Railroad should have stayed and faced the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act?”
“So you’re likening them?” Kornacki asked. “That’s quite a comparison.”
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The late 1960’s and early 1970’s was the heyday of legal privacy as we came to know it in the 20th century. From the Supreme Court first came the family planning cases that made contraception legal in 1965, and which continued up to abortion rights and most recently the decriminalization of sodomy law almost always used against same sex relationships. Next came a decision that required law enforcement to obtain a warrant for tapping a phone line for content and the subsequent Congressional action to instantiate that decision; those laws are the foundation for the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Consumer protection privacy laws were continuing apace with rules that required companies that kept “scores” on individual’s credit to allow the individual access and the right to correct the record in the event of misidentifications or mistake. Another flavor of this era is the law that produced one of our better known sectoral laws, FERPA, or the one that protects education records. Often overlooked is the plainly named Privacy Act of 1974.
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USA Freedom Act hides behind ‘fog of legalese’ to give NSA more spying power
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Want real surveillance reform? Well, we almost had it. The USA Freedom Act started off with a roar before being slightly weakened (compromised is the word being used) by the House Security and Judiciary Committees. Still, it had wide ranging support across the floor. It was a sufficient start to a bill set to curtail the surveillance programs in the United States considerably and the civil liberties community in Congress rallied behind it.
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Early this week, the FBI announced that five Chinese hackers had been indicted for spying on American companies. That’s right, economic espionage.
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Major websites such as Reddit, Imgur and DuckDuckGo are to take part in the June 5 “Reset The Net” anti-NSA spying online campaign.
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The Reset the Net campaign aims to encourage direct action, urging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools
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Edward SnowdenEdward Snowden. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
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Oliver Stone will write and direct a film about Edward Snowden, one of two high-profile films in the works about the National Security Agency leaker.
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Acclaimed director Oliver Stone, who has made iconic films like “Wall Street” and “Platoon,” will be directing a film based on the story of Edward Snowden that will be adapted from a book written by Luke Harding, a journalist at British newspaper, The Guardian.
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Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will be adapting the story of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the big screen.
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Former intelligence service provider Edward Snowden, currently residing in Russia and sought after by the US authorities, said in an interview that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
Agence France-Presse cited Snowden as stating in an interview given to Brazilian TV channel Globo that if Brazil gives him asylum, then he would gladly accept the offer and would very much like to live in Brazil. However, the foreign ministry of Brazil has said that it has not yet received any formal asylum appeal from Snowden.
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The Brazilian foreign ministry Monday denied that US intelligence contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has formally requested Brazil for asylum.
In an interview aired by local TV station Globo Sunday evening, Snowden, whose temporary asylum in Russia expires in August, said that he had requested asylum from Brazilian government, and he would be happy to live in Brazil if the government approves his request, Xinhua reported.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago last June, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is expected to announce on Tuesday a deal with DEF CON to hold the final round of DARPA’s two-year Cyber Grand Challenge at the organization’s 2016 Las Vegas conference.
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Every year, the government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. The vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view, even after the investigations are over. The secrecy surrounding these matters is the subject of a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal.
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In one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades, the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from James Risen of The New York Times. Risen is refusing to testify in the trial of an ex-CIA analyst accused of being his confidential source. He has vowed to continue his fight and face imprisonment rather than reveal his source’s identity. Tune in to Democracy Now! on Tuesday when we get reaction to the latest developments from Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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NBC News didn’t broadcast the full interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, but only aired a quarter of it Russia Today reported. Unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9/11 attacks,
The four-hour interview of Snowden by journalist Brian Williams was condensed into a 60-minute programme by NBC.
In one of the portions, Snowden questioned the US intelligence agencies’ inability to stop the 11 September, 2001 attacks in New York, despite having massive amount of surveillance.
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A Downtown attorney filed a federal lawsuit Monday against the president, the heads of the FBI and NSA, and others alleging the government is illegally monitoring his Internet communications, including email.
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Recently e-commerce giant Amazon unveiled a microphone-enabled barcode reader, the Amazon Dash, giving a helping hand to add items to your shopping list. The device was given away free of charge to a select number of Amazon’s Prime Fresh loyalty program users, who can now order their groceries either vocally or through a quick scan of a product’s container (for example a milk bottle). Just say it and get it delivered to your home. “Never forget an item again — Dash remembers so you don’t have to,” says AmazonFresh’s website.
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AFTER more than a week with no answers from Americans or “hard facts” over spying claims, Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell said he plans to raise concerns over allegations at a regional meeting this week.
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Sunde was also involved in numerous tech startups in recent years, including the short messaging service Heml.is (“secret” in Swedish) – reportedly a NSA-proof service – for which he raised more than $150,000 through a crowd-funding campaign.
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A civil liberties coalition wants to nullify the NSA, one lightbulb at a time.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has refused to confirm or deny if it has been eavesdropping on Barbadian cellphone calls.
Agency spokesperson Vanee Vines would say neither “yes” nor “no” to questions from the DAILY NATION on if it had been doing so.
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Mr. Green, why not try making art that calls into question, rather than exploits, our growing lack of privacy?
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For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place
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As that indicates, this is an extremely thoughtful and wide-ranging paper that draws together a number of big issues — surveillance, privacy, governance, geopolitics etc. It’s an important contribution to the debate initiated by the release of NSA and GCHQ documents by Edward Snowden, and anyone interested in what the longer-term implications of those revelations will be really ought to read it.
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On June 1, NBC’s Meet the Press unveiled new polling numbers about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They weren’t very revealing. What was more instructive was how the show presented its debate over Snowden’s actions.
The main participants in the discussion were right-wing Crossfire host Newt Gingrich and hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman.
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Civil Rights
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Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.
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Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.
“The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.
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Coming through passport control is an ordeal, I am followed on the street and hassled by security services. Not all citizens enjoy the same rights
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What is Firedoglake? How does it work? How does the site make money? Are there any other websites you could write for? What do you think you plan to do next?
Sometimes describing what I do at Firedoglake to family, friends and people I encounter after speaking at events is a bit perplexing to people. This is not a more prominent news media organization like New York Times, Rolling Stone or Huffington Post. But I have found not being more prominent uniquely positions Firedoglake to pursue specific projects.
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A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.
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The case had been closely watched as possibly setting an important precedent about the First Amendment, news reporters and confidential sources. Instead, Risen will now face a decision about officially naming his source for a book he wrote about Iran or refusing to answer questions under a Justice Department subpoena. (The source’s name has been widely reported as part of an official legal action.)
Last Thursday, the Justices met behind closed doors to consider accepting Risen’s case for the Court’s next term, which starts in October 2014.
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As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.
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As the World Cup nears, the Brazilian press has reported that the American company Academi, formerly Blackwater, carried out training of Brazilian military personnel and federal police in April.
The training is a facet of the military cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States signed in 2010 during the second term of the Lula de Silva administration in preparation for containing terrorist acts during this year’s World Cup. Academi is a private security company based in the United States, and has used mercenary soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Bill Gertz reported this week on a memo outlining Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens – a memo from 2010. Remember how the blogs and many of us out here were ringing the alarm bells on Obama’s stance that he could use the military and drones against American citizens? Remember how we were marginalized and called crazy for it? Turns out, ‘crazy’ is relative.
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The ICE undercover operation played out in the first decade of the 2000s (roughly 2004 until sometime in 2008) and involved the use of US government front companies to sell aircraft to suspected Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
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In an effort to increase job opportunities for Saudi Arabian citizens, the Saudi government is detaining and deporting thousands of undocumented foreign migrant workers. Part of the deportation process includes detaining large populations in what has been described as “appalling” conditions. These detention centers have had reports of guard brutality, overcrowding, lack of food, and poor hygiene. Furthermore, most of these migrant workers are Somali, and are deported back to one of the most unstable, dangerous areas in the world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So there’s every reason to believe that YouTube is, indeed, bullying the independents into accepting a deal that dramatically undervalues the investment indies make in new emerging artists. Unlike the lack of support songwriters had when PRS experienced the same tactic, the indies can surely count on songwriters to support them in standing up to the bully. But when will the competition commissions around the world do something about it? It’s not only artists that will be worse off if the indies give in – so will music fans all over the world.
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Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co-founder was arrested in Southern Sweden. TPB co-founder was wanted by Interpol and apprehended in a police raid. Peter did not serve prison time for his role in Pirate Bay operations. TorrentFreak noted that he was arrested exactly eight years after police conducted the raid.
Peter was wanted by Interpol for more than two years and he was arrested in a place near Malmö, Sweden. Interpol had been looking after his role in The Pirate Bay case.
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Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.
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06.01.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The Kano computer system revolves around two core things: a Raspberry Pi and the Kano OS designed for it. More than just another Raspberry Pi kit, it proved itself with a successful Kickstarter, promising a system that would help get kids into real computing and allow them to start down a path of programming and coding.
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The Sphere icon pack is made by Achim Karsch and features over 24.000 icons for the operating system, covering pretty much all the known applications out there.
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The Australian national Linux conference of 2014, held in Perth in January, looks set to make a loss of nearly $40,000, according to the president of Linux Australia, Joshua Hesketh.
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Server
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Guill, a recent graduate of the masters in computer science and electrical engineering program at the University of Texas in Dallas, built the 40-node Raspberry Pi cluster for distributed software testing. In addition to a list of technical requirements, Guill wrote that he also wanted it to be “visually pleasing.”
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I’ve done a lot of support of government servers and they run for about forever, as in until they serve no further use. Even retired, old servers are often repurposed and put back into service due to budget restrictions and/or long lead times to order new equipment under the required procedures for government procurement. In the United States this is especially true at the state level. When a server is repurposed it is usually reloaded with the current enterprise standard Linux distrubution release and applications, not legacy releases. That’s one common use case.
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Kernel Space
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Intel Broadwell processors will be supported by the P-State driver with the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel release.
Rafael Wysocki sent out the initial ACPI/PM commit queue of the work he plans to send via pull request into the Linux 3.16 kernel when its merge window opens in June.
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We recently visited Linux creator Linus Torvalds at his home office where we talked about The Linux Foundation’s ‘Introduction to Linux’ edX MOOC course, the way he works (more to come on this in the coming weeks) and Mean Tweets.
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Topping the Linux news this evening is a look at the five most popular Linux distributions by ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Also tonight, Jennifer Cloer asks Linus Torvalds about the meanest tweets he’s received. And finally tonight, Jack M. Germain looks at Deepin Linux and Jack Wallen asks if Cinnamon is a worthy replacement for Unity?
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Support for Intel’s Bayley Bay CRB has been added to Coreboot.
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This week at the Network Virtualization and SDN World event in London I’ve had many people ask me some variation of, ‘how is OpenDaylight doing?’ or ‘how are things progressing?’. To answer those questions, I must implicitly answer a different one: how do you judge the success of an open source project like OpenDaylight?
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Work on supporting ARM’s CoreSight technology within the mainline Linux kernel is back underway.
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Graphics Stack
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Here’s some fresh tests of Mesa’s LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver for software-based rendering. Since last month, LLVMpipe now supports OpenGL 3.3.
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AMD’s Leo Liu has published a set of four patches that improve Gallium3D’s video support, particularly around H.264 encoding for Radeon GPUs.
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NVIDIA released their 337.25 Linux graphics driver beta this Friday afternoon to end out their work month.
First up, the bug-fixes involve an X crash about querying clock offsets, a performance regression when running KDE with desktop effects using OpenGL compositing, NVIDIA-Settings fix, an OpeNGL rendering corruption fix, a nvidia-installer crash fix, etc.
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Fallout from the many changes introduced early on in the Linux 3.15 kernel cycle are almost all addressed and this next kernel release should happen in the very near future. As some last minute work are some notable fixes for the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics drivers.
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Last week when Mesa 10.2 RC4 was released it was expected to be the final development version and to ship the official release of Mesa 10.2 on Friday, 30 May. The official release didn’t happen but Mesa 10.2 RC5 is out there now with the hopes of shipping the final release next week.
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The new driver from NVIDIA is quite an impressive one and it covers some new GPU models and numerous bug fixes for various issues and bugs.
NVIDIA has three distinct driver versions that are aimed at various users and products, but this Short Lived Branch is the most updated one. This is where the NVIDIA developers make the first updates for their products and it’s also the version that receives improvements for games and applications.
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Benchmarks
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This week there’s already been a high-end OpenGL comparison using the latest proprietary drivers with newer AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Those OpenGL results were followed by a 2D NVIDIA/AMD Linux performance comparison and now to end out the week are some OpenCL compute benchmarks.
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There’s some very interesting tests that will be published on Phoronix in the next few days… Including the results from testing 65 different graphics cards under Linux with varying software stacks.
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I got an interesting email from Michael A. Marks the technical director for Aspyr Media who built his own steambox and ran some OpenGL tests with interesting results.
Before you read too far into it just bear in mind that Michael knows what he is talking about given he’s worked on some AAA titles like Call of Duty & Civilization in the porting process from DirectX to OpenGL.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Anomaly Defenders is now out for Linux and continues the struggle from the previous Anomaly games, only this time you are attacking the aliens! There’s a good deal going on it too.
If you buy directly from Games Republic at our Linux shop not only do you get Anomaly 2 with it, but we even get a tiny cut too! You should also get Steam keys.
Any game you buy from https://linux.gamesrepublic.com/catalog.html gives us a tiny cut and the overall store is run by the Anomaly developers.
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On Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon, the update manager has received an enhanced design and new features, now showing more information, it does not lock the APT cache at startup anymore and does not check for an internet connection anymore. Also, Cinnamon 2.2.0 has been implemented, coming with a redesigned UI for the System Settings, the Hot Corners features better settings, the menu applet got a few new options, MPRIS support has been added by default, the HiDPI/Retina display support has been implemented and the window manager has received enhancements.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Returning to Randa is always tremendous, no matter what the work is. The house in Randa, Switzerland is so welcoming, so solid, yet modern and comfortable too.
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Last but not least, here is my report from the Krita 2014 sprint. It was the fourth Krita sprint and the first one since the previous sprint 2011. In terms of Krita development that a really long time and quite a lot happened since then. After the last sprint in Amsterdam the sprint location was once again in Deventer. As usual the sprint was again very productive and generally fantastic with lots of old faces and some new ones.
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Amarok is one of the most famous music players on the Linux platform and it’s been around for more than a decade. It’s integrated by default in KDE, which might have contributed to its fame, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting alternatives.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I have tried to describe a situation where Web browsing is more tightly integrated with the desktop. There is still a lot of work to do: detailed functionality needs to be refined, assumptions need to be verified, mockups and prototypes need to be created and evaluated…
A browser is a very complex application to design, but luckily there is a lot of knowledge already available that should help us generate ideas and make informed decisions.
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I’ve deliberately not included GNOME in this sweep, as a lot of the core GNOME applications already have AppData and most of the gnomies already know what to do. I also didn’t include XFCE appications, as XFCE has agreed to adopt AppData on the mailing list and are in the process of doing this already. KDE is just working out how to merge the various files created by Matthias, and I’ve not heard anything from LXDE or MATE. So, I only looked at projects not affiliated with any particular desktop.
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This is the first update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and its makers have made quite a few modifications to it.
According to the changelog, the airplane mode menu is now insensitive in the lock screen, the struts are no longer extended to the screen edge, keynav has been fixed for alternatives in AltSwitcher, and the window menus have been implemented in the shell.
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Tartan is a new research and development project by Collabora to yield a Clang analysis plug-in for GLib and GNOME.
The Tartan plug-in loads GObject-Introspection meta-data for all encountered functions to better inform LLVM’s Clang and the plug-in also takes care of detecting common coding practices for GLib. Tartan is licensed under the GPLv3+ by Collabora.
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This latest update for GTK arrives with a multitude of changes and new features, but this is understandable because this is a development release.
According to the changelog, interactive debugging support has been implemented, gesture support has finally landed, the GTK+ widgets can now draw outside their allocation zone, by setting a clip with gtk_widget_set_clip(), GtkStack has added a few more transition types, and the GtkProgressBar is now narrower.
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The latest update to Kali Linux was released a few days ago. Kali Linux 1.0.7 review is a summary review of the main features of this latest upgrade to the security distribution from Offensive Security, a security and penetration training outfit based somewhere on this third rock from the Sun.
The main feature introduced in Kali Linux 1.0.7 is the ability to transfer the system to a USB stick with encrypted persistence.
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Sure, on the desktop, Windows still rules. According to Stat Counter’s’ April 2014 data, Windows has about a 90 percent market share. Out of an approximate base of 1.5 billion PCs, that’s about 1.36 billion Windows PCs. So, guess what’s the number two end-user operating system in the world?
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“Simplicity Linux 14.7 Alpha is now available for download in Netbook, Desktop and X Editions. It is based on Precise Puppy and uses the excellent LXPup by SFS to provide LXDE as a desktop environment for Netbook and Desktop Editions. As usual, Netbook is our cut down version which focuses on web based applications rather than locally installed applications,” said the developer in the official announcement.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2014 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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Telefonica is developing an NFV reference platform and lab in conjunction with Red Hat and Intel as part of a two-year roadmap for deploying NFV internationally.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Tails is a distribution based on Debian and Tor technologies that aims to keep its users as anonymous as possible. It gained a lot more visibility after Edward Snowden said that he used exactly this Linux distribution to hide his tracks. The developers are now implementing more changes and fixes that should ensure it becomes even more secure.
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Earlier this month the Siduction team, which regularly updates snapshots based on Debian Unstable/Sid, released a development build showcasing the new LXQt desktop, the future of both the LXDE and the Razor-qt environments. Siduction have a bit of history here as they featured Razor-qt as a desktop early on and were probably the only distribution to ship a dedicated iso as part of their line-up throughout 2012 and 2013. Besides using KDE 4 for the main image Siduction have shown a great commitment to medium light and lower resource desktops.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If there’s one area of Linux that gets more scrutiny than any other, it’s the desktop. From every corner, the haters and detractors abound. Nearly every publication that offers any focus on the Linux desktop at some point posts a piece about getting rid of the default Ubuntu desktop. Cinnamon is one of the primary replacement contenders.
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Ubuntu developers are trying to shake some of its GNOME dependencies and they have been working towards this goal for quite some time. Ubuntu distributions have been using GNOME packages since the beginning, even before the adoption of Unity as the default desktop environment.
Back when Ubuntu was still using GNOME 2.x to power its desktop, people were complaining about various problems, which in fact were not the fault of the Ubuntu developers. Some of the patches submitted by Ubuntu upstream, to the GNOME project were accepted either with delay or not at all. So, Canonical has decided to make Unity, a project it can control from one end to another.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Deepin desktop design is snazzy yet simple to use. It is one of the first Linux distros to take advantage of HTML 5 technology.
Add its home-grown applications such as the Deepin Software Center, Deepin Music Player and Deepin Media Player, and you get an operating system that is tailored to the average user.
The Deepin Linux development team is based in China. The distro so far is available only in English and traditional or simplified Chinese. It is a very young distro that debuted a few years ago and cycled through just one or two full releases per year as it crawled through its alpha and beta stages.
Deepin 2014 Beta is the latest version, released earlier this month to replace a version released last fall. This current release, based on screen shots displayed on the website for the previous version, substitutes the more traditional bottom panel bar with a docking bar that resembles the Mac OS X look.
Read more
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The new Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the first flavors released are Cinnamon and MATE, which is the norm for this kind of launches.
It’s important to note right from the start that the ISOs for the two versions of Linux Mint 17 usually arrive before the official announcement, which is not too far off. Rest assured, these are the official images from the Linux Mint Team.
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The ISOs approved for Linux Mint 17 aka Qiana stable release are already uploaded and available for download. The release hasn’t been announced yet but here’s your chance to install and enjoy the latest version of the popular Ubuntu derivative! 32 and 64-bit versions of both the Cinnamon and MATE variants are available.
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When you buy a Synology product, you know what you’re getting yourself in to. The company’s designs rarely change between generations, beyond a few small tweaks and improvements to the internals, and its Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system only ever improves with time. Its pricing, however, can leave it out of the reach of the budget-conscious buyer, especially when more than two drive bays are required.
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The Linaro Digital Home Group, or LHG, follows other working groups from Linaro, a not-for-profit company owned by ARM and many of its top licensees. Linaro develops standardized open source Linux and Android toolchain software for ARM-based devices. Previous groups have included the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), the Linaro Networking Group (LNG), and most recently, the Security Working Group (SWG).
As usual, the goal is provide standardized software and requirements for relevant upstream open source projects. In this case, Linaro defines digital home applications as media-centric devices including set-top boxes, televisions, media players, gaming, and home gateway devices. Home automation does not appear to be a central focus.
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Phones
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Though it’s difficult to compare two operating systems that are targeted at different users, Mozilla’s Firefox OS still feels half-baked compared to what Ubuntu offers. While Canonical is focused on making a full-fledged mobile OS that goes head-to-head against Android and iOS, Firefox’s approach is towards making smartphones more affordable. Initial reviews of Firefox OS have been really underwhelming so it will take about a year for us to see both operating systems in the hands of its end users. Finally, it would be a great idea to wait till both operating systems get enough exposure and that would be somewhere around April 2015 where both Ubuntu and Firefox would have (hopefully) reached enough stability to be used on a broader scale.
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Good news for budding developers interested in mobile platforms and devices. The Tizen Developer Conference 2014 (hashtag #TDCSF14) due next week is offering free registration to student developers.
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Android/Linux smartphones are taking 80% of the market shipments while having an average selling price ~$70 less than those other operating systems, you know, on Blackberries and iPhones.
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WebRTC voice and video is now available on Firefox Nightly. That’s the latest news from the Mozilla Foundation and TokBox, the Web communications company that Mozilla Foundation is working with to bring us WebRTC voice and video in my favorite Web browser. To see how this actually works, I decided to download Firefox Nightly and install or run it on my systems.
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s first generation of smartwatches is officially ditching Android. SamMobile reports that the original Galaxy Gear is being upgraded to Tizen, the operating system used on the newer Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo (but not the Gear Fit, yet another model released this spring.) Samsung has made a point of differentiating its software from stock Android — its various Android smartphones are loaded with design tweaks — but in this case, the main difference will be in added features; we and other reviewers found that the Tizen interface looked and operated very much like the Android one.
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Samsung continues to welcome new players into the Tizen family. Its June 2 dev conference may coincide with Tizen smartphone news.
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With Genode version 14.05, we address two problems that are fundamental for the scalability of the framework. The first problem is the way how Genode interoperates with existing software. A new concept for integrating 3rd-party source code with the framework makes the porting and use of software that is maintained outside the Genode source tree easier and more robust than ever. The rationale and the new concept are explained in Section Management of ported 3rd-party source code. The second problem is concerned about how programs that are built atop a C runtime (as is the case for most 3rd-party software) interact with the Genode world. Section Per-process virtual file systems describes how we consolidated many special-purpose solutions into one coherent design of using process-local virtual file systems.
In line with our road map, we put forward our storage-related agenda by enabling the use of NetBSD’s cryptographic device driver (CGD) on Genode. Thereby, we continue our engagement with the rump kernel that we started to embrace with version 14.02. Section Block-level encryption using CGD explains the use of CGD as a Genode component.
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A group of nine research institutes, software development firms and IT companies are building Ossmeter, a platform to evaluate and compare open source software packages and the communities involved in them. The platform will be available as a public service, but the software will also be shared using an open source licence. A study on Ossmeter was published earlier this week by Joinup’s OSOR community.
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Call it the Hadoop Swiss Army knife of cluster computing frameworks.
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Platform as a service (PaaS) is gaining a lot of traction in the enterprise IT world, and you have likely heard about some of the big names like Google App Engine, Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Microsoft Azure, but there are also some open source competitors, such as OpenStack, that are worth noting. Since we have already covered OpenStack quite a bit, here are four other open source cloud platforms you might not know.
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Women in FOSS
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Women make up less than two percent of the open source developer community, according to a 2007 survey by the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The Philadelphia chapter of women’s tech education group Girl Develop It wants to get those numbers up, and it’s starting locally.
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I’ve been asked to remove your blog by several people and I’ve reached the conclusion that it would be a really bad idea because it would set the wrong precedence and it would shift the discussion to the wrong topic (censorship yadda yadda). Questioning OPW should be allowed. The problem with your post is that if not questioned by other people (as many have done already) it would send the wrong message to the public and prospect GSoC, OPW and general contributors. Your blog was the wrong place to question and your wording makes it clear that you have misunderstandings about how the community works.
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Outreach programs need to scale and be sustainable to be a long-term success. Is that the case? I’m not sure myself; depends on the criteria you come up with.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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If you’re not already talking to your web browser, you may soon be doing so. Just last week, we covered Google’s new “OK Google” voice search features in the Chrome browser, which lets you execute searches with spoken words. Now, Mozilla has announced a partnership with TokBox to build WebRTC-based communications features right into its browser. The features could let users exchange real-time data, audio and video between their browsers.
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GSOC/FUDCon
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Funding
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How Canadian governments and law enforcement agencies access telecom data, the benefits of open source Internet tools for business and the purchase of Internet switching gear are among over $1 million in research projects being funded by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.
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BSD
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We have covered the LLVMLinux project many times with an increasing number of developers from the x86 and ARM world being interested in building the kernel with Clang. Among the reasons for wanting to build the Linux kernel with Clang is for possible performance advantages, faster kernel compilation times when debugging the kernel, using Clang’s static analysis abilities on the kernel code itself, improving the quality of LLVM and Clang by finding missing/broken compiler features, and improving the overall code quality of the Linux kernel by making the code compatible with more compilers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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What do you wish was more open about the world of science—academia? research? access? software? NASA released the source code for their software in April. Who’s next?
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Part of the reason why radium snake-oil products proliferated in the years after Marie Curie and her husband first isolated the element is that the Curies refused to patent the process and, in fact, shared it with the world.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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A Virginia tenth grader says he attacked and killed his parents because they were acting too parental, “taking away [his] iPod and stuff.”
Vincent Parker, a 16-year-old honor roll student, was arrested after he randomly attacked and killed his parents last December.
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They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to adults attempting to explain away inexplicable tragedy by scapegoating the younger generation’s entertainment du jour, that certainly seems to be the case. For our generation, of course, that means video games. We’ve seen it over and over again, from journalists jumping to blame violent games before they have any facts to back it up, to television personalities pretending there’s a proven link when there isn’t, to grandstanding politicians proposing constitution-violating sin-taxes on games just because.
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Science
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For 11 episodes now, the groundbreaking Fox and National Geographic Channel series Cosmos has been exploring the universe, outraging creationists, and giving science teachers across the nation something to show in class every Monday. In the process, the show has been drawing more than 3 million viewers every Sunday night, a respectable number for a science-focused show that is, after all, a major departure from what prime-time audiences are used to.
Cosmos certainly hasn’t shied from controversy; it has taken on evolution and industry-funded science denial, and it has been devoting an increasing amount of attention to the subject of climate change. And apparently that was just the beginning. This coming Sunday, Cosmos will devote an entire episode to the topic.
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Health/Nutrition
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Anyone who buys their own groceries (as opposed to having a full-time cook handle such mundane chores) knows that the cost of basic foods keeps rising, despite the official claims that inflation is essentially near-zero.
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“British girls have become the fattest in Europe” was this week’s brutal headline.
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Consumer products containing ingredients made using an advanced form of engineering known as synthetic biology are beginning to show up more often on grocery and department store shelves.
A liquid laundry detergent made by Ecover, a Belgian company that makes “green” household products including the Method line, contains an oil produced by algae whose genetic code was altered using synthetic biology. The algae’s DNA sequence was changed in a lab, according to Tom Domen, the company’s manager for long-term innovation.
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Security
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Amid mass demos and violence over extravagant World Cup spending showing little promise of return for an impoverished Brazil, Anonymous hackers plan a mass hack attack on the Cup’s sponsors, a source told Reuters.
High inflation and low business investment have hampered the government’s recent attempts to boost the economy ahead of the tournament. All this is happening as some of the country’s most pressing social and other problems have been neglected, with rampant poverty and destitution rife in large parts of the capital.
People are up in arms, staging protest events for a number of reasons, the latest of which are centered on skepticism that the lavish spending on the World Cup will benefit them in any substantial way. This Friday, several simultaneous events blocked Rio de Janeiro’s main roads, paralyzing traffic.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The only winners in war are those who produce the guns, bullets, drones, IEDs, and all the other gadgets to maim and kill.
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Jay Carney is stepping down as White House press secretary, President Barack Obama announced on Friday.
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When Jay Carney steps down as White House press secretary later this year, he will leave behind a trail of memorable clashes with reporters. Here are a few of them:
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Terrorism is a deadly, ever-present menace from which Americans should spare no expense or effort in protecting themselves. Or so our rulers claim.
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Most countries have special-purpose institutions of higher education to train military officers. The United States has 18 such colleges and universities, including federally funded ones such as West Point, state-funded ones such as The Citadel, and private ones such as Norwich University. What distinguishes the United States from all but a few other countries is the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at civilian colleges and universities.
Created in 1916, ROTC is probably the most visible sign of U.S. military involvement on non-military colleges and universities, with its uniformed cadets and midshipmen and university credit for courses taught by military officers on “military science” and “leadership.” Army, Navy), or Air Force ROTC programs are present today on almost 500 campuses.
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Obama said Sloan Gibson, deputy secretary of the VA, would take the helm on an acting basis while he looked “diligently” for a new permanent VA secretary. Gibson, an Army veteran and former banker, had joined the VA just three months ago after running the USO military service organization.
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France and the United States have exchanged statements on the Mistral ships contract with Moscow. Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf has said the United States is concerned about the deal and it believes that the time is wrong for selling the amphibious assault ships to the Russian Federation. The statements were made after French President Hollande confirmed that the deal signed in 2011 is in force to be completed in October. The $1, 2 billion Vladivostok is to join the Russian Navy in 2014 with Sevastopol, the second ship of the class, to be delivered in 2015.
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According to the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, former President George W. Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all committed war crimes during their tenure.
Richard Clarke was Bush’s counterterrorism czar in 2001 and later became the president’s special advisor on cyberterror until he resigned in 2003 and became a vocal critic of the administration. In an interview with Democracy Now! this week, Clarke was asked by host Amy Goodman whether Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could ever seriously face “war crimes” charges for the Iraq operation.
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What is a huge army of private contractors secretly doing in Afghanistan? A leaked PowerPoint presentation explains
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My arrest at Creech along with eight others on April 16 was a “return to the scene of the crime” (the Air Force’s crime, not mine) for me, as I was among the “Creech 14” in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct action against drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few sites from which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there to fly their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has been proliferating around the world and so has the number of drone operation bases in communities around the U.S. My work with Voices for Creative Nonviolence has brought me to the scenes of the crime in Afghanistan, the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone bases in New York, Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.
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Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.
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The Bureau is publishing, for the first time, data showing the types of targets that have been reportedly attacked by CIA drones in Pakistan.
The research is a joint project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at Goldsmiths University, London, and Situ Research in New York. The data feeds this interactive website mapping the strikes, the types of target attacked, and their relative scale.
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Finally, although President Obama ended the use of torture, he continued the drone attacks started under Bush. A Stanford Law School reports states that “there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.” Many say they violate international law, especially since civilians are killed in countries that haven’t declared war upon the U.S. As for the decisions of presidents before Obama, the use of the atomic bombs, massive bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange can easily be viewed as war crimes. If President Bush is deemed a war criminal, then the decisions of presidents before and after Bush should be evaluated in the same manner.
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President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will continue to “take direct action” by ordering drone strikes and capture operations against suspected terrorists “when necessary to protect ourselves.”
In a speech outlining a foreign policy framework that stresses cooperation with allies, Obama said there still would be times when the U.S. must go it alone. He restated a policy he disclosed last May, however, that no drone strike should occur unless there is “a near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed.
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By way of brief background for the unfamiliar, at the most basic level (but with varying degrees of specificity), each proposal would require the President to release a public report on the number of civilian and combatant casualties killed in U.S. drone strikes (for earlier discussions on the substance of the proposals, see e.g., here and here). Back in November, the House and Senate intelligence committees debated including a similar reporting requirement in the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2014. The SSCI-approved version of the bill included the provisions; whereas, HPSCI rejected a Schiff-sponsored amendment to include the reporting requirements in the House version. Ultimately, however, the proposal was never enacted.
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A New York federal appeals court has rejected the government’s request to reargue in secret its order that it reveal a classified memo describing legal justifications for using drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism overseas.
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After announcing it would comply with a federal court order, the Obama administration has decided that it wants to conceal more portions of a controversial memo authorizing the assassination of Americans overseas.
Last week, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice said they would make public parts of the internal document written in July 2010 by then-federal lawyer David Barron that justified the use of drones or other means to kill U.S. citizens accused of terrorist involvement.
The declaration came as the U.S. Senate was considering Barron’s confirmation as a judicial appointee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals—a move that helped convince at least one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, to support the nomination.
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Conservatives say, and this is one of their more successful memes, that poor people are immoral. The proles have sex and kids out of wedlock and expect us (i.e., upstanding middle- and upper-class patriots) to pay for them. They steal Medicare and cheat on welfare. They don’t follow The Rules (rules written by, let’s just say, not them). Which makes them Bad.
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In his May 28 West Point speech on foreign policy President Obama took a swipe at “so-called realists.” But the acolytes of this particular school of thought will by and large be satisfied with his manifesto. The most scathing attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have come from neo-conservatives such as Robert Kagan. They are the ones who will pounce on the Mr. Obama’s latest address, and indeed have already done so.
The West Point lecture was classic Obama: the president was calm and reasonable. And he took an in-between Goldilocks stance designed to differentiate him from the extremes. The latter he characterized simplistically to supplement the rhetorical force, if not the persuasiveness, of his case.
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About two dozen anti-drone protesters greeted those entering the United States Military Academy Wednesday, piggybacking their message onto the fanfare of graduating cadets and a visit by President Barack Obama.
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Some light has been shed on how the drone program works; in October 2013, the Washington Post revealed how the NSA is also involved in the targeted killing program. And early in 2014, The Intercept published more details about how “controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies” used by the NSA for its surveillance programs are also used to identify drone targets.
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It isn’t just John Major who is unhappy that transcripts and full notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George W Bush about the lead-up to the Iraq war will remain secret. The entire world needs details of conversations between Blair and Bush about the 2003 war, but instead the Chilcot inquiry will only get the gist of the talks. For a war which killed 655,000 Iraqis and over one million in total, and for a reason never proven, it cannot be just the former British prime minister who is troubled by the lack of information and transparency.
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IT’S ABOUT as eye-catching a blurb as you could hope for on an Iraq war thriller – an endorsement from embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange himself.
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Chilcot has surrendered in a “bad, bad day for democracy and justice. The establishment of this country, and the security and intelligence services have won again. Truth has lost out.”
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Many believe Blair should be put on trial for his role in taking us to what looks like an increasingly illegal war in Iraq. I would try him for allowing the country to be swamped with millions of new arrivals as, and this fact is absolutely vital to remember, it was not fair to anyone; not those who were already here, those who arrived or those who came along subsequently.
Communities felt they lost their identities, schools were filled to the point that giant cabins were quickly rushed into playgrounds to fit in all the children, many of whom could speak no English, and resentment quickly grew.
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In reality, current US troop levels–about 32,000–are actually about what they were when Obama took office (Think Progress, 6/22/11). A graph that accompanied an NPR story (6/29/11) shows this pretty clearly.
Late last year the New York Times offered similarly misleading spin (FAIR Blog, 11/25/13), reporting that Obama “has reduced the forces in Afghanistan from about 100,000 in 2010 to about 47,000 today.” That’s technically true, but ignores the fact that the troop levels had only gotten that high as a result of Obama’s policy of massive escalation.
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He was said to be a key player in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983 and in the founding of Hezbollah—until he disappeared in 2007. Now a new book claims he’s under CIA protection.
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Reader Peter Smith is none too happy with this newspaper.
As he wrote to me: “I could see The Blade shirking and hiding initially from its duty of reporting to the citizenry about the tragedy when the news first broke, due to the lack of ‘factual evidence…’
“But now the facts are out! I know it and you know it too … time to step up and report first-hand all the facts about this tragedy and all the ramifications coming out of it, including the cover-up.”
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The issue of giving aid to the Syrian rebels has been widely debated with some concerned that weapons and training will end up in the hands of Islamists who have embedded themselves among the opposition.
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Sixty years ago, in June 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ousted the reformist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup installed a brutal right-wing regime and decades of bloody repression.
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Russia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.
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On May 11 a plane arrived at Kiev’s airport in strict secrecy; it was met by the airport’s military personnel rather than the civilian staff. NATO military uniforms, 500 packages of amphetamines, and containers marked as poisonous substances were unloaded from the plane. By order of the Kiev directorate of the SBU, the fighters, the cargo and the containers of poison were not inspected and left the airport in cars with tinted windows. The cargo was accompanied by CIA agent Richard Michael. Aboard the plane were also fighters from the Right Sector and the Polish private military company ASBS (Analizy Systemowe Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz) Othago, created several years ago by Poland’s current Minister of the Interior, B. Sienkiewicz.
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Washington’s role in the coup d’etat in Kiev on Feb. 22 has brought the U.S. a Pyrrhic victory…
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City attempt to reach peaceful agreement over fate of squatters’ civic centre after fourth night of violent clashes in Catalan capital
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While the “use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” The Washington Times uncovering of a 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. As one defense official proclaimed, “this appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens.” Meet Directive 3025.18 and all its “quelling civil disturbances” totalitarianism…
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A SWAT crashed through a family’s door in the middle of the night and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s playpen. A 19-month-old baby was horribly disfigured when it exploded in his face. [Graphic]
Alecia Phonesavanh and her family were staying at a friend’s house after their home had been lost in a fire. The makeshift living arrangements left their 19-month-old baby boy sleeping in a playpen in a shared room. Things were going OK until the local government decided to send paramilitary home invaders to unleash indiscriminate violence upon the home and anyone inside.
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Transparency Reporting
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The US was among the first states to congratulate Ukraine’s president-elect Petro Poroshenko. Yet real US opinions of the new president are more complicated, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables which refer to the billionaire as a “disgraced oligarch.”
For years, the US was keeping an eye on the Ukrainian billionaire and former foreign minister. Between 2006 and 2011, Poroshenko’s name was a direct or indirect subject of hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks.
A simple search for ”Poroshenko” on WikiLeaks’ website gives at least 350 documents mentioning his name. But some of the descriptions provided by US diplomats are far from complimentary.
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Last Saturday, the White House accidentally revealed the identity of the CIA’s most senior operative in Kabul by accidentally including his name on a list of officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit to US troops in Afghanistan. Though it was disbursed to more than 6,000 journalists, all indications suggest that every outlet has complied with the government’s request to refrain from publishing the name.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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FAIR’s latest Action Alert (5/28/14) urges media activists to call out CNN for basing a climate change report around one guest: right-wing climate change denier Ann Coulter. If you write to CNN, please share a copy of your message in the comments below.
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The U.S. government is in the final stages of weighing approval for an overhaul of regulations governing the country’s poultry industry that would see processing speeds increase substantially even while responsibility for oversight would be largely given over to plant employees.
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The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the “very aggressive P.R. operation” they have used for years to silence media criticism.
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I attempted to enter Canada on a Tuesday, flying into the small airport at Fort McMurray, Alberta, waiting for my turn to pass through customs.
“What brings you to Fort Mac?” a Canada Border Services Agency official asked. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” He pointed me to border security. Another official, a tall, clean-shaven man, asked the same question. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” he frowned. “You mean oil sands. We don’t have tar here.”
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Finance
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The bankers, intelligence chiefs and private military strategists are the dukes, energy and arms firms the barons.
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The list of participants for the 62nd Bilderberg meeting that began in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday includes seven Finns. The annual meeting is an exclusive forum for the political and financial elite of the world to engage in informal, off-the-record discussions on a variety of global issues.
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The officially released agenda of the prestigious Bilderberg club meeting is not true, claims RT show host Daniel Estulin, a longtime watcher of the ‘secret world govt’ group. He says he obtained the real agenda for this year’s gathering in Copenhagen.
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Thomas Piketty has accused the Financial Times of ridiculous and dishonest criticism of his economics book on inequality, which has become a publishing sensation.
The French economist, whose 577-page tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become an unlikely must-read for business leaders and politicians alike, said it was ridiculous to suggest that his central thesis on rising inequality was incorrect.
The controversy blew up when the FT accused Piketty of errors in transcribing numbers, as well as cherry-picking data or not using original sources.
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Bedroom tax and housing list squeeze blamed for landlord repossession orders topping 47,000 in three months
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This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low — and that’s partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share.
Here’s a list of 10 tax-dodging corporations excerpted from the Americans for Tax Fairness report.
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Yet another of the world’s central banks has publicly “warned” citizens of Bitcoin. The Argentinian Central Bank has posted a statement about Bitcoin on their official website, warning of the lack of legal tender status, volatility, and Bitcoin’s use in fraudulent activities and money laundering.
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Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.
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The percentage of taxes that corporations pay today are near the record lows of the United States’ total tax bill, even though these corporations are bringing in huge profits. Although this is happening, the unemployment rate still remains high. A study completed by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action shows the damage done by having corporations pay low taxes and the effect on state budgets. The study shows that a small increase in the amount of taxes large corporations pay will have positive effects such as restoring cuts in education and public services, and could possibly restore over three million jobs. As federal aid was declined to state budgets more and more, many states have cut back on taxes claiming that doing so would benefit their economy and create jobs. One example of this was a tax exemption on corporate profits passed directly to individual owners in the state of Kansas. This kept Kansas in a recession. Hard working employees were stuck with paying the taxes that corporations got out of paying. Corporations get out of paying taxes in loopholes such as offshore tax havens, the “executive pay loophole” that allows corporations to deduct performance bonuses from their tax receipts, and the “stock-based pay loophole” that allows companies to deduct billions from their tax bill. People can see that cutting the taxes of corporations is not helping the economy in any state. It is not helping form jobs, and Americans agree it needs to be stopped.
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The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.
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A national charity whose executives earn six-figure salaries used a legal loophole to pay disabled workers as little as three and four cents an hour, according to documents obtained exclusively by NBC News.
An NBC News investigation recently revealed that Goodwill Industries, which is among the non-profit groups permitted to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c), had paid workers as little as 22 cents an hour.
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Censorship
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The MPAA was formed initially in 1922 under the moniker Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was created in order to give films at the time a set of standards by which filmmakers would use as a list to make sure that movies wouldn’t depict excessive violence, sexuality or other practices deemed immoral. It was later changed to the Motion Picture Association of America and placed under the direction of Jack Valenti in the mid ‘60s.
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An extraordinary commentary published in the New York Times Book Review — posted online May 22, scheduled for print publication June 8 — asserts that the US government must be the final decision-maker on whether leaked information about government wrongdoing should be published by the press.
This anti-democratic screed, worthy of any police state, is written by Michael Kinsley, a longtime fixture of the punditry establishment and the former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” program. His commentary takes the form of a review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place to Hide on the Edward Snowden revelations about illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Kinsley ridicules Greenwald’s claim that blanket NSA surveillance of electronic communications is a threat to the democratic rights of the American people, and that Snowden was justified in exposing government criminality by leaking documents to Greenwald and other journalists for eventual publication in the Guardian (US) and the Washington Post.
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The German government is considering setting up arbitration courts to weigh in on what information people can force Google Inc. (GOOG) and other search-engine providers to remove from results.
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Twitter has a reputation as an open platform for expressing one’s opinions. It’s become a place for dissent and debate. It played a key role in the “Arab Spring” revolutions of the last couple of years.
But last week, it agreed to censor a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed in Russia. It also blocked a “blasphemous” account in Pakistan. It’s not the first time Twitter has censored politically sensitive accounts. Now, it seems, Twitter’s reputation as a platform for free speech is at risk.
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Historically, Cambodia has been fairly lax in enacting legislation that stifles freedom of expression online—unlike its neighbors of Vietnam and Thailand— but with more Cambodian citizens gaining access to the Internet, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has attempted to control dissenting views and “immoral actions” online through the drafting of a cybercrime law. A leaked copy of the legislation, which was initially drafted in 2012, revealed some serious threats to fundamental freedoms by making certain speech and other actions online punishable by fine and prison time.
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Google is accepting requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world’s dominant search engine.
The demands can be submitted on a Web page Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court.
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Privacy
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Smári “Mailpile” McCarthy’s lecture Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism sets out a set of technical, legal and social interventions we can undertake to make mass surveillance impossible, starting with this: “The goal of those interested in protecting human rights should be to raise the average cost of surveillance to $10.000 per person per day within the next five years.”
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Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had harsh words for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden during a taped interview with NBC News’ David Gregory of Meet the Press.
“The guy should be prosecuted,” Bloomberg said when asked if he thought Snowden a patriot or a traitor. “You cannot have individual people deciding what information should be released. We have a democratic process and my recollection is things like the NSA surveillance, that, well the process worked.”
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There is really no getting around the fact that staying secure on the Internet is hard, if not impossible, to achieve. Yes, users can do more to keep themselves safe by adopting good security practices. They can choose strong passwords that they don’t reuse for different sites. They can avoid disclosing personal details online and for users that are particularly security conscious, can encrypt the contents of their hard disks. Ultimately however, users have to rely on the software they are using to be secure, especially security software. If this isn’t the case, then no end of good habits will prevent others from secretly siphoning information they can later exploit.
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Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning’s legal cases are destined to be remembered together for as long as their cases are discussed because of the similarities in the cases and their nearly simultaneous evolution which, together, reveal two perspectives on American justice. Nevertheless, the media’s treatment of Manning’s case has been a stark contrast to the manner in which Snowden’s case has been reported. Comparing the two cases reveals a double standard in both the prosecution of the two cases, and in the media’s coverage of those events.
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The safest way to store your documents is on your local hard drive, says SmartKlock founder Jason Fernandes, warning that online cloud services leave you open to surveillance and compromise your privacy
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Glenn Greenwald has just published “No Place to Hide.” The book, which reads like a thriller, is Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in May and June 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent and NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald coordinated the public release of the 1.7 million pages of NSA documents that Snowden took with him in order to prove definitively that the federal government is spying on all of us all the time.
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Pentagon Papers whistleblower doesn’t believe Edward Snowden would receive a fair trial if he returns home to the United States, due to the Espionage Act
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When the four-hour sit-down between journalist Brian Williams and Snowden made it to air on Wednesday night, NBC condensed roughly four hours of conversation into a 60-minute time slot. During an analysis of the full interview afterwards, however, the network showed portions of the interview that didn’t make it into the primetime broadcast, including remarks from the former National Security Agency contractor in which he questioned the American intelligence community’s inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In response to a question from Williams concerning a “non-traditional enemy,” Al-Qaeda, and how to prevent further attacks from that organization and others, Snowden suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.
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The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents , New York Times reported.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is hoarding images of US citizens obtained through communications intercepted in order to use the images for facial recognition programs, confidential documents made public by the New York Times indicate.
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Social-media giant Facebook says it will appeal a court ruling that will allow a Vancouver woman to launch a class action lawsuit against the company.
B.C. Supreme Court Judge Susan Griffin ruled yesterday that there is enough evidence to support allegations made by Debbie Douez that a Facebook advertising product used the names and images of members without their consent.
Griffin says the product, called “Sponsored Stories,” included the names and images of members, an advertising logo and product information, which were sent to other Facebook members.
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Edward Snowden has said the emails released by the National Security Agency to show he had not made internal whistleblowing efforts are “tailored and incomplete”.
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Yesterday, the NSA released an email from Edward Snowden to his superiors asking about the legality of NSA spying, claiming it was the only evidence they had that he ever tried to go through channels before turning leaker; on its face, this is pretty damning. But there’s one problem: six months ago, the NSA claimed that they had no emails of the sort from Snowden, and then this one happened to turn up just in time to counter Snowden’s allegations on US TV that he’d tried to blow the whistle from inside. My guess? Someone as canny as Snowden kept copies of all the communiques he made and flags he raised, and will be shortly making the NSA look like pathetic liars (again).
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An amendment proposed by the House would remove the requirement that the National Institute of Standards and Technology consult with the NSA on encryption standards.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has claimed he worked undercover for the CIA, and said that he would like to return to the US.
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German media has reported that the country’s foreign intelligence agency wants to access social media in real time. The agency reportedly wants to expand digital operations out of fear of falling behind other countries.
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Confidential documents from the BND, Germany’s answer to the NSA and GCHQ, suggest the agency could soon get major funding to improve its online surveillance and hacking capabilities.
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Numerous documents focusing on partnerships and surveillance tactics between America’s National Security Agency and regional security apparatus’ in the Middle East, especially the Gulf region, will be released soon, according to the journalist leading the reporting on the explosive NSA leaks.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that there was no doubt that the government has destroyed years of evidence of NSA spying – the government itself has admitted to it in recent court filings. In a brief filed today in response to this illegal destruction, EFF is asking that the court make an “adverse inference” that the destroyed evidence would show that plaintiffs communications and records were in fact swept up in the mass NSA spying programs.
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“We were a clear demonstration that official channels didn’t work,” said William Binney, one of a trio of National Security Agency employees who tired to “blow the whistle” on the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities more than a decade before Edward Snowden delivered classified documents from the agency’s files to The Guardian. Binney, now retired, resigned from the NSA in 2001. A year later he and two of his former colleagues asked Congress and the Department of Defense for an investigation of the agency for wasting money and violating privacy rights with a massive data collection program called “Trailblazer,” the successor to an earlier program dubbed “Stellar Wind.” Binney believes that’s the reason why the FBI five years later staged an armed raid of his home.
“Stellar Wind was the basic reason I left the NSA in 2001,” Binney said in a recent interview with Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine. “That’s when they started to take the program that I created to do social network reconstruction of anybody in the world, and direct it against everybody in the United States. That means they were basically putting a PEN register on every phone number in the United States. They call it trace-and-tap, where they put this device on your line and I can monitor who you call, how long you call them.”
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Since breaking the National Security Agency spying story for The (London) Guardian last year, Glenn Greenwald has been the target of attacks from fellow journalists who seem to labor under the delusion that it’s their job to protect the government.
Soon after he reported revelations of government malfeasance provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, NBC’s David Gregory asked Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden … why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”
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The intelligence funding bill the House overwhelmingly passed Friday would make no major reforms to some of the most controversial spying programs, which angered some Democrats.
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More broadly, the United States justifies the lawfulness of its communications surveillance by reference to distinctions that, considering modern communications technology, are irrelevant to truly protecting privacy in a modern society. The US relies on the outmoded distinction between “content” and “metadata,” falsely contending that the latter does not reveal private facts about an individual. The US also contends that the collection of data is not surveillance—it argues, contrary to both international law and the Principles, that an individual’s privacy rights are not infringed as long as her communications data are not analyzed by a human being. It’s clear that the practice of digital surveillance by the United States has overrun the bounds of human rights standards. What our paper hopes to show is exactly where the country has crossed the line, and how its own politicians and the international community might rein it back.
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Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) expressed deep concern over the 1986 Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA), which allows police to obtain emails without a warrant.
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Given the agency’s history of making claims that turn out to be not quite accurate, it’s worth taking the NSA’s claim with a grain of salt. But the NSA’s response to Snowden also has a deeper problem: it wouldn’t have made a difference if Snowden had raised his concerns more forcefully through internal channels.
Remember, the NSA’s position is that it hasn’t done anything wrong. The agency claims that its domestic surveillance programs comply with the law, and that it gets plenty of oversight from both the courts and Congress. The NSA has stuck to this position despite a year of pressure from Congress and the public. Why would it have been any more receptive to the concerns of a lowly contractor?
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Google is asking its users to “demand real surveillance reform” after last week’s House vote on a compromise bill to curb U.S. spying.
Late Thursday, the company took to Twitter asking followers to “join us in asking the Senate to fix the USA Freedom Act,” which passed the House last week.
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As we’ve mentioned, the USA Freedom Act — which had been the “good” bill to reform some of the NSA’s domestic spying activities — was completely watered down right before it passed the House. Basically the entire civil liberties community pulled their support for the bill at the last minute once they saw the changes that the White House demanded (even after the bill had already been watered down). What got a little less attention was that many in the tech industry had also dropped their support for the bill, despite earlier supporting it.
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#A TOP hotel executive doesn’t believe the Bahamas’ tourism industry will be affected by revelations that the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) may be recording all cell phone calls in the country.
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On that occasion, McCarthy was citing the Internal Revenue Service abuses of his time “in which privacy, due process, equal protection of the law, and the principal of innocence until proven guilty are not protected, and actions traditionally disapproved in the United States” are violated by Washington agencies.
If the maverick-minded McCarthy was on the scene in our own time, he would no doubt also include the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens as representing a similar danger.
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The CIA’s non-profit venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has been pumping millions of dollars into technology startups since its launch in 2000, meaning it’s not the least bit unusual for major vendors to have acquired and assimilated one of these CIA-nurtured seedlings.
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China says that the US has spied on Chinese companies, research institutes and mobile phone users, and has also highlighted the role of high-tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft in supporting US intelligence, in a government report published on 26 May and in its news media.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released an April 2013 email exchange between then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency’s Office of General Counsel.
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The FBI spied on Nelson Mandela on his historic visit to the US months after his release from prison, newly released files have revealed.
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Joe Nachio, the former chief of Denver-based Qwest Communications who was convicted on more than a dozen counts of insider trading and sent to prison for nearly five years, says the National Security Agency first blackballed his company, then federal authorities refused to allow him to explain his side when he was on trial.
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During a live webcast on NBCNews.com immediately following Wednesday’s 10 p.m. ET airing of his interview with Edward Snowden, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams wondered why the National Security Agency was not more receptive to Snowden’s claims of unconstitutional spying: “Knowing that in war powers times…the Bush administration use of war powers with Bush and Cheney, isn’t the general counsel at the NSA a little bit on guard for a perversion, as Snowden put it?” [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2014/05/29/nbcs-williams-shouldnt-nsa-be-guard-perversion-surveillance-after-bush#ixzz33I3WOdVm
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The NSA is thought to deploy the TAO unit for specific hard-to-get targets — for example, to hack systems, tap cellular phone networks, or intercept routers and servers at shipping ports — in order to implant them with surveillance devices.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald and the co-authors of last week’s article in The Intercept wrote about the latest US National Security Agency spy operation to be leaked, they alleged that the NSA has been collecting the contents seemingly of all cell phone calls dialed or received in two nations: the Bahamas, and an unnamed “country X.” After scolding The Intercept for withholding the name of that second country, WikiLeaks alleged on Friday that the other subject of the previously unreported NSA program was Afghanistan.
“WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan,” editor-in-chief Julian Assange wrote. “This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs.”
According to WikiLeaks, there may be much more to the story. Also last week, the anti-secrecy group tweeted that Jared Cohen — the 32-year-old current director of Google Ideas and a former US State Department advisor — has a history that connects him to a program that may have put Afghan signals intelligence, or SIGINT, into the hands of US investigators.
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The leaked documents state that The Bahamas is a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements.”
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Soon after that the Snowden leaks were revealed on June 9 2013. While there may have not been a causation, there probably is a strong correlation, because people realised that the NSA are not-something-to-be-afraid-of, harmful, incompetent, and useless. While the Snowden revelations are probably actual, many of them are likely the deluded products of people with Manias, Schizophrenia or Clinical depression, which I believe most people at the NSA have developed due to the inherently secret, selfish, and dishonest, nature of their work there (see “Publish or Perish” = “Life or Death”). So it’s hard to know what is factual and what is a delusion without the NSA being placed under scrutiny and forced to publish their findings for the world at large (not just the USA).
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NSA spies need jobs, too. And that is why many covert programs could be hiding in plain sight.
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ACLU technologist searches Linkedin profiles and finds a treasure trove of information on classified programs
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Research, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to mark the one year anniversary of Edward Snowdon revealing the activities of UK and US intelligence agencies, showed 85% believe it is “fairly important”, “very important” or “essential” to keep browsing records private. Only 12% believe it is not important, the survey conducted by Ipsos Mori showed.
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After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden’s earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he never actually raised these issues. Snowden quickly responded, noting that this is not the only email, that he raised the issue more directly with his supervisors… and, most importantly, that none of this really matters.
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Stewart Baker is still defending the NSA, but his latest piece advancing the agency’s cause deploys a particularly disingenuous argument. He feels the American Bar Association acted hypocritically when it sent a letter to the NSA asking it to respect attorney-client privilege.
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Civil Rights
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The following letter was sent to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire; former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans von Sponeck; current UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Richard Falk; and over 100 scholars.
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The evolution of immigration and border control policy in Greece and its interdependence with European funding suggests an agenda which has been decided above national legislatures with strong coordination between European political actors and economic interests, while ignoring the human suffering it produces.
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As thousands took to the streets this weekend to protest the civil and military dictatorship – which left a legacy of some of the most sadistic and brutal repression against political prisoners seen in Latin America – the military police have unleashed a new war on the poor of Brazil, and the State is preparing to enforce new “anti-terrorism” laws which raise legitimate fears that they will bring back the practices of the fascist dictatorship. (Note: On March 22nd, Brazilian fascists called for protests under the slogan “march for family.” They were a failure, much like the white man march in North America. In some places, groups of six or less people participated.)
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Military police violently cracked down on a teachers protest using tear gas and batons in front of the State Department of Education building, on Wednesday afternoon. The confrontation happened after a teacher used a marker. to write “Education Strike” in the wall. Teachers had walked the Avenida Presidente Vargas to the location after another demonstration in front of the administrative building of the town hall, where police also used tear gas to remove teachers that closed the route.
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In what is being touted as a victory for First Amendment rights, the First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of people to record police officers in public. This is nothing more than a reaffirmation of a right citizens already possessed, something that can hardly be considered a victory.
The problem is that, despite this being made clear on multiple occasions, people are still being arrested for recording police officers. Sometimes it’s a bad (and outdated) wiretapping law that gets abused. Sometimes it’s other, unrelated laws that are stretched to fit the circumstances, which means those recording officers are hit with charges ranging from interfering with police investigations to criminal mischief, depending on how the interaction goes.
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A bill advancing in Kansas would mandate reporting for miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy, the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to HB 2613 — which was originally intended to update the state’s procedure for issuing birth certificates for stillborn babies — doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department.
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Based on the true story of ‘San Jose Mercury News’ reporter Gary Webb and the fallout from his expose on how the Nicaraguan Contras, with the help of the CIA, smuggled cocaine into California to fund their rebel agenda, this looks like a thriller with brains. There’s even the subtext that comes with a flood of crack into the inner city, and the conspiracy theorizing over the government targeting people of color. Also featuring Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Patrick, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Paz Vega, the trailer is intriguing.
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A defense attorney for a waterboarded prisoner urged an Army judge on Wednesday to not take back a bold order to disclose details of the CIA’s black site program, likening the judge to Watergate’s Judge John Sircia, whose bravery toppled the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.
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One “formative” incident occurred around 2007, when the young technical analyst was working for the CIA under diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Late last night, after many reporters had stopped watching (or in my case, left the city), the House of Representatives delivered a surprise. It passed an amendment delivered by the reliable anti-war-on-drugs Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, one that would prevent the DEA from using funds to break up medical marijuana operations in the states where they’re operating legally.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable — which would combine the two largest cable internet providers in the U.S. into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much — Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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MakerBot is one of the key companies in the low-cost 3D printing market. It was founded in 2009 and based its first model on the completely open RepRap design. However, in 2012, MakerBot moved away from its open source roots, claiming that it needed to make this shift in order to build a long-term business:
We are going to be as open as we possibly can while building a sustainable business. We are going to continue to respect licenses and continue to contribute to the open technology of 3D printing, some of which we initiated. We don’t want to abuse the goodwill and support of our community. We love what we do, we love sharing, and we love what our community creates.
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In a stunning display of madness, makerbot industries files a patent application on a mechanism clearly derived from content created by their users. What’s almost worse is the article they wrote praising the invention, presumably while they were filing the paperwork.
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As Techdirt has been charting, the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations have already encountered far more resistance than was expected when they began last year. This has mostly centered around the controversial corporate sovereignty provisions, but there are also more general concerns about things like deregulation — for example, through a new regulatory council. As well as pushback from expected quarters — civil organizations and NGOs (pdf) — even some European governments are expressing their doubts. And following last week’s elections for the European Parliament, a new obstacle to concluding the agreement has been added: an increased number of European politicians (MEPs) that are skeptical about pan-European projects in general, and TAFTA/TTIP.
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Copyrights
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In April, we wrote about an important court ruling in Spain that found that Pablo Soto’s P2P file sharing software, Blubster, was “perfectly legal”, because the software was “neutral” and a part of “free enterprise within the framework of a market economy.” In that post, we went through the entire history of earlier court rulings that had similarly suggested that file sharing software shouldn’t be blamed for how people used it, and the US’s aggressive pressure that forced Spain to pass multiple new copyright laws to try to reverse such rulings. All of that appeared to be for nothing, as the courts still recognized the silliness of blaming software for how people use it.
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Yesterday, the music labels, under the guise of RIAA spinoff SoundExchange, along with Congressional Reps. George Holding and John Conyers, announced some new legislation and a coordinated PR campaign for what they’re calling “Project72.” The official name of the bill is the “Respecting Senior Performers as Essential Cultural Treasures Act” or the RESPECT Act. There is so much hypocrisy and ridiculousness here that it’s difficult to know where to start. However, in short, the labels fought hard to keep the situation the way it is today, and a very large number of the musicians the RIAA rolled out in “support” of this new law — claiming they just want to get paid by music streaming services — are musicians who got totally screwed over by RIAA labels in the past. How about a little “respect”?
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