01.24.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Oracle CTO Larry Ellison wants a bigger piece of the server market and is taking direct aim at Cisco’s UCS to grow share. Oracle’s new X5 Engineered Systems portfolio is a bid by the company to provide lower-cost two-socket converged infrastructure systems running Linux at very competitive price points.
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Kernel Space
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The Gummiboot simple UEFI boot manager hasn’t seen much improvements in recent months but on Friday received a new feature over the course of several hundred new lines of code.
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Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center sent in yet another Intel drm-next pull request to David Airlie for accepting into the 3.20 DRM-Next Git tree before he closes off the tree for accepting new feature code (Airlie’s change for the past few kernels has been to stop accepting new code a few weeks before the N-1 release). With this latest Git pull request, the changes aren’t too exciting:
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Graphics Stack
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Bryce Harrington, the former Canonical employee part of Ubuntu’s X/Mir team turned Samsung open-source employee, has issued the first maintenance update for Wayland 1.6.
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Emil Velikov announced the Mesa 10.4.3 point release during the early hours of today. While most Mesa stable updates aren’t too exciting, this one is certainly noteworthy if you’re a user of the Gallium3D “Nine” state tracker for providing Direct3D 9 support on Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dying Light is a survival horror game developed by Techland. Up to now its release later this month has been billed as a Windows / PlayStation 4 / Xbox One title, but it looks now like it will premiere on Steam for Linux / SteamOS.
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Two more games entered Early Access on Steam during the past couple of days: Armello, a combination of card and board games with role-playing elements, and Perfect Golf, a realistic golf simulator.
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Reviews
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Fancy is not a part of Zenwalk Linux. Functionality and workable lightweight infrastructure are. As the developer states in his postings, only usability matters. I like the philosophy behind Zenwalk. I am less impressed with its lackluster desktop environment. Also, I ran out of patience trying to find a solution to the password-not-working issue. The developer needs to provide a quick response.
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zenwalkToday in Linux news, Jack Germain has a review of Zenwalk and Dedoimedo.com tries to review Chakra. With the pro-32 bit architecture folks seemingly winning the argument, Bruce Byfield weights in saying what’s surprising is that it’s taken so long to deprecate. Elsewhere, Softpedia.com is reporting that Linus Torvalds patched the kernel to fix a Witcher 2 issue.
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New Releases
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The “14.1” indicates an updated and polished release of Netrunner 14 LTS on the same underlying base. Since 14.1 is using the same base “trusty” like Netrunner 14, there is no need for users of 14 to migrate: Simply updating from the shared backports ppa of the Frontier release cycle should give the same result, while keeping customizations in place.
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GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, re-organizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing file systems, has been upgraded to version 0.21.0 Beta 1.
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Slackware Family
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I recently started using the Slack group chat tool in a few teams. Wishing to add some vanity notifications such as sales and user growth milestones from some Django-based projects, I put together an easy-to-use integration between the two called django-slack.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next version of the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux distribution is in development and it will be called Vivid Vervet. There are only a few letters left in the alphabet before Canonical will have to come up with a new naming convention, but for now, the alliteration can continue.
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Meizu has already outed the first member of its new M1 family, the M1 Note. But the phablet has long been rumored to get a smaller sibling, ever since the M1 project was known just by its codename – Blue Charm.
And Meizu is now quite close to unveiling the M1 Mini. The official introduction will take place on January 28 at a special event. In the meantime more details about the upcoming smartphone have been leaked.
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Meizu leaks and rumors were rather quiet for a while, but not anymore. Meizu’s January 28 event is getting closer and closer by the day, and we’re getting more and more information about Meizu’s upcoming products, well, alleged products. We’ve reported earlier today that Meizu might offer the upcoming M1 Mini handset in three different OS variants, running Flyme, YunOS and Ubuntu (Touch) OS. This leak actually sounds really interesting, as I already mentioned, and I’d love to see an Ubuntu-powered Meizu handset, which will happen sooner or later because Canonical and Meizu signed a partnership agreement a while back.
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Ninja Blocks has begun shipping the Ninja Sphere and announced it has signed up as a key partner for Canonical’s Ubuntu Core embedded device operating system, as it opens its first office in the US.
The startup launched in 2012, when it was selected to participate the Startmate accelerator program, and also smashed a Kickstarter campaign for its first product, which was also called Ninja Blocks.
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A Linux-based desk with WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 5-inch touchscreen automatically adjusts between sitting and standing, and tells you when it’s time to move.
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Phones
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Android
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Surfing the web privately is something many web users are interested in, whether they’re doing it on a desktop, laptop or mobile device, but not many people know how to do it. Recently, a detailed WhoIsHostingThis infographic showed you how to secure your connection using a VPN — a virtual private network created on top of a public network to anonymize web traffic — on Windows, Mac and iOS, assuming the user already has access to a VPN service. Phone Arena has put together a similar step-by-step guide of enabling VPN connectivity on Android devices.
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It’s not enough to be able to come up with a concept, digitally or 3D design it, and then 3D print it. It’s not enough to be able to replicate and prototype items nearly out of thin air. It’s not enough to have sleek, mind-boggling technology. The question that nearly always follows is, “Yeah, cool — but can I do it from my phone?” It’s the obvious contemporary question that everyone has for the most part, including the guys who make these fantastical products.
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Frog by Wyplay is an independent open source software platform for pay-TV operators. The initiative brings together a growing ecosystem of almost 80 companies across the entire digital TV technology value chain including chipset vendors, device manufacturers, independent software vendors, software development and integration services providers and operators.
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Some of the folks behind the development of Open vSwitch (OVS) are now working on a new project to add virtual networking for OVS users.
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Open source SaaS vendor Open-Xchange gained another partner ally this week in its quest to offer an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. The partner, ExtendASP, will integrate the company’s OX App Suite into its customer and product manager solutions.
The move, which the companies announced Jan. 21, promises to increase OX App Suite’s customer base. In that way, it strengthens the position of Open-Xchange as it competes with entrenched proprietary foes in the office-productivity suite market.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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You’ve probably seen the cute little dinosaur that appears when Chrome can’t establish a network connection. Well he’s actually the star of his own endless runner game that you can play on PC and Android.
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Mozilla
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Passwords are always going to be vulnerable to being cracked. Fortunately, there are solutions out there that are making it safer for users to interact with services on the web. The new standard in protecting users is Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) authentication which is already available in browsers like Google Chrome.
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CMS
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The risk of unpatched software is one that WordPress understands well and is taking aggressive steps to mitigate.
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BSD
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While DragonFlyBSD 4.0.2 was released just two weeks ago, the v4.0.3 update is now out.
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Chris Buechler has released version 2.2 of the pfSense FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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In a study of more than 2,000 college students, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that the average American college student spends approximately $1,200 on books and supplies per year. The same study found that 65% of college students opt to not purchase textbooks because the prices are too high.
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Programming
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The new “ORC” Just-In-Time compilation APIs have landed within mainline LLVM.
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Health/Nutrition
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The following articles on the CIA Haiti sponsored narcotics smuggling by Dennis Bernstein, Howard Levine and Jim Lobe were published in the 1990s and republished by Global Research 25 February 2004. They shed light on the history of US interventionism in Haiti, focusing on the 1991 CIA led military coup. The coup was led coup by general Raul Cedras, resulted in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Aristide.
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A measles outbreak has sickened 70 people at Disneyland, and could be the spark that brings the once-eradicated disease back in force.
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Obesity has hit Australia hard in recent years — but how do our waistlines compare to those around the world? This map, put together from recent obesity data obtained by the CIA, shows that Australia is not alone.
The map, put together by Clinic Compare, shows that the percentage of the population that is clinically obese. Sure, a quarter of Australians are obese, so too Britons. But there are some surprises on the map: 33 per cent of Saudi Arabians, 32 per cent of Mexicans and 30 per cent of Argentinians and are dangerously overweight, for instance.
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Security
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A device used to monitor the gasoline levels at refueling stations across the United States—known as an automated tank gauge or ATG—could be remotely accessed by online attackers, manipulated to cause alerts, and even set to shut down the flow of fuel, according to research to be published on Thursday.
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The Hill’s networks are under constant attack. In 2013 alone, the Senate Sergeant at Arms’ office said it investigated 500 potential examples of malicious software, some from sophisticated attackers and others from low-level scammers. And that’s just the serious cases — in a different measurement, the House IT security office said in 2012 it blocked 16.5 million “intrusion attempts” on its networks.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Yes, the Empire’s leaders really believe that they have become gods. And now we only hear their twisted propaganda slogans, and their self-glorifying lies. They have become like those preachers and priests of the bygone eras: sadistic but constantly frightened, brutal and suspicious.
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“Everything changed for Sterling when he filed a discrimination complaint in 2000.”
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The jury is still out in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for allegedly having leaked the story of “Operation Merlin” – the covert CIA effort to lure Iran into working on phony plans for a key component of a nuclear weapon – to New York Times reporter James Risen.
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The jury is still out in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for allegedly having leaked the story of “Operation Merlin” – the covert CIA effort to lure Iran into working on phony plans for a key component of a nuclear weapon – to New York Times reporter James Risen.
But “Operation Merlin” itself was also on trial. The CIA was hoping that testimony by prosecution witnesses and a series of declassified CIA cables introduced as evidence would show that Risen’s account was wrong in recounting that the CIA’s human asset “Merlin” had immediately spotted a flaw in the plans to be turned over to Iran that Iranian engineers might be able to spot as well.
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Six days of testimony at the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling have proven the agency’s obsession with proclaiming its competence. Many of the two-dozen witnesses from the Central Intelligence Agency conveyed smoldering resentment that a whistleblower or journalist might depict the institution as a bungling outfit unworthy of its middle name.
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In a trial that whistleblower advocates have called “damage control” for the CIA, federal prosecutors are pursuing espionage charges against whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. The case stems from the agency’s attempts to feed Iran flawed nuclear schematics.
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Thus they are plotting revenge by simultaneously destabilizing «populist» states and inciting civil war in Venezuela. The fresh troops arriving at the CIA stations are already diving into these new jobs.
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Channel 4 News has admitted it could have “challenged more strongly” the views of an ex-CIA officer, who told the programme the best solution to violence in the Middle East was for Muslims to kill each other until they “bleed each other white”.
Michael Scheuer, who was in the CIA from 1982 and 2004 and was involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said Sunni and Shia Muslims should be left to fight each other, adding the situation was “ideal” when the brutal Islamic State (IS) was advancing on Baghdad and poised to carry out a massacre.
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Frank Archibald, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, plans to retire from his position within the CIA. Archibald was 57 when he took the position in 2013.
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The secretive head of the agency’s National Clandestine Service is retiring amid reports of infighting over a reorganization of the intelligence service.
The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.”
As a practice, the CIA doesn’t identify the head of the clandestine service by name. But Frank Archibald was outed in a Twitter post in 2013, and details of his biography were known to some journalists. Archibald, who was 57 when he took the job that year, reportedly served tours in Pakistan and Africa and also headed the CIA’s Latin America division. The Associated Press reported that Archibald “once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power.”
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American spies secretly intercepted communications between those involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and provided the key evidence that he was killed in a Russian-backed “state execution”, The Telegraph can disclose.
The National Security Agency (NSA) obtained electronic communications between key individuals in London and Moscow from the time that the former spy was poisoned with radioactive material in central London. The evidence was passed to the British authorities.
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As the start of the public inquiry into the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London approaches, an investigation has claimed to reveal “proof” Russia was behind the dissident’s murder.
Scotland Yard found the former Russian spy had consumed a fatal dose of polonium-210 during a meeting with two former KGB contacts at the Millennium Hotel eight years ago but Russia denied any involvement and refused to extradite the suspects.
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Officials at the Fort Hood Army base in central Texas could not have prevented a shooting rampage last year in part because the troubled soldier behind the attack gave no clear warning that he posed a threat, according to an Army report released Friday.
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If you think this is too harsh, please remember that anyone convicted could be freed by presidential pardon. But the world would know Americans are against torture and our flag can go back up the pole to the top.
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Mr. Kissinger hired Mr. Marshall away from Rand, telling him that the intelligence the White House was receiving was “lousy” and “even worse than what one could find in the national press.” He asked the 48-year-old analyst to study the problem.
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In their new book “The Last Warrior,” defense analysts Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts detail the career and legacy of Andrew Marshall, who recently retired as director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment after four decades in the job. (See my review.) Early on, they explain why Marshall left his longtime job at the Rand Corp. and moved to Washington in late 1969. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had decided that the information they were receiving from the intelligence agencies was “sorely lacking” — and they brought in Marshall to take a look at the problem.
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Nixon didn’t believe CIA analyses of Soviet military capabilities and intentions…
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After landing at the Rabat airport in 2010, Zakaria Moumni, a former kickboxing world champion, was distressed when he was taken aside by security agents, arrested, blindfolded and taken on a ride under a blanket in the back seat of a car to a secret facility. He says he was held there for four days, during which he was deprived of food and water.
“There is no worse feeling than this hopelessness of being blindfolded and handcuffed naked without being able to control anything,” said Mr. Moumni, 34, who spoke from Paris, where he now lives. “They told me that I was in a slaughterhouse and that I was going to leave in small pieces.”
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The Pentagon and the White House are pushing back on reports that the Obama administration is pausing drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations in Yemen, amidst the abrupt collapse of a critical partner government.
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The Obama administration has been forced to suspend certain counterterrorism operations with Yemen in the aftermath of the collapse of its government, according to U.S. officials, a move that eases pressure on al-Qaida’s most dangerous franchise.
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What is revealed is the ways that the highest-ranking officials in America sanctioned actions that we usually think of as occurring under brutal dictators and leaders who are brought up on charges of war crimes at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
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As the chief spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield was not the first to refer to his position as “the ultimate oxymoron.” He became the not-quite-public face of a secretive agency, tasked with the job of neither confirming nor denying anything publicly.
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Poor John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Washington’s original first couple. They only wanted to arm the ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria. Three years on, how come their master plan isn’t working, while ISIS has grown so strong?
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In using drones in this way, the Americans seemed to sacrifice the very “precision” that supporters of drone warfare have always argued is one of its principal advantages: after all, there is nothing “targeted” about a “signature strike”. And in any case, “precision” is a rather elastic term when employed in this context. The Hellfire missiles fired by Predator drones, for example, have a “kill zone” of 15 metres (in other words, nothing inside a 15-metre radius survives), whereas the successor to the Predator, the Reaper, is able to fire something called the “Small Smart Weapon”, which can kill an individual while leaving the people in the next room unscathed. Chamayou reports that American strategists expect that in 25 years’ time they will be using “nano-drones”, tiny robotic insects capable of operating in very confined spaces with unimaginable precision.
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The site said the provincial government refused special permission for Obama’s car, called the Beast, as well as his motorcade, inside the gates of the famous Taj Mahal in Agra, India.
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Just before Obama left Washington for New Delhi, the White House announced that he will no longer travel to the Taj Mahal on Tuesday. Instead, he will stop in Riyadh on his way home.
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As the allied bombing of Libya began in 2011, the Obama administration rejected an offer by Moammar Gadhafi to engage in negotiations to abdicate, according to a retired U.S. Navy officer who says he was prepared to broker the deal.
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Emerson’s comments drew widespread ridicule, and led to prime minister David Cameron describing him as “a complete idiot.”
The pundit formally apologised and donated £500 to a Birmingham children’s hospital.
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There is hard evidence that the United States government has been trying to destabilize Venezuela since the election of socialist President Hugo Chavez in 1998 to the current government of President Nicolas Maduro. Let’s count down the top 5 ways.
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More tax dollars consumed, more intrusions in our lives, the further militarization of the country, the dispatching of some part of the U.S. military to yet another country, the enshrining of war or war-like actions as the option of choice — this, by now, is a way of life. These days, the only headlines out of Washington that should surprise us would have “narrowing” or “less,” not “broadening” or “more,” in them.
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U.S. drone strikes that hit their intended targets only 21% of the time have resulted in the killings of hundreds of civilians, including children, in America’s hunt for terrorists in Yemen and Pakistan.
According to a data analysis by human rights group Reprieve, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan killed as many as 221 people, including 103 children, in the hunt for just four men on President Barack Obama’s secret Kill List, the Express Tribune reported. The Kill List is a covert program that selects individual targets for assassination and requires no public presentation of evidence or judicial oversight.
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The armed forces seem to be reassuring themselves that the violence they inflict — and the violence the enemy inflicts in return — is definitely worth it, according to David Axe
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If Guantanamo was the icon of President George W. Bush’s anti-terror policy, drones have become the emblem of the Obama presidency. Indeed, Chamayou maintains that President Barak Obama has adopted a totally different anti-terror doctrine from his predecessor: kill rather than capture, replace torture with targeted assassinations.
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If North Americans were asked, “Which country do you think is primarily responsible for supporting terrorism in the Middle East?” the answers would most probably be Iran, or Syria, or maybe Pakistan.
In fact, it is U.S. ally Saudi Arabia which is “the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups,” as Noam Chomsky has recently pointed out. (In fact, the U.S. government has itself reached the same conclusion.)
When it comes to the rise of the fanatical terrorist group, ISIS, Chomsky says that it “is a natural result” of the invasion of Iraq ordered by George W. Bush and Tony Blair: “One of the grim consequences of U.S.-U.K. aggression was to inflame sectarian conflicts … that have spread over the whole region.”
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The invocation of terrorism is a relatively recent phenomenon, even if the practice of politically-oriented violence is not. A Google Ngram search of the keyword ‘terrorism’ shows that the word virtually did not exist before the 20th century:
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The truth is that the troops, through what they’re doing over there, are indirectly destroying our country, our rights and freedoms, our safety and security, and our economic well-being.
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The U.S. Air Force fleet of planes and pilots is stretched so thin, the service is considering hiring private military corporations flying supersonic jets to train its fighter jocks in mock air combat.
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The likely presidential candidate is doubling down on on his support for anti-ISIS air strikes, despite new evidence that they aren’t working.
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My own father, a decorated Navy war hero on US submarines during World War II and Korea, was tortured by his post-war “sins” that he carried for over 70 years all the way to his grave. His particular war sins were the result of being forced at gunpoint by US naval command to comply with America’s racist war policy to kill every Asian man, woman and child in Pacific waters during World War II, even innocent non-Japanese civilian families peacefully eking out a modest living in their small fishing boats. At one point when my machine gunner father couldn’t bear committing any more of his racist nation’s sins, after defiantly throwing his .50 caliber bullet belt to the deck and retreating down below deck to his bunk, his submarine captain charged after him with his revolver drawn ready to murder my father until several of my father’s shipmates talked the raging Medal of Honor winning skipper out of it. For the next seven decades my father agonized over the haunting images of gunning down little children and their mothers laying lifeless in their slowly sinking boats, turning the Pacific blue red with white man’s inhumanity toward yellow race people. But this is what the last “justified,” red, white and blue American war did to my father’s fragile human psyche. Rather than placing the blame squarely on United States war policy in the Pacific theater, he always blamed himself for murdering those innocent families whose only crime was being born with slanted eyes. His PTSD symptoms persisted the next 70 years, countless times suddenly jarred awake in the middle of the night in cold sweat moaning in agony over his nightmares of those haunting, indelible images from so many years before. Then on weekends he would regularly put on his treasured “Victory At Sea” records, and the lilting music like a trance would morosely place him right back into reliving his war trauma, wrestling with his inner demons hundreds of times over while drowning himself in alcohol, futilely self-medicating numbness amidst his lingering, unshakable pain. This is what war does. From any end of the gun, war is always wrong.
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Transparency Reporting
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Despite public perception of whistleblowers changing for the better, the plight of those who choose to expose wrongdoings “has gotten a lot worse” in the US, former ethics adviser to Justice Department and Edward Snowden’s lawyer, Josselyn Radak, told RT.
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JR: Public perception of whistleblowers is changing. You see both Edward Snowden and Bill Binney featured in the documentary Citizenfour by Laura Poitras, which has now been nominated for an Oscar award. People are beginning to realize the public value of the information brought forward by whistleblowers who were being persecuted and prosecuted for exposing illegality.
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Binney is probably the most senior intelligence whistleblower in recent history. To give you an idea of his seniority – he designed most of the programmes that Edward Snowden leaked details about. So when William Binney talks about the dangers of mass surveillance, it pays to listen. It’s a bit like hearing Josef Goebbels talk about the risks of propaganda. The guy knows his stuff.
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Finance
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But the Times piece, by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker, seems to treat the poor and middle class as almost interchangeable. Thus “Mitt Romney, vowing a campaign to ‘end the scourge of poverty’ if he runs for president a third time,” is presented as an example of the same phenomenon as “Mitch McConnell…encourag[ing] the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class.”
Yet these are very different political approaches, with different policy implications. The “middle-class tax cuts” Obama is said to favor wouldn’t do much for the poor, whereas the earned-income tax credit, whose expansion Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) advocates, is designed to help the working poor rather than middle-income families.
Indeed, traditionally, the Republicans have accused Democrats of favoring the poor at the expense of the middle class (a charge that has led the Democrats for decades to declare their allegiance to the middle class).
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The wealthy elite are getting even richer, and a new report says that by 2016, the top 1% will control more than half of the world’s wealth. What explains this staggering level of inequality, and is there any way to buck this trend? Prof. Wolff explains.
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Iowa Republican senator Joni Ernst gave her party’s official response to the State of the Union address by boasting self-righteously about her humble origins and how her self-reliant, heartland-state family pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, but conveniently failed to mention that her family’s farm was the beneficiary of nearly half a million dollars in federal subsidies.
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Tsipras has unnerved financial markets with a pledge to overturn austerity and demands a debt write-off from European partners. But his message has resonated with Greeks struggling with unemployment over 25 percent and wage and pension cuts.
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With the chance of the oncoming Greek elections EEL/LAK, an Athens-based NGO focused on the promotion of FLOSS and the Commons, has recently asked the political parties about their agenda in relation to Open Governance and the Commons. In total, four political parties replied -according to the polls three of them will succeed in electing MPs- proving that there has been a growing interest over the Commons discourse in Greece.
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Vital services such as meals on wheels and home visits have been hit particularly badly since the ConDems came to power in 2010
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Washington Post claims that broadly disclosing that one of its opinion writers is a Republican lobbyist is sufficient even when he is advocating for positions that specifically benefit his firm’s unmentioned clients, a standard media critics say is “troubling” and “dishonest.”
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On the one hand, in a fictional universe there is the Pakistani government that collaborates with the Taliban to attack the U.S. Embassy; on the other hand, in real life, there are children who are killed by the Taliban on the grounds that the Pakistani government organizes attacks in collaboration with Western powers. Here is the difference between fiction and reality for the U.S.
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That’s not a story that’s limited to Clint-Eastwood-directed warsploitation movies. You’ll hear the same thing on Fox News, where this month Jeanine Pirro delivered a bloodthirsty rant calling for mass murder as a solution to the problem of Muslim extremism, and the network repeatedly made the false claim that radical Islamists had taken over parts of European cities, turning them into Muslim-only “no-go” zones.
That’s its own form of dangerous extremism. Its premises are wrong, and its results are dangerous. By feeding that narrative, American Sniper is part of the problem.
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Privacy
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In yet another act sure to increase the speed of George Orwell’s rotations in his grave, the NHS has decided that the opt-out forms I pointed out to many of you a year ago are not worth the paper they are printed on or emails they are sent in. Because, you see, you might have not understood fully the implications of opting out of your data being shared with private companies.
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In the wake of the Paris murders, and the subsequent arrests in Belgium, the question of cyber-security and surveillance has again risen to the top of the news agenda. I’m not going to add to the debate here, beyond pointing out that I have a libertarian viewpoint on this; I’ll leave it for others more articulate than myself to make the argument for me.
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A more realistic analogy is this: the government simply tell the Post Office (the UK national delivery service) to steam open every letter, from anyone to anywhere, photocopy the contents, file them away, and then send the letter on. Keeping the contents so that they can refer back to them retrospectively. And whilst the Post Office are busy filing your records, BT (UK national landline carrier) is busy recording every single phone conversation you make. It’s the equivalent of having that message “Your call may be recorded for training purposes” built in to the telephone network.
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The increasing use of encryption technologies in everyday emails and messaging services will lead to “ethically worse” behaviour by the intelligence agencies, a former head of GCHQ has predicted.
Sir David Omand warned there would be greater intrusion on individuals’ privacy, not less, if agencies are unable to intercept communications – because they will be forced into more direct spying methods.
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Fifteen state representatives have signed onto a bill that would require police to get a warrant before using surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers to identify nearby phones.
David Taylor, R-Moxee, introduced House Bill 1440 this week to promote electronic privacy, he said.
His legislation doesn’t appear to propose changes for the Tacoma Police Department, the only Washington police agency known to possess the device commonly called a Stingray. The device finds suspects by the cellphones they carry. Once connected, the police can capture precise locations of a suspect’s phone and metadata — who he or she calls or texts, when and for how long.
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This story has been posted on other social media. Its main focus is on how an Alabama school system (Huntsville city schools) paid a former FBI agent the sum of $157,000 to direct security of their schools but the main purpose was to actually spy on the social media activity of the black students in the schools. The agent was brought in to oversee the Students Against Fear program (SAFe). This program allows students and teachers to submit anonymous tips to security personnel. According to the paperwork provided by the school administration system, the SAFe program does not work directly for the school system. Instead, it is employed by T&W Operations. T&W Operations, which is a service-disabled, veteran-owned, small business in Huntsville, Alabama, provides labor and support services for logistics operations with government and commercial clients. Over 600 students attending these schools had their social media monitored in the year 2013. Students who were expelled due to certain social media issues were mostly African-Americans.
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It is the continent’s favourite hobby, and even the European Parliament cannot resist: having a pop at the world’s biggest search engine. In a recent and largely symbolic vote, representatives urged that Google search should be separated from its other services — demanding, in essence, that the company be broken up.
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The problem with Google is not that it is too big but that it hoovers up data that does not belong to it.
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EFF obtained and analyzed records from the Oakland Police Department’s secretive automatic license plate readers, showing that the department has mounted a program of incredibly intrusive, highly racialized secret surveillance of an entire city.
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William Binney, former technical director of the NSA turned whistleblower, last night received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
The ceremony in Berlin featured a powerful line-up of fellow whistleblowers and former intelligence officers, who honoured Binney for “shining light into the darkest of corners of secret government and corporate power”.
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who won the Sam Adams Award in 2013, joined the event via video link from Moscow, to congratulate and thank Binney. “Without Bill Binney, there would be no Edward Snowden,” he said.
Snowden spoke of the “civic duty to say something” that he felt when he saw unlawful surveillance programs in action. Programs that, as technical director of the NSA, Binney himself helped to build.
In accepting the award, Binney said that he resigned from the NSA back in 2001 after he realised the agency was “purposefully violating the Constitution” with its “bulk acquisition of data against US citizens… first against US citizens by the way, not foreigners”.
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The incident involving a CIA spy uncovered within the BND ranks was perceived by most Europeans as total nonsense: a total of 218 top secret documents were stolen from BND by a 31-year-old employee Marcus R. over a period of two years while he was cooperating with the ”friendly” CIA. The White House was paying “the loyal agent” according to the “banana republic,” rates up to and including 25 thousand euros, omitting glass beads and colored feathers.
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In an act of extraordinary contempt for both the public and democracy, four lords are attempting to insert the bulk of the Snooper’s Charter in the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill in a way that means there will be almost no opportunity to debate it. We have only two days to stop this disgraceful move by writing to members of the House of Lords, and asking them to object to this disturbing attempt to circumvent the proper procedures “because terrorism”.
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A new anti-cyberbullying law in Illinois effectively allows schools to force students to hand over their social media passwords if they are suspected to have been the victim of or otherwise involved in cyberbullying. While the law doesn’t explicitly say schools can request passwords, it gives school officials broad scope to act even when alleged bullying occurs using “technology or an electronic device that is not owned, leased, or used by a school district or school.”
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Bruce Schneier, Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, talks with Edward Snowden about government surveillance and the effectiveness of privacy tools like encryption to an audience at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
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Civil Rights
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Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good.
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Many of the world leaders who came to Paris for the event were among the world’s worst violators of the principles the masses of demonstrators were there to defend. But even their hypocrisy, revolting as it was, could not deflect the demonstration’s positive impact.
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Lawmaking officially began last week in most states, and it should surprise no one that abortion is again high on the list of priorities for a number of legislatures going into 2015.
Since the 2010 election tipped statehouses Republican, states adopted 231 new abortion restrictions. Last year alone, 15 states enacted 26 new abortion controls, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
With all those news laws on the books, one might ask, just what’s left to curb? Yet armed with hundreds of pre-written bills—drawn up by model legislation organizations Americans United for Life and the National Right to Life Committee—state lawmakers are finding new ways to make an abortion even harder to get in the new year.
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Contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment, torture had gradually disappeared in the West since the eighteenth century, and only the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism have reintroduced it in Europe. Once that door opened, it managed to infiltrate the heart of the French Republic. A few years after the end of the Second World War, torture was practiced during the wars in Indochina and Algeria, even if the rulers did never publicly admitted it. To intellectuals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet (The Torture in the Republic, Minuit, 1972) or the Communist Henri Alleg, who had himself suffered to torture (La Question, Minuit, 1958) protested, with others, against this process.
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Now that the world is done stating “Je suis Charlie,” it’s time to turn its collective gaze back to the US government’s torture program. One of the beautiful things about the world having such a short attention span is that it is possible to refocus after a distracting event.
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Closing Gitmo while not tackling the root problem of its associated archipelago and the ‘exceptional’ US mindset that set it into force would be nothing but a symbolic victory. As is seen by the CIA black sites, barely any information has emerged about each location except for a few notable ones like in Poland. This means that it is unknown exactly what kind of human rights abuses may have been carried out there, demonstrating that the US government has actually done a particularly good job at covering its tracks in these cases. This should serve as a dire warning, however, even if Gitmo is closed, other more secretive ‘detention facilities’ may be opened to replace it, given the ‘need’ that certain influential members of the national and military spheres say there is for keeping it open in the first place. Just as one weed can quickly spread throughout an entire garden, it may be that Gitmo’s final legacy will be that it spread a network of near-identical camps all throughout the world.
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The lawyer for a Guantanamo inmate says fear after the Paris attacks risks giving governments a licence to implement the sort of anti-terror legislation that saw her client wrongly detained.
[...]
In the book the 44-year-old documents how he was subjected to brutal treatment, including being kept in a “frozen room” for hours on end, forced into group sex with prison guards and repeatedly tortured.
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With the recent release of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report affirming aggressive post-911 CIA interrogations that many critics liken to torture, Mikula, a professor of Eastern European History and acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Benedictine University, has been reliving her harrowing childhood experiences in the dual context of an expatriate and American citizen.
She finds it ironic today that the same agency which helped her family escape communism is accused of using some of the same harsh interrogation tactics as the totalitarian regime.
“The idea that you would torture people who you didn’t know were enemies or not – that you would torture (innocent) people in order to identify suspects – it makes me think of all we went through to get away from that,” Mikula said.
Mikula, named Zuzana in her native country, is the daughter of Edith Martonik and Jozef Mikula. Her father, who was an outspoken critic of communism, left Czechoslovakia for Austria when it was clear the communists were going to assume control. His hope was to fight communism from afar and foment a change that would allow his return.
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One of Margaret Thatcher’s most senior ministers died Thursday amid a swirl of accusations that he was personally involved in the abuse of children and the subsequent coverup of a Westminster pedophile ring.
Lord Leon Brittan, who was appointed Home Secretary in 1983, always denied the allegations, some of which can be published for the first time now that he has died. Police sources also confirm that at the time of his death, he was being investigated over allegations that he had raped a woman as a young man. Brittan died in his sleep at home with his family at the age of 75. He had suffered from cancer and heart problems.
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An annotated copy of the address book, which also contains entries for Alec Baldwin, Ralph Fiennes, Griffin Dunne, New York Post gossip Richard Johnson, Ted Kennedy, David Koch, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, and all manner of other people you might expect a billionaire to know, turned up in court proceedings after Epstein’s former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez tried to sell it in 2009. About 50 of the entries, including those of many of Epstein’s suspected victims and accomplices as well as Trump, Love, Barak, Dershowitz, and others, were circled by Rodriguez. (The existence of the book has been previously reported by the Daily Mail. Gawker is publishing it in full here for the first time; we have redacted addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and the last names of individuals who may have been underage victims.)
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Slahi had fought alongside the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1990s. This was a war in which the United States aided and even armed members of the mujahadeen against the Soviet-controlled government that had been installed in Afghanistan. However, by working with the mujahadeen, and even pledging support to a then-grassroots Al Qaeda, Slahi later found himself a wanted man.
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Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been detained in Guantanamo for 13 years without ever facing trial. From his cell, he wrote “Guantanamo Diary,” a unique account of the conditions in the US detention centre.
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The United States has accepted that the former Guantanamo inmate, Australian citizen David Hicks, is innocent, his lawyer says.
Lawyer Stephen Kenny told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that he expected Hicks’s 2007 conviction “to be set aside”.
Hicks’s lawyers appealed his conviction last month, saying it was unsound.
Hicks had pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in a deal that allowed him to complete his sentence in Australia.
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The evidence is clear that MI5 and MI6 were involved in the abduction and torture of Gaddafi’s opponents – someone must be held to account
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Exonerating spooks for improper conduct is a regular feature of the establishment. After all, you don’t convict your own, turning your nose at activities pursued under the grand, catch-all term of national security. From the start, the CIA review, established to investigate its own activities into spying on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was always predictably constituted, with predictable outcomes.
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Andre Seebregts, K.’s lawyer, wanted the judge to prohibit the extradition because the role played by the US secret service (CIA) in the arrest and torture of K. in Pakistan has not been clarified. The judge agreed with him.
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Fact: The CIA’s torture program was directly inspired by animal experiments.
In the 1960s, dogs were subjected to random electric shocks from which they could not escape. Eventually the dogs gave up trying to avoid the painful shocks, not even escaping when a path to escape was finally presented to them.
[...]
What concerns me most as a medical doctor is the fact that two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, directed these human torture experiments. The psychologists were curious about whether the theories of animal “learned helplessness” might work on humans.
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The sentencing of someone who couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag is the latest sign that we’re in the middle of a nerd scare.
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I started studying the computer underground back when I worked in tech, as an early web developer, in the mid 1990s. I found the world fascinating, and I interviewed people and wrote about it, initially for myself. I never participated much. At first this was because I didn’t have much to contribute, but in time I came to understand that I wanted to remain on the disinterested side of law enforcement. This was not only because of what it meant for my own long-term prospects, but because it would let me build more understanding of the culture I was studying, and ultimately let me share what I learned of that culture with more people.
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An autistic schoolboy hanged himself after receiving a bogus “police” email claiming he had been looking at illegal websites and must pay a £100 fine.
Joseph Edwards was more susceptible to believing the scam was genuine because of his disability, a coroner heard today.
The 17-year-old A-level student was found hanged at his home by his mum, who has since launched a campaign to make children more aware of the dangers from internet scams.
Joseph received the online spam message, claiming to be from Cheshire Police, which said he had been visiting illegal websites with indecent images on his computer and would have to pay a large sum of money to avoid officers taking action.
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I spent last weekend elbow-deep in engine grease, hands tangled in the steel guts of my wife’s Mazda 3. It’s a good little car, but lately its bellyachings have sent me out to the driveway to tinker under the hood.
I regularly hurl invectives at the internal combustion engine—but the truth is, I live for this kind of stuff. I come away from each bout caked in engine crud and sated by the sound of a purring engine. For me, tinkering and repairing are primal human instincts: part of the drive to explore the materials at hand, to make them better, and to make them whole again.
Cars, especially, have a profound legacy of tinkering. Hobbyists have always modded them, rearranged their guts, and reframed their exteriors. Which is why it’s mind-boggling to me that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just had to ask permission from the Copyright Office for tinkerers to modify and repair their own cars.
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This– THIS LINK– could have sent me to jail. Another link came very, very close to sending Barrett Brown to jail. Brown was just sentenced to five years in jail on other charges that the government could make stick, in another step towards the criminalization of everything.
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Yesterday at the Earle Cabell Federal Building, in the fine city of Dallas, Texas, a fellow named Andrew Blake wore a curious t-shirt to Judge Sam Lindsay’s court for a hearing to determine how much longer Barrett Brown ought to stay in prison. Blake got his shirt while covering the trial of Chelsea Manning. It was black, with one word, in white, printed across its chest: “truth.” Before things got started yesterday, a federal marshal approached Blake and told him he had to cover up the word. In case you missed that: he had to cover up “truth.” In a courtroom. That’s how it went for much of yesterday, like a script for a bad movie that any reasonable studio executive would read and reject because no way could the plot transpire in real life.
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But first, Brown expressed regret. He regretted having recorded and posted videos in which he threatened an FBI agent who was investigating Brown, calling the videos “idiotic” and the product of a “manic state” brought on by a withdrawal from drugs used to control his heroin addiction. He admitted that he “stupidly” tried to hide laptop computers from FBI agents when they arrived at his mother’s home with a search warrant. He said he had crossed the line from journalist to collaborator when he contacted security firm, Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) with an offer to redact sensitive material from a major 2011 hack, diverting attention from hacker Jeremy Hammond. “I have never denied I was involved with Anonymous,” Brown said. “But that means different things at different times.”
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But critics of the sentence, including Brown himself, say he has done nothing that many mainstream journalists haven’t also done in their work and that he is being persecuted because he does not have the protection of a large media organization. Reporters for outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, for example, have not faced the same prosecution efforts from the government for their part in publishing documents stolen from the National Security Agency by former contractor Edward Snowden.
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Abby Martin speaks with Ali al-Ahmed, Director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs about the death of Saudi Arabian monarch, King Abdullah, and why the media is covering him as a ‘reformer’.
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American diplomats pay lip service to human rights while tens of billions of dollars in arms are shipped to the Kingdom of Hate, where you can be executed for ‘sorcery’ or tweeting about Islam.
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Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, issued the following statement in response to the Senate Republican Majority’s decision to remove the words “Civil Rights and Human Rights” from the name of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. This subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over civil rights oversight:
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Saudi Arabia’s deceased King Abdullah, according to just about every obituary in major Western publications, was a reformer. The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and NPR all describe Abdullah as a ruler committed to reforming Saudi Arabia’s notoriously repressive practices. Sen. John McCain called Abdullah an advocate for peace; IMF head Christine Lagarde called him a “strong advocate for women.”
But Abdullah did not, in fact, make any fundamental reforms to the Saudi state, which remains one of the most oppressive and inhumane on earth. It punishes dissidents, including currently with multiple rounds of publicly lashing a blogger, amputates hands and legs for robbery, and enforces a system of gender restrictions that make women not just second-class citizens, but in many ways the property of men. Abdullah’s reputation as a reformer comes from some relatively limited policy shifts he made. Praising Abdullah as a reformer, in addition to being misleading, seems to imply that Saudi Arabia should be held to a lesser standard than the rest of humanity, and that its citizens should be somehow grateful for Abdullah’s minor adjustments to a system that remains cruelly unjust.
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The constraints and restrictions on Saudi women are too notorious and too numerous to itemise. Right now, two women are in prison for the offence of trying to drive over the border in to Saudi Arabia. It is not just the ban on driving. There is also the ban on going out alone, the ban on voting, the death penalty for adultery, and the total obliteration of public personality – almost of a sense of existence – by the obligatory veil. And there are the terrible punishments meted out to those who infringe these rules that are not written down but “interpreted” – Islam mediated through the conventions of a deeply conservative people.
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North Korea called on Thursday for the top United Nations human rights body to investigate allegations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture in the George W. Bush era, that were contained in a recent Senate report.
The move, announced by So Se Pyong, ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the U.N. in Geneva, puts more strain on ties with Washington, following U.S. accusations that Pyongyang was behind a cyber attack on Sony Pictures. North Korea denies those accusations.
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So Se Pyong, ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the U.N. in Geneva, said that the issue of the “CIA torture crimes” should be put on the agenda of the U.N. Human Rights Council which meets from March 2-27
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“This morning … I sent a letter to the president of the Human Rights Council … requesting that the council take up the issue of CIA torture crimes committed by the United States,” said So Se Pyong, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva.
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The architect of the Senate’s landmark inquiry into Central Intelligence Agency torture is denouncing an unusual demand from her successor to return all classified copies of the investigation.
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When it comes to the CIA’s torture of innocent people, or unconstitutional dragnet surveillance, or assassination of American citizens, Republicans are eager to enable the executive branch. No fiddling with immigration regulations, because tyranny. But go ahead and kill whoever you want. We trust you.
Witness Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the brand-new chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Instead of carrying out the oversight functions that are the very reason the committee exists, he is being every bit the CIA lickspittle that I said he was going to be last March.
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When the new Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr (R-N.C.), announced that, allegedly unbeknownst to him, the former chairwoman had widely distributed the panel’s study of CIA torture, he said he was perturbed. A sensitive document — one whose validity he has vehemently challenged — now being spread within the executive branch? Concerning, Burr said, to say the least.
Except most of the recipients that Burr is concerned about never even opened their copy.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request for the full, still-classified 6,900-page torture report, government lawyers wrote that most of the executive agencies that had been copied on the transmission of the full report to the White House from then-Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hadn’t opened their sealed copy — and in one case, never even picked it up.
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With this petty action, Burr signals that his time in this important chairmanship will be stridently partisan. It’s not a promising sign for a tenure that ought to be marked by constructive debate.
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The new Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to make sure that a scathing 6,900-page report about the CIA’s torture of terrorism suspects captured after 9/11 is never publicly released.
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Nearly 10 years ago, allegations were raised against some European states for colluding with the CIA in post-9/11 anti-terror measures. Amnesty International is now calling on these nations to come clean.
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Rights group Amnesty International urged European countries on Tuesday to come clean on alleged co-operation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in torture, and to help bring those responsible to justice.
“Governments can no longer rely on unsubstantiated ‘national security’ grounds and claims of state secrecy to hide the truth about their roles in the torture and disappearance of people,” said Amnesty counter-terrorism and human rights expert Julia Hall.
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When the US Senate released the report on CIA torture in December, the world reacted with shock and outrage. The document detailed the “program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques” that the agency embarked upon in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. These techniques included mock executions, waterboarding, and “rectal rehydration,” along with threats to family members, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity. One detainee is thought to have died from excessive cold.
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Rights group Amnesty International urged European countries on Tuesday to come clean on alleged cooperation with CIA operations involving torture and help bring those responsible to justice.
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Earlier on Tuesday, Amnesty International published its report outlining Europe’s role in secret CIA torture operations. The governments cited in the report include Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Germany, Macedonia and the UK, the last has been described as the “most important US ally” in CIA operations.
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European governments that cooperated with the CIA’s secret detention, interrogation, and torture operations as part of the USA’s global “war on terror” must act urgently to bring those responsible to justice following a US Senate report containing new details said Amnesty International in a new briefing paper.
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The Screen Actors Guild has nominated Claire Danes of “Homeland” for its Best Actress Award. It has also nominated Danes, Mandy Patinkin and the rest of the “Homeland” cast for the Outstanding Ensemble Award.
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Exonerating spooks for improper conduct is a regular feature of the establishment.
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An FBI special agent who lost his job in 2008 told Newsweek columnist Jeff Stein his story about how the 9/11 hijackers slipped through the cracks at the FBI and CIA more than a decade ago.
Mark Rossini said the CIA prevented him from going to FBI headquarters with the information that two known terrorists, who later went on to carry out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, had entered the US.
Government reports on 9/11 blame a vague “intelligence failure” for the terrorist attack that killed about 3,000 people in 2001 and provide little clarity on why the CIA didn’t communicate crucial information about the hijackers to the FBI. This information, in theory, could have helped the US to prevent the attacks.
Rossini said that after 9/11, when congressional investigators started asking him questions about his work with the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, he and another FBI agent stayed quiet at the direction of CIA officers.
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That internal review found that the CIA had consistently overstated the value of intelligence gained during the cruel and brutal interrogations of some of its detainees, The New York Times reports.
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While the CIA and former members of the Bush administration have been waging a campaign in defense of the spy agency’s actions, its own internal report found that they were overstating how helpful torture had been. According to The New York Times, an internal review commissioned by former Director Leon Panetta found that the agency continuously exaggerated the intelligence it obtained during the brutal interrogations of detainees. According to the review, the CIA knew that information used to track down operatives from al Qaeda and stop terror plots did not come from interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
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A major trial is underway in a federal courtroom in Virginia that, at its heart, is tackling issues of CIA interference in other countries, but also the Espionage Act, and the sanctity of journalists’ secret sources. Former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling is on trial for several violations of the Espionage Act, that involves revelations of a bizarre secret operation called the Merlin Project.
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The deaths of Yasser Al Zahrani, Salah Ahmed Al Salami, and Mani Shaman Al Utaybi were never accepted as suicides by their families, two in Saudi Arabia and one in Yemen, or by former prisoners who knew them, especially as autopsies showed the men’s necks had been removed. But the official narrative prevailed. It was “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us,” Rear Admiral Harry B Harris Jr, the commander of the camp, told a press conference about the deaths. He described a “mystical belief” at Guantanamo that three men had to die at the camp for all of the prisoners to be released.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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GOOGLE CEO Eric Schmidt has predicted that the internet as we know it today will disappear in the future.
Schmidt said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the internet could become a thing of the past as online connections become ever smarter and personalised thanks to the growth of the Internet of Things.
When quizzed as to his views on the future of the web, Schmidt said: “I will answer very simply that the internet will disappear.”
“There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,” Schmidt said, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
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Google chairman Eric Schmidt expects the internet as we know it to ‘disappear’ in the next few years as our online connections become ever more smarter and personalised.
“I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear,” Schmidt said at the Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland when asked about his predictions for the future of the web.
“There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Six men went on trial this week accused of blackmail and extortion after thousands were sent threats demanding cash payments for alleged adult video downloads. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde hopes for a conviction, but wonders if Hollywood content would’ve been handled differently.
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Send this to a friend
01.23.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux has always had passionate advocates and some of them have created images that some might construe as propaganda.
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Have you ever installed a full desktop Linux system on your Chromebook? It isn’t all the hfard, but it is a bit more complex than it should be. New features in the latest version of Chrome OS will make dipping into an alternative operating system easier. For example, you’ll be able to easily boot a full Linux system from a USB drive and use it without any additional hassle!
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Server
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The way IBM and the big Linux distros – Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) Red Hat, and SUSE – are tackling the portability problem has to do with the way server platforms treat data stored in memory. Most Linux software is written for the x86 architecture, which uses the “little endian” approach to storing bytes in memory. The alternative is “big endian,” which has traditionally been used by mainframes and IBM’s Power architecture. (Detailed explanation of the difference here)
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Carlos Horowicz: Planisys is a Cloud Services Provider headquartered in Argentina with its hardware and connectivity infrastructure mainly in U.S. data centers.
Planisys provides businesses with CDN, DNS, and transactional e-mail services focusing on clients with high-traffic requirements like latin american online newspapers.
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Kernel Space
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Monday I speculated that Bodhi Linux founder Jeff Hoogland’s change of heart was possibly due to reminiscing with Christine Hall in her interview. Well, today Hall spoke with Hoogland again to find out. In other news, Phil Johnson has 11 technologies that annoy Linus Torvalds and Softpedia.com is reporting on Torvalds’ decision to leave code in the kernel for one lone machine. Jack Wallen said ordinary users are the ideal candidates for Linux and Konrad Zapałowicz is back with three ways beginners can help out with the kernel.
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Linus Torvalds is considered one of the greatest living programmers, and for good reason, having written some of the most widely used software, such as the Linux kernel and the Git revision control system. He’s also known for not being shy about sharing his opinions on things that he doesn’t like through colorful and sometimes NSFW language. Sometimes, he’ll direct his sharp tongue at people who, in his opinion, do substandard work or companies and organizations with which he may have a disagreement or be in competition. Most often, though, the target of Torvalds’ ire is technology that he feels isn’t up to snuff. Use the arrows above to read Torvalds’ thoughts about 11 technologies that have gotten under his skin repeatedly over the years.
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Linus Torvalds is not known to interfere with other projects than the Linux kernel and it must be something really special to get him involved. Well, it looks like the Linux port of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings proved to be interesting enough.
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Bottomley shared that with efitools 1.5.2 it’s tested and works for IA32. He’s been using it with the Quark SoC board via the Galileo Kipps Bay D. He’s been playing with the Intel Quark and will share more in a future blog post.
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Graphics Stack
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Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical released the libdrm 2.4.59 library on Wednesday. While most libdrm updates tend not to be too exciting, the v2.4.59 release carries a bit more weight.
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Following yesterday’s NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 launch, here’s an 11-way comparison looking at all of NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs as well as many Kepler and Fermi GeForce graphics cards under Linux. Beyond the raw OpenGL performance, the thermal and power efficiency data is also available for the tested range of GeForce 900/700/600/500/400 series graphics cards.
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Keith Packard who this month left Intel’s graphics team to join HP to work on “The Machine” has released a new pre-release version of X.Org Server 1.17.
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Benchmarks
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In continuation of this morning’s launch-day article for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, the graphics card that’s priced at $200 USD and is built on the very power efficient Maxwell architecture, here’s some more Linux benchmark results.
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Applications
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There’s a “frame-parallel” branch of libvpx to enable frame parallel decoding. This is designed to speed up the VP9 decoding process for multi-core processors. The work is explained by its developers as, “In frame parallel decode, libvpx decoder decodes several frames on all cpus in parallel fashion. If not being flushed, it will only return frame when all the cpus are busy. If getting flushed, it will return all the frames in the decoder. Compare with current serial decode mode in which libvpx decoder is idle between decode calls, libvpx decoder is busy between decode calls. VP9 frame parallel decode is >30% faster than serial decode with tile parallel threading which will makes devices play 1080P VP9 videos more easily.”
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Docker 1.5rc1 is upon us and should be ready to slide down the slipway in the first week of February.
Announced in a newsgroup – as is proper – the new version is billed by developer Arnaud Porterie as containing “many major features”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.35 is now available.
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Wine 1.7.35 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development version of Wine for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.
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Games
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Shadow Warrior, an FPS build by Flying Wild Hog that is described as a bold re-imagining of the classic 3D Realms’ shooter with the same name that was released back in 1996, might be getting a Linux release.
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Well this was a surprised! Dying Light has hints that it may come to Linux thanks to information from the awesome SteamDB.
The visuals in the game are just fantastic, and we really don’t have many games in this class on Linux.
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Dying Light is a new FPS from Techland and it’s all about surviving the night during a zombie apocalypse. This is a studio specialized in this kind of games, and it looks that they might also be interested in the Linux platform.
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The publisher of Hotline Miami, Devolver Digital, has unveiled its new game Ronin, being created in collaboration with Tomasz Wacławek.
Due out on PC, Mac and Linux later this year, a debut trailer for the turn-based action platformer shows off elements that are clearly inspired by the critically-acclaimed Gunpoint, only with more katanas.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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On Thursday my Broadwell-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop/ultrabook finally arrived for some Linux testing of Intel’s exciting Haswell successor. While many tests are forthcoming of this third-generation X1 Carbon — including Broadwell Windows vs. Linux benchmarks — here’s my initial experiences over the first ~10 minutes with this new hardware.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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An even more impressive review, this time of Plasma 5 on Utopic, is from Ken Vermette.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Matthias Clasen has announced that the GNOME development team has released GNOME 3.15.4, and this is now the latest and most advanced version of the desktop environment.
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GNOME 3.15.4 was released on Thursday night and is the latest pit stop on the road to the very exciting GNOME 3.16.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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Two open source titans put their rings together and joined forces to announce that Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7.1 beta is now available on the IBM Power Development platform. Last month Red Hat announced that v7.i beta supported IBM Power Systems based on little endian mode. Today, it is available and ready to use on the platform directly via download as well as at IBM Innovation & Client Centers worldwide.
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Fedora
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Many users have already switched to 64-bit a long time ago and they must be wondering why there is still a need for the 32-bit architecture. It creates headaches because many app developers don’t actively support it anymore and it’s becoming too expensive to maintain.
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There’s been many changes and additions for Fedora 22 talked about so far and with this week marking the system wide change proposal deadline we have a last look at some of the new work that’s hoping to be done for the May release of Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Leaks posted this evening on Weibo claim to show some of the features of the upcoming Meizu m1 mini including the choice of Ubuntu OS.
Weibo posts picked up this evening by Meizu News, hold some interesting surprises for Meizu fans. The images which appear to be from leaked marketing material, list a few of the specifications of the mini Meizu along with price and a choice of operating system.
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In a recent security notice, Canonical has published details about a Samba exploit that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.
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A new rumor regarding the impending launch of a Meizu powered by Ubuntu Touch has started to circulate online and it looks like some new images have been leaked from Weibo, a microblogging platform very popular in China.
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This goes in line with previous news, stating the Meizu m1 mini will be a multi OS device, coming with your choice of Meizu’s Flyme OS, Yun OS, developed by Alibaba, and Ubuntu. The stock Android version was unexpected and it remains to be seen whether it will be another option to purchase, or is a pre-production model for development purposes.
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Flavours and Variants
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Lubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2 (Vivid Vervet) is now out and ready for testing. This LXDE-based distro doesn’t have too many changes worth mentioning, with the exception of the base.
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The second Alpha version for the 15.04 branch of Ubuntu GNOME has been released and is now ready for testing. It’s not a major evolution from the previous Alpha, but some of the important packages have been upgraded.
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Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2 (Vivid Vervet), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the KDE desktop environment, is now available for download and testing. The developers have made quite a few substantial improvements, including to the Plasma desktop.
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The Ubuntu MATE developers have just released the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Alpha 2 Linux distribution, which is now available for download and testing. It’s the first one in the new development cycle and it comes with quite a few improvements.
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Along with the official Ubuntu flavors, Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2 was released yesterday. Read on to find out what’s new.
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The SAMA5D4 Xplained Ultra (SAMA5D4-XULT) follows the SAMA5D3-based SAMA5D3 Xplained, which was developed by Newark Element 14 and Atmel to support the SAMA5D3 system-on-chip. In this case, the Xplained board amplifies the capabilities of the SAMA5D4 SoC announced by Atmel last October. Newark Element14 is the U.S. distributor of U.K.-based Premier Farnell.
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Sometimes a product comes along, that makes so much sense, that you wonder how no one thought of it before. For example, the Snuggie. I mean come on, a blanket with sleeves? Genius! Let us not forget about the George Foreman Grill; that thing makes some damn tasty turkey burgers.
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Phones
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Tizen
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As many of you know, I’ve been involved with Tizen for quite some time. I manage Tizen at the Linux Foundation, which means I get a unique perspective on the project. And as anybody who has talked with me about what I do, I am a huge supporter of the Tizen platform and its goals, and am a general optimist (including but not limited to Tizen, of course).
2014 was a big year, with Tizen wearables and cameras hitting the market, Tizen IVI 3.0 achieving GENIVI 7.0 compliance, and a lot of interesting platform work on Tizen:Common. 2015 has really gotten off to a great start as well, with the announcements at CES that all new Samsung Smart TVs released in 2015 will run Tizen, starting in February.
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Android
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Lava has launched the Iris 350 budget smartphone, which is now listed on the company’s site at a price of Rs. 3,499. The official listing of the Lava Iris 350, without revealing an exact release date, notes that the handset will soon be available in stores.
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Android tablets are a dime a dozen these days. Look in any electronics store and you’ll see a sea of virtually indistinguishable slates, few of which manage to stand out.
Dell’s new Venue 8 7000 tablet is a noteworthy exception. The Venue 8 7000 — sometimes also referred to as the Venue 8 7000 Series or the Venue 8 7840 — is a distinctively stylish tablet with some unusually compelling qualities. Its name may be awkward and forgettable, but the device itself is anything but.
And with a price of $400 — the same as Google’s flagship Nexus 9 tablet — it’s one of the most interesting Android options available today.
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If you’re in the market for a new cellular plan, you may want to wait for a new player to enter the game: Google. New reports suggest the company is planning on launching a wireless cellular network in an effort to get more people on the Web. It’s a move that could, in turn, force existing providers to offer better plan pricing and better data speeds.
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2015 is the year the battle for your wrist goes nuclear, as the highly anticipated Apple Watch will finally hit store shelves.
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Last year, Google unveiled its design vision for the future. Called Material Design, it incorporates bold colors, flat elements, and informative animations to create a fresh user interface for the modern age. Material Design made its major debut with the launch of Android 5.0 Lollipop in the fall, and Google has been rapidly updating its own apps and services to take advantage of the new design directives.
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Supporting Android in the enterprise is no longer optional, it is necessary.
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Not a whole lot of LG G3 users can claim to be running Android 5.0 Lollipop or later at the moment even though the rollout technically began last year. Unsurprisingly, the update is taking its sweet time and has so far been mostly limited to South Korean, Europe, and a handfull of other markets. Android 5.0 Lollipop only started rolling out across the majority of Europe last week and now it finally seems ready to grace some other countries as well. The next country in line to receive it will apparently be Australia according to Gizmodo. The article says that official sources from LG Australia have told local LG G3 owners about the good news so this is more than just a rumor.
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The Android 5.0.2 release is crawling along and finally available on our Nexus 7 2013, allowing us to install the latest Nexus Lollipop update and see how it performs on the newest Nexus 7.
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It looks like Google is about to bring its Nexus Player streaming box to some online and brick-and-mortar retailers within the next few days: The Nexus Player as well as the optional Nexus Player gamepad, both of which are being manufactured by Asus, started to appear on Newegg’s website. The online electronics retailer still lists both as unavailable, with a release date of January 25.
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LibreOffice for Android has long been one of the biggest demands in the open source world. The reason is simple, a majority of Android users (myself included) who are concerned about vendor lock-in don’t save their data in Microsoft’s controversial docx, or Apple’s incompatible Pages formats. ISO approved ODF is the only way to go if you don’t want your files to become inaccessible in the future.
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I love Android, but still dabble from time to time with iOS. Doing so usually makes me thankful at how Android works, with its deep Google integration, smart sharing features, and Material Design flourishes in Lollipop.
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Google’s Android OS is now up to version 5.1, dubbed Lollipop. The software broke cover as Android L at Google I/O over the summer of 2014 and we’ve long been anticipating the then-teased Material Design features; an entirely new design language that breathes fresh life into Android. Android Lollipop is now out in the wild on a range of devices, but of course it first arrived on Google’s own batch of Nexus hardware, debuting on the new models – the Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet.
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It was a bold prediction in 2009 that Microsoft would take its Windows operating system open source. The advent of Windows 10 says it hasn’t come true — yet.
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I don’t write about Microsoft much here. That’s largely because, as I noted recently, open source has won. Well, it’s won in the field of supercomputers, cloud computing, Web servers, mobile systems, embedded systems and the Internet of Things. Of course, it hasn’t won on the desktop – although there are some interesting indications that even there things may be changing. That means Wednesday’s launch of Windows 10 is still important, since it affects the daily lives of many people – far too many. Here, I want to focus on a few key aspects that emerged.
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Events
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With many of the videos from linux.conf.au now available, and a three-day weekend about to hit Australia, there’s no excuse not to watch the best talks from last week.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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WhatsApp has released a web client version of its popular social platform for the desktop, but there are a number of limitations that will prevent plenty of users from getting it through their browser of choice.
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Mozilla
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Developers of the Firefox browser want to better protect user privacy by limiting the amount of data contained in Referer headers.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Platform9, which many people have taken note of as a virtualization-focused startup, is making news this week after it announced the availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a SaaS solution that leverages an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud. Platform9 claims it can allow organizations to spin up an OpenStack private cloud deployment within minutes.
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On the heels of its introduction as a hot new publlic company a few weeks ago, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, is expanding its reach. Recently, Hortonworks extended its technology partner program with the addition of three new certifications it offers. Hadoop-related certification is a very hot commodity in the tech job market at the moment.
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Meritalk’s new report, Cloud without Commitment, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, examined federal barriers to cloud adoption including migration, data portability, integration and future agility.
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Seventy-five percent of federal IT workers want to move more services to the cloud, but are held back by data control concerns, according to a survey released this week by MeriTalk. According to “Cloud Without the Commitment,” only 53 percent of federal IT workers rate their cloud experience as very successful, the same number as are being held back by fear of long-term contracts.
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Healthcare
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Trees are incredibly smart. They run on sunshine, provide shade in summer and ever so kindly drop their leaves to allow the winter sun through. And now a team from the University of Exeter has determined that they are good for our mental health, too. Londoners who had more trees on their street popped fewer antidepressant pills.
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BSD
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The PC-BSD crew that base their desktop-focused BSD operating system off of FreeBSD put out their 10.1.1. release candidate this week.
This quarterly update to PC-BSD (v10.1.1) is set to bring a new system updater that supports automatic background updating, improvements to the boot environments / GRUB support, GPT partition installation improvements, all PC-BSD desktop utillities have been converted to Qt5, OVA files for virtual machines, and various other improvements over the original PC-BSD 10.1 release.
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Besides working toward PC-BSD 10.1.1′s release, the PC-BSD crew have also been working on improving their Lumina Desktop Environment.
Nearly a year ago I wrote about PC-BSD developing its own desktop environment and months later it was out in alpha form. The new PC-BSD desktop is called Lumina and it’s a homegrown environment catered toward the BSDs. The Lumina desktop is FreeDesktop.org/XDG-complaintand they’re hoping for it to be an alternative to GNOME or KDE.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU RCS (Revision Control System) 5.9.4 is available.
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Openness/Sharing
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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk posted a blog entry on June 12 that was far from typical, but not unexpected for those who know him. He discusses the “wall of patents” his company owns for the manufacturing of electric cars and argues that “these days they serve merely to stifle progress.” The result? Tesla has made all of its patents public, paving the way for an open-source electric car. There’s a similar movement underway in IT: The open-source cloud. What can IT professionals learn from Musk’s recent move?
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Open Access/Content
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There was a time not long ago when publishing was difficult and expensive. Thanks to services like Lulu.com and Lulujr.com, that’s changing. Open source and Creative Commons licensing has also opened the door for teachers and students to inexpensively and easily find a new and authentic audience for their work.
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Programming
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In work that has serious implications for anyone believing their open source project contributions are anonymous, the researchers find that as many as 95 per cent of contributors to a decent-sized code base can be identified.
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Apple’s journey from ‘it just works’ to ‘it just needs more work’ may undermine the company’s reputation for quality
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Health/Nutrition
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Nearly 80% of Americans — 80%! — even wanted doctors and nurses that treated Ebola patients to be locked into quarantines, despite lack of medical evidence.
Of course, a mass Ebola outbreak in the United States never materialized.
But a major measles outbreak is already here. And it’s only going to get worse.
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Security
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Less than half of firms regularly take basic measures like installing patches and updating software, Cisco research finds
Cisco has warned that many businesses’ faith in their security tools and policies is misplaced, as just 42 percent of UK firms have highly sophisticated measures in place – less than India, the US and Germany.
The networking firm’s Annual Security Report found that 75 percent of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) believe their tools are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ effective yet less than half take standard steps like patching and updating software to the latest versions, increasing their protection.
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Adobe has rushed out an emergency fix for a flaw that was affecting users of its Flash Player tool on Windows, Mac and Linux systems.
Adobe said in a notification about the fix that it was aware that the flaw was being abused by criminals to carry out attacks against Flash Player.
“Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2015-0310 exists in the wild, which is being used in attacks against older versions of Flash Player,” the firm said.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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SPIEGEL: One of the reasons Snowden didn’t approach the New York Times was that the paper had refused to publish the initial research about the NSA’s bulk collection in 2004. The story was only published almost a year later. Was it a mistake to have held back on that reporting?
Baquet: I wasn’t even at the New York Times then and I don’t know what the discussions were like. It’s easy to look at it now and say, “how could the New York Times not have published the story,” but I won’t judge them because I wasn’t here, and I don’t know what the discussions were like. Bill Keller, the former editor in chief, has said the story was not as good as the one they published.
SPIEGEL: There are other cases where the New York Times showed a lot of consideration for the US government. In 2011, for example, you didn’t print a story about drone bases in Saudi Arabia. Can you give us an insight into what your criteria are for not publishing those kinds of stories?
Baquet: It was my decision not to publish the drone research — and it was a mistake. The circumstance was that the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had been killed by a drone strike. We were writing a story on deadline. A high-ranking CIA official called me up and made the case to leave out where the drone base was. It was Saudi Arabia. I accepted it. And I was wrong. I made a decision on deadline that I regretted almost the next day. We then published the information later. It taught me a lesson. But there are instances where I think you do have to hold things back, and I can think of some instances where I don’t regret it.
SPIEGEL: For example?
Baquet: During WikiLeaks, there was one specific instance in which there was a really remarkable cable. Moammar Gadhafi was still in power and it was a greatly detailed cable, which clearly came from somebody with firsthand knowledge of Gadhafi’s activities. It felt like a great thing to publish, but the government made the case that if we published it, it would be very clear to Gadhafi where it came from, and that the source would be killed. Once I reread that cable in light of that, I think it was pretty clear that the government was making a compelling case not to publish it. As I recall, everybody involved agreed not to use that particular cable.
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The moral depravity into which the US is sinking is shown by the movie American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas ‘Selma’ depicting Martin Luther King’s struggle against racism has received none.
American Sniper is directed by Clint Eastwood, and tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper credited with 160 confirmed “kills”, and earning him the dubious honor of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history.
[...]
Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda, which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best of America, men who went through hell in order to protect the freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. It is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of Kyle (Bradley Cooper) in the movie “just want to get the bad guys.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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On January 21, 98 U.S. senators voted to affirm that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” But the media should not misconstrue that vote as evidence that the Republican-led Senate is now seeing eye-to-eye with scientists on the issue. Moments later, 49 senators voted to deny that “human activity significantly contributes to climate change” – the position held by the vast majority of climate scientists.
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The town, with a population in the low hundreds, was forecast to swelter through a whopping 49 degrees Celsius (120.2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). By 1:30 p.m., Marble Bar had reached a high of 48.4 degrees Celsius. At 2:30 p.m. local time, the mercury dropped a measly point to 48.3 degrees Celsius, while by 4 p.m. it had only slid to 48.2 degrees Celsius.
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A cancer-causing component of oil has been detected in the drinking water supply of an eastern Montana city downstream from a crude oil spill
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Oil spill into Yellowstone River renews concerns about pipeline safety.
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Instead of protecting it, the Queensland and Australian federal government have traded the crown jewel of the Seven Wonders of the World for exporting more heat-trapping gas and coal and more poisonous mercury vapor.
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Finance
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In a world plagued by economic depression, certain states are beginning to take measures against the financial oligarchy.
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So in Obama’s proposal, offered more as a what-if dream than as a concrete agenda he expects to see enacted by Congress, the wealthiest 1 percent would give up a little more than 1 percent of their income–after seeing their share of income more than double since 1980. All in all, it’s a shift of 0.2 percent of US personal income.
You call that stealing from the rich to give to the poor? I call it Sheriff of Nottingham Lite.
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After six years of recession – during which three centre right coalitions failed to raise the country from its knees – young, unemployed, frustrated Greeks are looking for a new way out.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But Iftikhar was merely suggesting that there is prejudice based on skin color in our political culture–hardly a far-fetched claim–and that non-white politicians like Jindal may tend to bash other minorities (in this case, Muslims) in order to avoid the consequences of this prejudice. (Iftikhar’s use of the skin-scrubbing metaphor indicates that he finds this a futile endeavor.)
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On the other hand, it’s equally hard to argue that Obama has done much to slow the boom down. The administration has resisted pressure from environmental groups to regulate hydraulic fracturing, and Obama’s current energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, has been a fairly outspoken defender of the technique. If anything is holding back drilling, it’s falling prices, not administration policies.
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Censorship
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Iranian authorities have shut down a newspaper and suspended its licence after it published a front page depicting George Clooney at the Golden Globes alongside the headline “I am Charlie, too”.
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China is blocking VPN services that let users skirt online censorship of popular websites such as Google and Facebook amid a wider crackdown on online information, tech companies and specialists said Friday.
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Privacy
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That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.
“Welcome to today. We’re already in that world,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.
“Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” she added.
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Laying eighteen pages of clauses before the Lords to insert the Snoopers’ Charter into an already complicated bill is an abuse of procedure. The Lords cannot have time to properly consider the bill, and would deny the Commons the opportunity to consider the clauses as well.
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Four members of the House of Lords have attempted to bring back from the dead the Communications Data Bill – otherwise known as the Snoopers’ Charter. The entirety of the bill that had previously been rejected (or at least put on hold) by Parliament – some 18 pages in all – was added as a late ‘amendment’ to the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill currently passing through the Lords. This is utterly cynical at best, and a total abuse of parliamentary procedure at worst.
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The Technological boom has touched nearly every industry; it may now be taking over the farming industry. Monsanto and John Deere, two big Agribusiness giants, have started services that allow them to collect minute by minute data from farms as crops are being planted and harvested. Currently available to Midwestern farmers, both companies pledge that the data will benefit the farmers by increasing profits.
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In order to create clear rules about when law enforcement agencies can access and track Americans’ electronic location data Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, reintroduced the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS Act) today.
The bipartisan, bicameral bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and in the House by Reps. Peter Welch, D-VT and Jon Conyers Jr., D-MI.
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Civil Rights
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They are best known for hacking government and corporate websites, but in the wake of the Westminster child abuse scandal and allegations of establishment cover-ups, the Anonymous internet collective has a new target: exposing international paedophile networks.
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A journalist with connections to the hacking collective Anonymous has been sentenced to five years in jail after posting online links to stolen data.
Barrett Brown originally faced charges punishable by more than 100 years in prison, but the sentence was reduced after he pleaded guilty last year.
He said he broke the law to reveal details of illegal government activity.
The case drew criticism from advocates of free speech and media rights organisations.
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Terrorists, hackers, and journalists. According to a recent Guardian article covering new Snowden documents, British spy agency GCHQ considers all of these individuals threats—various levels of threats, but threats nonetheless. One intelligence report goes so far as to say, “Of specific concern are ‘investigative journalists’ who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.”
[...]
It shouldn’t need to be said, but journalists’ communications need to be safe from government hands. And yet, we see example after example of the British government going after this important check to power. (The US has done its fair share of targeting journalists as well.) The Guardian, for example, was forced by GCHQ to destroy their hard drives containing Snowden documents. That was soon after David Miranda, partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained and interrogated at Heathrow for nine hours. England has notoriously abused its surveillance laws to spy on journalists, prompting over 100 editors to sign a letter to the British prime minister calling for a stop to the spying and passage of a strong freedom of expression law.
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THE US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (DoJ) will pay $134,000 to a woman who was the victim of a spoof Facebook page that featured her in varying states of dress.
The fine relates to a case from 2010 when a waitress called Sondra Arquiett was arrested as part of a drugs bust.
The BBC reports that Arquiett complained after she realised that images, including some with her in short shorts, had been posted online by a third party.
She sued the government for its actions and the DoJ set about considering it. The DoJ has admitted what it did, but has not accepted that it acted improperly.
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The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in the Fourth Amendment case Rodriguez v. United States. At issue is whether an officer “unnecessarily prolonged” an otherwise legal traffic stop when he called for backup in order to safely walk a drug-sniffing dog around the stopped vehicle. According to a previous Supreme Court ruling, the use of drug dogs during routine traffic stops poses no constitutional problems so long as the traffic stop is not “prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete that mission.”
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It didn’t take long for North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr to stir up his Democratic colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee he now chairs. He has sent the White House a letter, The New York Times reports, demanding that copies of an internal CIA report on torture be “returned immediately.”
Burr and some other Republicans didn’t like the report released under the previous Intelligence Committee chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. In it, the CIA’s use of torture was detailed and documented, and it embarrassed the agency and, for that matter, the country.
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Shortly after he became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January, Senator Richard Burr told reporters in his home state that he had no intention of trying to rewrite the committee’s 6700-page, $40 million torture report. Burr said that despite his disagreements with the report, he wanted to “look forward and do oversight in real time.”
It turns out that Burr’s statement was half true: he doesn’t want to rewrite the torture report. But he does want to help the CIA slip it into a memory hole—along with the Panetta Review, an internal CIA study that confirms the Senate report’s conclusions.
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King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly.
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Greece’s anti-bailout Syriza party has widened its lead over the ruling conservatives to 6.7 percentage points from six points previously, a survey showed on Friday, two days before a national election.
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The British, forever bragging about how attuned to irony they are, are responsible for some of the most hilariously ironic free speech and privacy violations in the world. There was the man charged with a “Racially Aggravated Crime” because he made a statement criticizing Islam—which turned out to be a direct quote from Winston Churchill. There’s the flat in London surrounded by 32 CCTV cameras—it once belonged to George Orwell.
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There is no direct evidence that an ex-CIA officer leaked details of a classified mission to a journalist, but phone and email records show the two were in frequent contact, an FBI agent testified Wednesday.
Prosecutors wrapped up their case with a web of circumstantial evidence based on the phone and email contacts.
Former CIA man Jeffrey Sterling, 47, of O’Fallon, Missouri, is charged with leaking information about a purportedly botched operation to thwart Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times reporter James Risen, who wrote about the mission in the 2006 book “State of War.” Risen has refused to disclose his sources.
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Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela four times from 1998 through 2012 and was admired and supported by a large majority of that country’s citizens, largely due to his policies that helped the poor. King Abdullah was the dictator and tyrant who ran one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
The effusive praise being heaped on the brutal Saudi despot by western media and political figures has been nothing short of nauseating; the UK Government, which arouses itself on a daily basis by issuing self-consciously eloquent lectures to the world about democracy, actually ordered flags flown all day at half-mast to honor this repulsive monarch.
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It’s not often that the unelected leader of a country which publicly flogs dissidents and beheads people for sorcery wins such glowing praise from American officials. Even more perplexing, perhaps, have been the fawning obituaries in the mainstream press which have faithfully echoed this characterization of Abdullah as a benign and well-intentioned man of peace.
Tiptoeing around his brutal dictatorship, The Washington Post characterized Abdullah as a “wily king” while The New York Times inexplicably referred to him as “a force of moderation”, while also suggesting that evidence of his moderation included having had: “hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded”. (emphasis added)
While granting that Abdullah might be considered a relative moderate within the brazenly anachronistic House of Saud, the fact remains that he presided for two decades over a regime which engaged in wanton human rights abuses, instrumentalized religious chauvinism, and played a hugely counterrevolutionary role in regional politics.
Above all, he was not a leader who shied away from both calling for and engineering more conflict in the Middle East.
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died yesterday aged 90, and there has been some controversy over the tributes paid by world leaders to the ruler of a repressive regime that carries out public beheadings and bans women from driving.
[...]
You are not supposed to repeat what the Queen says in private conversation. But the story she told me on that occasion was one that I was also to hear later from its subject – Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – and it is too funny not to repeat. Five years earlier, in September 1998, Abdullah had been invited up to Balmoral, for lunch with the Queen. Following his brother King Fahd’s stroke in 1995, Abdullah was already the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. After lunch, the Queen had asked her royal guest whether he would like a tour of the estate. Prompted by his Foreign Minister, the urbane Prince Saud, an initially hesitant Abdullah agreed. The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle. As instructed, the Crown Prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind. To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not – yet – allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen. His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an Army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the Crown Prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.
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Documents published online for the first time Thursday indicate that the FBI opened an inquiry into New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez on August 1, 2012, focusing on repeated trips he took to the Dominican Republic with longtime campaign contributor and Miami eye doctor Salomon Melgen. TheDC reported in November that Menendez purchased the service of prostitutes in that Caribbean nation at a series of alcohol-fueled sex parties.
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Saudi Arabian activist blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for advocating free speech, may not have to serve the full decade in prison.
Badawi family’s spokesperson, Dr Elham Manea, who is also an associate professor specialising in the Middle East at University of Zurich, said on Facebook that the news was delivered by a Saudi ambassador in Germany.
She wrote: “Saudi ambassador in Germany informed NDR-TV that flogging will not continue and #RaifBadawi maybe not have to serve the whole time in prison.”
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A journalist and activist accused of working with Anonymous has been given a five-year prison term and ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines. Barrett Brown was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty last year to charges of transmitting threats, accessory to a cyber-attack, and obstruction of justice. Supporters say Brown has been unfairly targeted for investigating the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. After his sentencing on Thursday, Brown released a satirical statement that read in part: “Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex.” We discuss Brown’s case with Kevin Gallagher, a writer, activist and systems administrator who heads the Free Barrett Brown support network. He says that the public should not believe what the government says about Brown.
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Campaigners blast policy as ‘discrimination’ but attraction cites ‘child protection’ rules after turning away adults and their carers
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A major U.S. Supreme Court decision has upheld the right of federal employees to become whistleblowers. The case centers on former Transportation Security Administration Federal Air Marshal Robert MacLean. In July 2003, MacLean revealed to an MSNBC reporter that the Department of Homeland Security had decided to stop assigning air marshals to certain long-distance flights in order to save money, despite warnings of a potential plot to hijack U.S. airplanes. MSNBC’s report on the story sparked outcry, and the policy was quickly reversed. MacLean was fired three years later after admitting to being the story’s source. He filed a lawsuit over his dismissal, sparking a multi-year legal battle that ended earlier this week when the Supreme Court ruled on his behalf in a 7-to-2 decision. At issue was whether MacLean’s actions could be protected by the U.S. Whistleblower Protection Act, a law that protects employees if a disclosure exposes unlawful conduct, gross mismanagement or threats to public safety. We speak to Robert MacLean and attorney Neal Katyal, who argued MacLean’s case before the Supreme Court. Katyal is the former acting solicitor general of the United States.
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Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, has praised King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as a “strong advocate of women”, but human rights campaigners said his reign only brought marginal advances for women, while failing to secure fundamental rights of free expression, association, and assembly.
In paying tribute to the king who died on Thursday aged 90, Lagarde – who has expressed her concerns over gender inequality – described the monarch as a great leader who implemented many reforms.
“In a very discreet way, he was a strong advocate of women. It was very gradual, appropriately so probably for the country. I discussed that issue with him several times and he was a strong believer,” said Lagarde, who is attending the Davos economic forum in Switzerland.
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Former Conservative MP Louise Mensch has unleashed an extraordinary tirade on Twitter, instructing both David Cameron and the Queen to “fuck off”.
Mensch became enraged after the British Government declared all UK flags be flown at half mast to mourn the death of King Abdullah on Thursday.
She began by criticising US President Barack Obama for paying tribute to the late royal, whom Mensch said “whipped women for driving & is currently starving his daughters.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The chief executive of BlackBerry has claimed that Apple should be forced to make apps for BlackBerry users under net neutrality laws currently being debated in the US.
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Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.”
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Earlier this month, Lamar White, Jr. woke up to discover his Internet connection wasn’t working. He had just gotten a new cable box installed at his Dallas, Texas, home and figured his lines should still be in ship shape because it hadn’t been long since they were last checked.
Rather than just assume he had crappy Internet service, like you or I might, he thought his home computer system was on the receiving end of a denial of service attack. White, you see, is something of a major figure in the political media. And there are a good many people who may want revenge for the things he’s dug up.
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What The Media Should Know About The GOP Bill That Is Net Neutrality In Name Only
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On January 20th, La Quadrature du Net along with other European organisations co-signed an open letter [pdf] calling once more the EU’s Member States to adopt clear and strict rules to protect Net Neutrality. However, a negociation document shows that at the same moment, Member States were one towards the end of a free Internet. It is time for the European Parliament to get back to work on this issue and defend a real protection of Net Neutrality, against oligopolistic strategies of the large Internet actors backed by governments.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A Greek anti-piracy group has lost its bid to have various torrent sites blocked by local Internet providers. The Athens Court ruled that barring access to torrent sites such as KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay is disproportionate and unconstitutional, while hindering the ISPs’ entrepreneurial freedoms.
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A man jailed for 50 years in the United States for multiple bombings, drug smuggling and felony perjury, is attempting to leverage copyright troll cases to his advantage. Brett Kimberlin says that since a court has already revealed the identities of BitTorrent users, it should also unmask his critics.
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Policy makers intending to promote creativity have always overemphasized the importance of “copyright protection” without addressing the wide range of other concerns that are necessary to consider when making comprehensive innovation policy. In an era where everyone, with the use of their computer or mobile device, can easily be a consumer, creator, and a critic of art, we can not afford to ignore this digital ecosystem of artistry and innovation. Yet copyright remains completely out of touch with the reality of most creators today, while the rules that do pass seem to stray even further from addressing their needs.
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01.22.15
Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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And then it dawned on me … just who the ideal candidate for Linux should be. It’s not the developer (though they probably get more benefit out of the platform than any user type), it’s not the gamer, it’s not the geek, and it’s not the administrator. The ideal candidate is the average user.
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3-D printers are becoming popular tools, dropping in price and becoming available to almost everyone. They can be used to build parts that you can use around the house, but more and more, they also are being used to create instruments for scientific work. Although a growing library of objects are available in several on-line databases, there is nearly an infinite number of possible things you might want to build. This means you likely will want to design and build your own creations.
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Desktop
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Purism, the company behind the Librem 15, promises that it will ship an Intel CPU fused to run unsigned BIOS code. The hope is that this will allow a future where free software can replace the proprietary, digitally signed, BIOS binaries.
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Acer on Wednesday announced two new ruggedized Chromebooks geared for classroom use. Both will go on sale in February.
The Acer Chromebook C910 and C740 have a durable design built around reinforced covers and hinges. The new models support multiple user sign-ons and offline file access.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel is a very advanced piece of software that is able not only to cater to all the current hardware needs but also to run on hardware that was decommissioned and is no longer produced for more than twenty years.
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The learning curve to becoming a Linux kernel developer is pretty steep and choosing the right direction might be somewhat difficult (but not as hard as you think – see my previous article.) However, I have some ideas on how to start this beautiful journey. I hope that these guidelines will be useful for someone.
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Alex Deucher has sent in his DRM-Next changes for the open-source Radeon graphics driver updates that will target the Linux 3.20 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA quietly released the 346.35 Linux graphics driver on Friday.
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With Fedora 22 switching to libinput as its X.Org input driver and others beginning to look at utilizing xf86-input-libinput that uses a shared input library with Wayland, there’s some details end-users and developers need to know about the migration.
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This morning NVIDIA is formally announcing the GeForce GTX 960 as the latest Maxwell GPU. The GeForce GTX 960 is a mid-range GPU priced starting out at $200 and comes with a compelling set of features. The past few days I’ve been testing out the eVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB graphics card and in this article are some initial performance figures under Linux.
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While there have been GLX_EXT_buffer_age patches for Mesa going back months, they’ve been for DRI3. Chris Wilson of Intel has now implemented GLX_EXT_buffer_age support along the DRI2 code-paths.
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Version 3.1 of the GLFW OpenGL library for creating and managing windows/OpenGL contexts and handling input/events is now available.
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Applications
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Ideally, tapecalc works like a traditional paper-tape calculator, like you used in your business classes in secondary school, years ago. Even the display seems to mimic the paper roll effect.
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Jan Schmidt spoke last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2015 about the State of the GStreamer project and some of their interesting accomplishments recently along with some of they work they have moving forward.
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Proprietary
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WhatsApp is the most used messenger service on mobile devices, but it’s also one of the few that don’t have an API or a client that can run on other devices as well, like PCs for example. That is no longer the case and Linux users now have access to WhatsApp by using the Google Chrome browser.
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Another cloud storage vendor is eying the open source community. This week, MediaFire announced a new open source toolkit compatible with Linux and FreeBSD, giving Linux desktop fans another cloud storage option to compete with Dropbox, Google Drive and the like.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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With Xonotic 0.8.0 finally having been released after one and a half years in development, here’s some open-source Mesa/Gallium3D graphics benchmarks on many different graphics cards for this high-profile open-source first person shooter game.
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He forewarns that there’s explicit language in his video due to being upset over the poor graphics performance of Catalyst 14.12 when using a Radeon R9 270 graphics card for this Unity 4 game. The rest of his system comes down to an AMD FX-8350 Vishera, 8GB of RAM, Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint 17.1, and is playing at 1920 x 1080. His Radeon R9 270 graphics card is from XFX. The specs should be good enough for this independent Unity-powered game, but at least with Catalyst 14.12, there’s still issues to overcome.
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Today we are very excited to give you the next iteration of Xonotic, the free and fast arena shooter. Yep, you guessed it: Xonotic 0.8.0 is out! This version is the culmination of months of effort from many individuals from across the globe. It contains improvements in just about all visible aspects of the game and onto the web. There are new menu screens, gameplay features, and a much-anticipated new weapon: the Arc! We’re excited for the what the future holds, and we hope to see you out on the servers soon. Happy fragging!
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Storm United is a beautiful FPS game running on the Unreal Engine that will have full Linux support, and they have shown off their first real game-play video. The game was originally built in Unity, but it was dropped in favour of Unreal Engine which performs far better for this type of game.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE is one of the oldest open-source desktop projects which can be found today, and over the years it has established a rich history of highs and lows. During some points it has been the undisputed ruler of the desktop world, while other times it had fallen behind or faced hard trials.
A memory everything but forgotten, just over 6 years ago KDE tore itself apart in spectacular fashion to assemble itself anew. Brave users who wandered through the rubble and wreckage saw developers rebuild the KDE before their eyes, witnessing the birth of ‘Plasma Desktop’ and it’s sister project ‘KDE Development Platform’. It was universally understood that this twisted gnarled creature of a computing experience was both hideous yet full of potential, and over 5 years of refining Plasma it had struggled, crawled, hobbled, walked, run, and eventually mature into a fine desktop.
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My objective was to release some games for the ’15.04′.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME has quietly been working on sandboxed applications support and for GNOME 3.16 they hope to ship an initial reference runtime implementation of their new technology.
Matthias Clasen wrote a lengthy blog post tonight detailing the sandboxed applications for GNOME. The goal of sandboxed applications is to make it easy for third-parties to distribute applications that work on multiple distributions, give the applications as little access as possible to the host system, and to also make it easier to write applications.
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GNOME 3.15.4 is out. This is a development snapshot, so use it with caution.
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Not long ago, the Linux Mint team has decided to change their release policy and adopt only the LTS versions of Ubuntu, the systems released between to LTSs being only point releases that update the main components. Also, they have moved Linux Mint Debian Edition’s (LMDE) code base from Debian Testing to Debian Stable.
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There is no shortage of security-focused Linux distributions on the market, and among them is Pentoo Linux. While some security-focused Linux distributions concentrate on privacy, like Tails, others like Kali Linux and Pentoo focus on security research, providing tools that enable research and penetration testing. Pentoo Linux differentiates itself from other security Linux distributions in a number of ways. The primary difference is the fact that Pentoo is based on Gentoo Linux, which is a source-based Linux distribution that uses the Portage package-management system. Gentoo has capabilities known as “Hardened Gentoo,” which Pentoo also inherits, providing users with additional security configuration and control for the Linux distribution itself. Pentoo 2015 RC 3.7 was released Jan. 5, providing updated tools and features. Among the new features is the integrated ability to verify that the distribution files have not been corrupted. Pentoo provides many applications for security analysis, including wireless, database, exploit, cracking and forensic tools. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at key features and tools in the Pentoo 2015 RC3.7 release.
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New Releases
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Robolinux is an easy-to-use Linux distribution based on Debian that features various flavors. A GNOME desktop has been added and the devs have put forth a number of new applications. It’s still the same OS that wants to replace Windows by emulating its conditions, so nothing much has changed there.
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Black Lab Linux, a distribution that is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and is using the Xfce desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 6.0 SR 1.1 and is now available for download.
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Manjaro would like to present our first public release version of Manjaro KDE Plasma 5 Desktop (Bellatrix 0.9.0) to it’s users to test with our new Qt5/python3 based installer named Calamares.
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Manjaro KDE is a Linux distribution that uses snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and a custom version of KDE. The developers have just pushed version 0.9.0 Pre1 (Bellatrix 0.9.0) out the door and they made quite a few improvements.
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Q4OS is a Linux distribution built to offer a desktop experience similar to that of Windows XP. The developers are preparing to launch version 1.0 and they have made quite a few changes.
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software vendors do something akin to selling air: They get people to pay for something that easily, and perfectly legally, can be had for free. But added security is becoming an increasingly important part of the value proposition, as Red Hat (RHT), maker of one of the leading Linux enterprise distributions, emphasized this week in a statement on its software subscriptions.
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Red Hat is hiring more developers that will focus on Fedora, especially the Fedora Workstation product, that in turn will flow back into RHEL and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation. Among the type of work that Red Hat is looking for in the candidates include experience with Wayland, LLVMpipe, X.Org, compiler optimizations, graphics driver enablement, etc.
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OpenStack is an open-source IaaS cloud platform that was developed through the collaborative efforts of Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX) and NASA with the objective of countering the dominance of Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS. The platform has AWS-like features including EC2 and S3 compatibility that allows businesses to build their own Amazon-like cloud services in their datacenters.
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Fedora
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Ahead of evaluation by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), more of the planned changes for Fedora 22 are being discussed on the Fedora developers’ list. Here’s some more of the likely Fedora 22 changes that haven’t been covered by our earlier articles on F22 feature work.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mea culpa! When I first saw that Canonical was coming out with its own combination of Docker containers and a lightweight Linux distribution in Ubuntu Core, I presumed it was a pure server play. I was wrong. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, also wants to turn Ubuntu Core into the operating system for the Internet of Things.
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The modern PCs have become ridiculously small and more powerful with each passing year. Up until now no one thought that it could be possible to fit everything into a mouse, but that’s now becoming a reality and it’s powerful enough that it can run even an OS like Ubuntu.
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The second alpha of the Vivid Vervet (to become 15.04) has now been released!
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The second alpha for the Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet flavors (Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Lubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin) has been released. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new.
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The Ubuntu flavors opting in for a second alpha release for the 15.04 Vivid Vervet cycle have out their new releases today.
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The next version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system is due in April. Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is currently under development, but you can take a recent nightly build for a spin if you want to test it out before the official launch.
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Intel announced a portable access point and content server for schools that runs Ubuntu on an Atom E3815, and serves up to 50 students using WiFi or GbE.
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Flavours and Variants
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The second Alpha of Vivid (to become 15.04) has now been released!
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung Z1 is the first Tizen based Smartphone to be launched and we are hoping it is the first of many Tizen Smartphones to come. The Z1 has now made its way to the Samsung eStore in India and can be yours for the price of 5,700 INR, which is a very competitive price for such tech.
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This is an Interesting little video that I found on the net. Created by YouTube user TheGarchaHD, it walks you through the User Interface of the Tizen based Samsung Z1 and shows you some of the features of the Tizen 2.3 Operating System.
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Messaging apps these days don’t have to just live in your smartphone or your tablet, they need to be with you wherever you are, and that might be sitting with you at your computer. Messaging apps like facebook, WeChat and Line already have this option and it seems to be the best you really do need to include the PC in your platform choices.
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Android
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WhatsApp is coming to the desktop, thanks to a web client that launched today for Chrome and Android. Reached by The Verge, WhatsApp confirmed earlier rumors, which pointed to a newly live page at web.whatsapp.com. “The primary use is of course still on your phone,” a spokesman said, “but there are people who spend time in front of a computer at home or at work and this will help bridge the two.”
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This Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update review will take a look at everything Nexus users need to know, right now, about the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop release for Google’s Nexus devices.
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An alleged update roadmap has leaked online for HTC devices, revealing when Android 5.0 Lollipop will roll out to various handsets in the company’s lineup.
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While developing the Galaxy Zoo app for Android, I experienced problems with UI responsiveness while the app was downloading from, or uploading to, the remote server. I don’t mean just the usual problems caused by doing network I/O or file system access in the UI thread – mistakes that can often be caught by using Strict Mode. I mean that buttons didn’t respond to presses if the app happened to be doing I/O in an AsyncTask.doInBackground().
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For the purpose of this article, we look at TrueCaller and a slew of popular third party Android Launchers. We have seen similar behavior across many of the latest ‘utility’ applications, so it is fair to extend the analysis to the entire domain.
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Have you heard the one about the big media house whose new, proprietary content management system (CMS) handles its every need, worked straight out of the box and with which all the journalists are in love? No?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google is out with its first stable Chrome browser update of 2015, with security vulnerabilities fixes topping the list of improvements in the new release. In total, Google is patching 62 different security flaws in the update.
In contrast, Microsoft has yet to provide a single security patch for its Internet Explorer browser in 2015, while Mozilla’s Firefox 35 had nine security advisories attached to it.
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Today’s Chrome Beta channel release includes new Javascript ES6 features and improved workflows for debugging Service Workers and Web Animations. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
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SaaS/Big Data
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IBM pays analyst firm Evans Data Corporation for what are widely regarded as worthy reports — in this role, Evans has cited IBM as an “industry leader” for making Hadoop more accessible, scalable and reliable for developers in a new analyst survey.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The OpenACC support was merged for GCC 5 on the final day of permitting new work for this major GPLv3 compiler update.
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Public Services/Government
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A system for smartphones, tablet computers and PCs that can warn students, teachers and school personnel of emergencies is to be developed for the Norwegian Akerhus county. The solution will be built by the Danish ICT service specialist Magenta, using open source components.
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Openness/Sharing
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Mirantis, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, has expanded its ambitious Mirantis Training for OpenStack course collection with two new courses and a Certificate Verification portal. Mirantis’ training platform has been running since 2011, and is differentiated from some other training platforms in that the coursework is OpenStack distribution-agnostic. According to Mirantis, Eighty eight percent of students rate it as better than other professional industry training offerings due to the quality of its instructors, its hands-on format, and its curriculum that is removed of vendor bias.
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Science
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The railway will be 7,000 kilometers long and go through Kazakhstan, reports Bloomberg citing Beijing’s city government on the social networking site Weibo, China’s alternative to Twitter. The railway will make travel easier between Europe and Asia, the statement said.
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Security
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South Korea’s online espionage program may be primarily focused on the North, but it’s also targeting the United States—and the U.S. government isn’t making a stink about it.
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The NSA wasn’t much interested in North Korea at the time but that changed – partly because the spy agency managed to get its hands on useful zero-day exploits used against the Norks, according to recently disclosed files. NBC News adds that US intel agencies had no forewarning of the Sony hack. After Sony reported the breach to the FBI’s cyber unit on 24 November, it became possible to trace back the attack.
So even after comprehensively bugging North Korea’s ‘net connection, the best the spy agency had was the equivalent of a CCTV camera rather than a burglar alarm capable of detecting a crime in progress.
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“The pieces don’t add up,” said Tal Klein, vice president of strategy for Internet-security firm Adallom. “I cannot dispute the fact that the NSA hacked the North Koreans, because that is the ultimate trump card—there’s empirical evidence that I will never be able to see. But the attack does not fit the mold of a nation-state attack, but of a revenge-oriented attack.” – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/security/doubts-persist-over-north-korean-link-to-sony-hack-despite-nsa-claim.html#sthash.8k1lwUtf.dpuf
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Our guest for Episode 50 of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast is David Sanger, the New York Times reporter who broke the detailed story of Stuxnet in his book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. David talks about his latest story, recounting how North Korea developed its cyberattack network, and how the National Security Agency managed to compromise the network sufficiently to attribute the Sony attack. We talk about how understanding the White House helped him break a story that seemed to be about NSA and the FBI, North Korean hackers’ resemblance to East German Olympic swimmers, and the future of cyberwar.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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American soldiers will deploy to Ukraine this spring to begin training four companies of the Ukrainian National Guard, the head of US Army Europe Lt. Gen Ben Hodges said during his first visit to Kiev on Wednesday.
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Did you hear the one about Hillary doing an impression of Vladimir Putin in Canada? Because it actually happened, Jackie Kucinich reports. During a wide ranging policy speech to the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, Hillary answered a question about the American electoral system with an impression. The moderator began asking her “if for some reason you decided to be president” and then quickly corrected himself, “actually run for that because there is a process.”
“There is a process, it’s not like Putin,” she said.
Cue the laugh track.
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It has taken decades of deteriorating politics and security for Yemen to reach its current level of crisis, though now the costs might come not just in the form of the suffering of the Yemeni people but also in regional instability and the proliferation of international terrorism. While the causes of Yemen’s crisis are intensely local—having to do with longstanding issues of corruption, tribal and North-South differences, and a constitution in need of amending—it is being amplified both by meddling regional actors and a menacing terrorist group with international reach.
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The tensions in the North that have been heightened following this week’s alleged Israeli airstrike that killed senior Hezbollah officials in the Golan Heights are also being felt in Lebanon, where apprehension is growing over the specter of another cross-border war.
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Since Barack Obama’s previous State of the Union address, the US president has relaunched the Iraq war – this time with a Syrian appendix – ensured the presence of US troops in Afghanistan through 2024 and continued drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Yet if Obama’s 2015 State of the Union is to be believed, “tonight, we turn the page”.
On foreign policy and national security, Obama cannot be blamed for wanting the page turned. Unlike in his previous States of the Union, there is no dead Osama bin Laden or Muammar Gaddafi to tout. His strongest foreign achievement in 2014 – an admittedly historic one – has been to normalize relations with Cuba, though, as with all things Obama does, congressional Republicans vow opposition.
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A similar observation might be made of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper about Iraq. Like the Iraq War itself, Eastwood’s movie begins by exploiting a historically inaccurate delusion and, then, sustains itself for two hours on the mission to protect US soldiers against the insurgency that arose in opposition to the US invasion and occupation based on the initial delusion.
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The planned flogging of a Saudi blogger convicted of insulting Islam has been delayed for a second straight week, a leading international rights group said Thursday, a move that comes amid mounting pressure from Saudi Arabia’s Western allies for authorities to cancel the punishment.
The London-based Amnesty International said that around eight doctors carried out medical tests on Raif Badawi, 31, and recommended that he not be flogged this Friday. Saudi authorities postponed his flogging last week after a doctor concluded that his wounds from the first 50 lashes had not yet healed, according to Amnesty.
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The announcement, made early on Friday, said his brother, Salman, had become king.
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He was told that he helped to kill more than 1,600 people, but as time went by he felt uneasy with what he was doing. He found it hard to sleep and started dreaming in infra-red.
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In May 2009, a former adviser to General David Petraeus named David Kilcullen wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for a moratorium on drone strikes carried out by the United States against al-Qaida and its associates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The military advantages of using drones (the US Army defines a drone as a “land, sea or air vehicle that is remotely or automatically controlled”) are outweighed, Kilcullen argued, by their costs.
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An estimated 3,500 people — hundreds of them children — have been killed by drones. While some of those killed were undoubtedly violent terrorists, fewer than 50 (2 percent) were confirmed to be high-level targets, according to a study undertaken by Stanford Law School and New York School of Law. There are numerous allegations, some confirmed by reliable news sources, of entire wedding parties and extended families being killed by U.S. drones.
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On January 23, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare, will begin a three-month jail sentence in federal prison for a protest against drones (also known as “unmanned aerial vehicles”) at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. I had a chance to interview her before she had to turn herself in.
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Former US drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant admits he “couldn’t stand” himself for his participation in the country’s drone program for six years – firing on targets whose identities often went unconfirmed.
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In closing, here is a quote from the ACLU regarding the use of drones:
“The executive branch has, in effect, claimed the unchecked authority to put the names of citizens and others on “kill lists” on the basis of a secret determination, based on secret evidence, that a person meets a secret definition of the enemy. The targeted killing program operates with virtually no oversight outside the executive branch, and essential details about the program remain secret, including what criteria are used to put people on CIA and military kill lists or how much evidence is required.
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While Lebanon and Israel await Hezbollah’s response to Sunday’s deadly Israeli drone strike in the Golan Heights, the motive for the provocative attack, which could yet trigger further violence, remains shrouded in confusion.
The continued silence from the Israeli government and military over the airstrike combined with some ambiguous comments in the media from Israeli security sources have only added to the puzzlement and drawn criticism in Israel.
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The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee devoted itself to an important issue on Tuesday: the Israel Defense Forces’ decision to stop stationing soldiers in communities near the Gaza Strip. But if these Knesset members aren’t too busy with the election campaign, perhaps they should also make some time in the near future to discuss what is beginning to look like a major security crisis: the open threats by Iran and Hezbollah to take revenge for Sunday’s assassination of senior officials from both Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which they attribute to Israel.
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The president said it was important to have legal constraints on the controversial drone program but that the program was aimed at minimizing casualties. “Under that our goal has always been: how do we target very specific terrorists who are proven to be trying to kill us — or more frequently kill innocent Muslims in their home countries,” he said.
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Yet there is something about drone warfare that is profoundly disturbing. How do our military and intelligence officials know if someone is a potential terrorist? Do we know the criteria by which a person or persons are targeted? Is it someone who is poised to kill, or is it someone who once killed? Is it prevention or revenge?
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Our tactics produce more dangerous, more committed extremists
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Since the Vietnam War, with its gruesome and inflated U.S. tallies of enemy dead, the Pentagon has denied keeping body counts. But, in fact, the military does add up the number of enemy fighters it believes it has killed — and proudly boasts of the totals in official documents that it never intends for public circulation.
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American Sniper retells the story about four Iraq combat tours of the most lethal sniper in US military history, Chris Kyle. Despite having been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the Clint Eastwood directed film was better than I expected, and I still hated it.
With a record breaking $105 million in box office earnings in its opening weekend, the film has arguably generated more controversy in the US than any movie I can recall.
Much of the controversy has centred on the portrayal of the late Chris Kyle himself. Veterans who served with Kyle have praised the accuracy of actor Bradley Cooper’s impersonation, but a number of liberal journalists have lambasted the film for not staying true to Kyle’s autobiography. In fact, the film came close to portraying Kyle as a reluctant warrior. You know, the whole “I’m just doing my job” routine. In the book and in Kyle’s own words, however, killing 160 Iraqis, who were mostly the “civilian by day, soldiers by night” type, was something Kyle actually took great satisfaction from.
“I don’t shoot people with Qurans. I’d like to but I don’t,” Kyle told a military investigator after being accused of killing an unarmed Iraqi civilian. In other parts of his book, Kyle writes: “I couldn’t give a fuck about the Iraqis” and “I hate the damn savages.”
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From the point of view of the U.S. military and the national security state, the period from September 12, 2001, to late last night could be summed up in a single word: more. What Washington funded with your tax dollars was a bacchanalia of expansion intended, as is endlessly reiterated, to keep America “safe.” But here’s the odd thing: as the structure of what’s always called “security” is built out ever further into our world and our lives, that world only seems to become less secure. Odder yet, that “more” is rarely a focus of media coverage, though its reality is glaringly obvious. The details may get coverage but the larger reality — the thing being created in Washington — seems of remarkably little interest.
That’s why websites like TomDispatch matter. They offer the larger picture of a world that’s being built right before our eyes but is somehow seldom actually seen — that is, taken in meaningfully. America’s Special Operations forces are a striking example of this phenomenon. The commando is, by now, a national culture hero, the guy who stands between Hell and us. But what special ops forces really do all — and I mean all — over the planet, doesn’t seem of any particular interest to Americans in general or the mainstream media in particular. The way those “elite” forces have parlayed their popularity into a staggering growth rate and just what that growth and the actions that go with it actually mean in terms of, say, blowback… well, that’s something you’re simply not going to read much about, other than at a website like this one.
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Fox News has apologized for broadcasting false information about Muslims in the wake of the Paris attacks. Last weekend, self-described terrorism expert Steve Emerson claimed on air that parts of Europe, including the entire English city of Birmingham, were totally Muslim areas where non-Muslims do not go. Emerson was forced to apologize, but the claim about so-called “no-go zones” was repeated by other Fox guests and anchors. On Saturday, according to a CNN Money tally, Fox News took time out of four broadcasts to apologize for reports on Muslims. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, discusses the rise of so-called “terrorism experts” by Fox News and other major cable networks. In two recent interviews with CNN, Scahill has criticized the news giant and others for their use of “on-air analysts who also work in the private sector and make money on the idea that we should be afraid.” He also responds to blistering criticism from FBI chief James Comey of using an anonymous al-Qaeda source in reporting on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and analyzes what al-Qaeda’s claim of responsibility will mean for the U.S. drone war in Yemen.
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War, then, is to be sustained and expanded. Put simply, Western governments with large-scale militaries and jihadist organizations with violence central to their strategies are engaged in an asymmetric exchange of violence, wherein killing of both combatants and civilians is routine. Drone strikes and bombing raids over Iraq and Syria generate reciprocal responses from al-Qaeda and groups now associated with ISIS in the form of beheadings, kidnappings and killing of civilians through various means.
It is an “a-symmetric” conflict because Western states’ strikes are far more lethal than those of jihadi organizations and ISIS. For every innocent civilian murdered by ISIS, U.S. drones and air strikes — and now French bombing raids — kill many, consequently rallying new recruits against the United States and France with each raid.
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Who among our congressional leaders speaks for an anti-war position? Will we see an anti-war presidential candidate in 2016? It seems unlikely.
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The former head of Britain’s intelligence agency MI5, Lord Evans, has added his voice to demands for a clampdown on the Internet and e-communications in the wake of the terror assaults on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris and a Jewish supermarket, in which 17 people were killed.
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We have allowed fear and hate to foster the rise of paranoiacs, demagogues, opportunists and fools, driving our attention and resources away from immediate, dire situations: climate change, globalism, economic inequality and the degradation of education and the national infrastructure.
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White HouseWhite HouseWhat can we expect in President Obama’s State of the Union with regard to U.S. foreign policy in 2015? Not much. As in every every State of the Union since 2002, the president is expected to address foreign policy largely within the framework of the war on terror and counterterrorism operations. But the State of the Union is largely a vehicle for rhetoric, not honest explanations of policy. President Obama mentioned drones in a State of the Union for the first time last year, claiming his administration had “imposed prudent limits” on their use.
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Finance
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Tethong said she would appeal the ruling.
During the trial, which began in December but was halted when Elmer collapsed outside the Zurich courtroom, Tethong argued that Elmer had not broken any Swiss laws because he had not obtained the information as an employee of a Swiss bank.
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A new report from the anti-poverty group Oxfam has helped put inequality back near the top of the global agenda, just in time for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland. In particular, one striking claim from the Oxfam report has generated headlines: By next year, the top 1% of the world’s population could own more wealth than the other 99%. The Oxfam report – just one of many attempts at measuring worldwide economic disparities – fits into a broader pattern of growing interest in, and concern about, inequality.
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Braintree first announced the v.zero SDK back in July last year. The SDK allowed automatic shopping cart integration with PayPal among other payment types. In September, Braintree revealed a partnership with Coinbase to accept Bitcoin, but this is the first implementation of their collaboration.
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Oil prices jumped in early Asian trading on Friday as news of the death of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah added to uncertainty in energy markets already facing some of the biggest shifts in decades.
Abdullah died early on Friday and his brother Salman became king, the royal court in the world’s top oil exporter and birthplace of Islam said in a statement carried by state television.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Five years after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of campaign spending with its Citizens United decision, top newspapers in the three states with the most expensive judicial campaigns, Ohio, Alabama, and Texas, have largely failed to connect Citizens United with major changes in these races. The influx of money into state judicial elections following the decision has accelerated negative advertisements and campaign financing that may influence judges’ decisions.
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CNN’s post-speech discussion of Barack Obama’s State of the Union address included anchor Wolf Blitzer’s reaction to colleague Jake Tapper’s view that the president had outlined a liberal economic agenda. Blitzer’s analysis illustrates the logic behind corporate media’s longstanding efforts to dissuade politicians from advocating for progressive policies…
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Republicans are trying to burnish their party’s image–and Congress’–by promising to “get things done” now that the GOP controls both the House and Senate. But a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that the public doesn’t care much about some of the first things the GOP, or President Barack Obama, is trying to do.
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Despite dedicating numerous segments to comments made by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber about tax credits established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that appear to support a right-wing challenge to their legality, Fox News’ programming on weeknights has ignored remarks made by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) that undermine the legal theory behind this upcoming Supreme Court case.
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Censorship
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In France and the United States, there seems to be near-universal agreement that to self-censor because of threats of violence is unwise and cowardly. The slogan “Je Suis Charlie,” which millions adopted in the wake of the Paris attacks, meant different things to different people, but its core, defiant message was that terrorists shouldn’t get to decide the boundaries of our political debate.
This was also the perspective of many Americans when, at the end of last year, a mysterious group said to be associated with North Korea threatened to wreak havoc if Sony didn’t cancel “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un. Political leaders of both national parties criticized Sony for withdrawing the film. Some particularly outraged Americans urged their fellow citizens not just to watch the film but to pay for the privilege on the theory that their doing so would convey an appropriate message to the dictator. President Obama weighed in, too, saying, “we cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”
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Privacy
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The revelations of Edward Snowden have exposed to the world a massive breach of democratic rights by the US intelligence agencies and their allies. They have also unleashed protests and expressions of sympathy for Snowden’s efforts among broad social layers.
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The documentary begins with a dramatic statement by US Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California). The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman declares: “I want him to be captured. The hunt is on!” The programme assumes the guise of a spy thriller. The measures taken by the US authorities to remove Snowden from circulation are extraordinary and menacing. This is not only the view of the documentary, but of the protagonists themselves: Edward Snowden, as well as Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks.
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The widespread dissemination of ideas can disrupt society and subvert the power of those at its top.
Gutenberg’s printing press, for example, helped spur the Protestant Reformation that over time helped overturn the religious and political order of Europe.
In an often-bloody process that took about 400 years, the authoritarian empires that ruled the continent gave way to modern, democratic nation-states.
Books have been banned (and burned) precisely because new ideas are a threat to the people in charge.
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I am in Berlin for the annual Sam Adams Award – this time to William Binney, formerly Technical Director of the NSA. There will be an address by Edward Snowden (and a short contribution from me). It really is a tremendous event, with some very senior former intelligence professionals making revelations about the extent to which the security state is out of control, a tool of immoral governments dominated by corporate interests.
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Another pile of Snowden documents has been released by Der Spiegel, detailing more of previously revealed NSA/GCHQ activities — like the harvesting of exploits and hardware shipment “interdiction” — along with some new stuff, including the NSA’s piggybacking on other countries’ surveillance to further buttress its massive haystacks.
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The NSA quietly commandeered a botnet targeting US Defence agencies to attack other victims including Chinese and Vietnamese dissidents, Snowden documents reveal.
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What data is harmless in the hands of the government? Apparently, not much. Case in point: the data collected by E-ZPass transponders. While the system helps alleviate traffic congestion, it also tracks drivers’ movements. If you thought it just triggered toll payments, you’re drastically underestimating the government’s desire for data.
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Edward Snowden, the infamous former NSA employee, leaked a number of secret documents. Just recently Der Spiegel released another one, revealing that South Korea’s cyber espionage program has been targeting the US for a while now, despite officially being aimed against North Korea.
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A team of nine journalists including Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras have just published another massive collection of classified records obtained by Edward Snowden. The trove of documents, published on Der Spiegel, show that the National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet. Der Spiegel reports that the intelligence agencies are working towards the ability to infiltrate and disable computer networks — potentially giving them the ability to disrupt critical utilities and other infrastructure. And the NSA and GCHQ think they’re so far ahead of everyone else, they’re laughing about it.
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Whistle-blowers like Bill Binny, Thomas Drake, and Edward Snowden, along with wrongly accused U.S. citizens, have been fighting for their rights. Not from terrorists, but from the U.S. government.
While they fight, many Americans have become complacent with their diminished rights and lack of privacy.
The Patriot Act passed 6 weeks after 9/11 in a climate of fear and imminent threat. It diminished freedom in the U.S., providing the government sweeping powers to spy on, arrest, and detain individuals. The original legislation provided little oversight. Since 2001, there has been a major struggle between protecting constitutional rights and increasing government powers to battle imminent terror.
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A bill filed in Alaska late last week would ban “material support or resources” to the NSA. This would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
Alaska Sen. Bill Wielechowski prefiled SB13 on Jan. 16. The legislation would prohibit the state and its municipalities from using assets, including personnel, to assist a federal agency in collecting certain telephone records or electronic data without a warrant, making it the fourth state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
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“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan, Culture is Our Business, 1970
New Snowden documents recently revealed that the NSA is getting ready for future digital wars as the agency postures itself in an aggressive manner towards the world. “The Five Eyes Alliance“, a cooperation between United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, is working hard to develop these weapons of Cyber Warfare.
So called “D” weapons, as reported by Der Spiegel, will paralyze computer networks and infrastructure that they monitor. Water supplies, factories, airports, as well as the flow of money are all potential targets.
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Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines.
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The new Documentary ‘Citizenfour’ revealed the existence of another ‘whistleblower,’ someone even higher ranking than Snowden who came forward.
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As the team of journalists reporting for Der Spiegel describe it, “the US government is currently undertaking a massive effort to digitally arm itself for network warfare.” And, they report, the NSA—along with its intelligence partners around the world—”have adopted ‘plausible deniability’ as their guiding principle for Internet operations.”
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A cross-party alliance of former defence ministers, police chiefs and intelligence commissioners will try to force a revised “snooper’s charter” into law before the general election.
The proposals to amend the counter-terrorism bill currently in the Lords and due for debate on Monday have been tabled by a group led by former Conservative defence secretary Lord King. The other supporters are the Liberal Democrat former reviewer of counter-terror laws, Lord Carlile, the former Labour defence minister, Lord West, and the former Metropolitan police commissioner, Lord Blair.
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Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD walk on the leash of USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) and are “extremely docile” and seen as “subordinates”, says former NSA and CIA employee Edward Snowden in an interview to Volkskrant and Nieuwsuur.
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The Dutch security services AIVD and MIVD do whatever the US security service NSA tells them, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden in an interview with the Volkskrant.
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RT: Are people taking their privacy more seriously after all the Snowden revelations? Or are they just making a joke of it?
AM: Yes, one of the jokes, of course, is “GCHQ is always listening to its customers.” I think people are beginning to take their privacy more seriously. It depends on which country you live in though because depending on the media coverage and the degree of media coverage people are more or less aware of what’s going on.
For example, in Germany there is a historic understanding of the importance of privacy as the last defense against sliding towards tyrannical government. And also people are very conscious still of more recent history, things like the Stasi secret police. So they take these issues very seriously and in fact there are a number of initiatives in Germany to up the protection of citizens’ rights.
However in places like the UK for example where the media has been largely censored around reporting some of the very serious disclosures which Mr. Snowden produced, there is less awareness; there is more a sort of complacency that the spies are always the good guys, that … if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to hide. But I think even in the UK people are waking up to this, so all we can do is thank Edward Snowden for all he has done for raising awareness of these various issues around the world.
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How a brutal government used cutting-edge spyware to hijack one activist’s life
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Edward Snowden is pointing to the recent terror attacks in Paris as proof that government surveillance can’t stop terrorism.
“The problem with mass surveillance is that you’re burying people under too much data,” the government leaker said in an interview with a Dutch public broadcaster.
“We see that France passed one of the most intrusive, expansive surveillance laws in all of Europe last year, and it didn’t stop the attack,” he added. “This is consistent with what we’ve seen in every country.”
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Civil Rights
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Concluding a controversial case that has dragged on for over two years, on Thursday morning the jailed journalist Barrett Brown will go before a federal judge to receive his sentence. He faces up to 8.5 years in prison.
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The charges relating to the hyperlink represented a serious threat to press freedom. EFF and other press organizations planned to file an amicus brief supporting Brown’s motion to dismiss eleven of the hyperlinking charges, noting that journalists routinely link to documents that, while illegally obtained, are of interest to the public. Thankfully, the government came to its senses in March 2014 and (before we could file our brief), dismissed eleven of the charges based on hyperlinking. The next month, Brown signed a sealed plea agreement that significantly reduced the remaining charges. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to three crimes: being an accessory after the fact to the unauthorized access to Stratfor’s computers; interfering with the execution of a search warrant by hiding a laptop; and, most seriously, threatening an FBI agent.
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A campaign to stop the UK Government spying on journalists and their sources has today been given “priority” by the European Court of Human Rights (pictured, Shutterstock).
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism submitted a legal challenge to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations over state mass electronic surveillance.
It claims that the UK state is breaching European law by accessing the electronic communications and telecoms records of journalists.
Today the Bureau learned that the ECHR has prioritised its legal challenge, meaning a judgment is expected with around a year rather than the usual four or five years.
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Every national newspaper editor has backed the Press Gazette Save Our Sources campaign and signed a joint letter of protest to Prime Minister David Cameron over police spying on journalists’ phone records.
Around 100 editors have signed a letter co-ordinated by Press Gazette and the Society of Editors to warn that the draft code of practice on use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act puts journalists’ sources at risk.
Politicians promised new controls in the code, but instead the new draft guidance states that police can continue to secretly view journalists’ phone records provided they give “special consideration” to the “proportionality” of doing so.
The joint letter (full text below), submitted as part of the RIPA code consulation, states that the draft code “provides wholly inadequate protection for journalists’ sources”.
And it warns that there is nothing in the new code to stop police again targeting the phone records of journalists in order to uncover lawful sources, as they did with The Sun.
The draft code appears to encourage police to access journalists’ phone records by stating that they are not “privileged information”.
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Israel’s government watchdog, the state comptroller, said on Tuesday that he had opened an investigation into decisions made by military and political leaders during last summer’s 50-day war with the Hamas militant group in Gaza.
The announcement was Israel’s latest effort to head off an International Criminal Court inquiry into its conduct during the war, and came days after prosecutors at the court opened a preliminary examination of possible war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, the first formal step that could lead to charges against Israelis.
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On January 27th, domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander will walk out of Florida’s Duval County jail — but she won’t be free.
Alexander, whose case has gained some notoriety, endured three years of jail time and a year of house arrest while fighting off a prison sentence that would have seen her incarcerated for the rest of her life — all for firing a warning shot that injured no one to fend off her abusive husband. Like many black women before her, Alexander was framed as a perpetrator in a clear case of self-defense. In November, as her trial date drew close, Alexander accepted a plea deal that will likely give her credit for time served, requiring her to spend “just” 65 more days in jail. Media coverage of the development suggested that Alexander would soon have her “freedom,” that she would be “coming home.”
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But earlier Wednesday, the seventh day of the trial, defense attorneys poked holes in the government’s case. Hunt testified that around the time Risen began asking questions about the program in May 2003, she believed the most likely source for the leak was someone on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sterling had talked to the panel’s staffers in March of that year about his concerns that Iran might be able to take advantage of flaws in the designs, in part because they were too obvious.
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One is an enemy of America, a group of evil Sunni terrorists who ruthlessly employ their own twisted vision of Islamic Sharia Law to behead people, punish homosexuality and criminalize adultery.
And the other’s one of America’s staunchest Sunni allies in the Middle East, on the road to democracy, albeit one that employs its own twisted vision of Islamic Sharia Law to behead people, punish homosexuality and criminalize adultery.
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Senator Richard Burr is acting like a man who doesn’t understand the role or duties that he now has. With the Republican Party assuming control of Congress, the North Carolinian is chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, the body charged with overseeing the CIA. His responsibilities are momentous. All senators are called to act as power-jealous checks on the executive branch. And the particular mission of the Senate intelligence committee, created in the wake of horrific CIA abuses, obligates Burr to “provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States” and “to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws.”
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Edward Snowden blames politicians who ask for more powers for intelligence services after the Paris attacks of ‘seizing a catastrophe for their own benefits’. They need to remember recent history, he says, pointing to the Patriot Act as the American response after 9/11. ‘A quick law is never a good law’, Snowden says in an interview with Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant.
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According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.
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A court officer handed out a packet of these same documents with bright red SECRET markings on the front to each juror (the government had tried to include such a warning on the binders of other exhibits, but the defense pointed out that nothing in them was actually classified at all). Judge Leonie Brinkema, apparently responding to the confused look on jurors’ faces, explained these were still-classified documents intended for their eyes only. “You’ll get the context,” Judge Brinkema added. “The content is not really anything you have to worry about.” The government then explained these documents were seized from Jeffrey Sterling’s house in Missouri in 2006. Then the court officer collected the documents back up again, having introduced the jurors to the exclusive world of CIA’s secrets for just a few moments.
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Prosecutors asked a federal jury Thursday to convict former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on leak charges to send a message that the spy agency’s secrets can be protected and that those who cooperate with the U.S. intelligence can be confident the government will do all it can to keep their identities under wraps.
But in its closing statement, the defense argued that government lawyers were long on conjecture and short on proof — and a lawyer for Sterling presented an alternative theory of who leaked top-secret details of a CIA operation aimed at undermining Iran’s nuclear program.
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Six days of testimony at the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling have proven the agency’s obsession with proclaiming its competence. Many of the two-dozen witnesses from the Central Intelligence Agency conveyed smoldering resentment that a whistleblower or journalist might depict the institution as a bungling outfit unworthy of its middle name.
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“Guantánamo Diary” is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage. One fall day 13 years ago Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist, received a visit at his house in Noakchott, Mauritania, from two officers summoning him to come answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” Listening to these words, Slahi’s mother fixed her eyes on her son. “It is the taste of helplessness,” he writes, “when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and you cannot help him. . . . I would watch both my mom and my aunt praying in my rearview mirror until we took the first turn and I saw my beloved ones disappear.”
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On one of the roughest days in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 14 years of captivity at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an American interrogator initially suggested that he pray out loud, then ridiculed him when he began reciting the Quran.
Chained, barefoot and wearing only a thin uniform in an interrogation room chilled to 49 degrees, Mr. Slahi found himself on the receiving end of a barrage of questions. “Yes or no?” one interrogator shouted at him.
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Years before the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing the C.I.A.’s use of torture and deceit in its detention program, an internal review by the agency found that the C.I.A. had repeatedly overstated the value of intelligence gained during the brutal interrogations of some of its detainees.
The internal report, more than 1,000 pages in length, came to be known as the Panetta Review after Leon E. Panetta, who, as the C.I.A.’s director, ordered that it be done in 2009. At least one of its authors won an agency award for her work, according to a recent briefing that the agency’s inspector general gave to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously-unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government, and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially-secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.
The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies to have been far more extensive and than previously thought, and to have involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured.
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Most legislation that includes the word “cyber” is nothing more than an excuse to give the government a larger piece of the action — generally by redefining the term “information sharing” to mean a one-way street of data collection running from private companies (and their customers) to various law enforcement and security agencies.
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Award winning whistleblower William Binney says his new job is to make the US government honest, make them face the truth publically, and to prevent further violation of the rights which America has never intended to stand for.
The Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence is to be given in Berlin this Thursday. This is an annual ceremony where intelligence professional are rewarded for their contribution in sharing light on governments’ wrongdoings. Such whistleblowers as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have got this award in the past. This year the prize goes to William Binney, retired NSA technical director. He left his high profile job in order to try to bring the NSA to account.
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Former NSA contracter-turned-whistleblower, Edward Snowden gave the documents to a team of nine journalists including Laura Poitras, who directed the documentary Citizenfour, and they were published by Der Spiegel.
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Just over a year ago, Jacob Appelbaum and Der Spiegel revealed pages from the National Security Agency’s ANT catalog, a sort of “wish book” for spies that listed technology that could be used to exploit the computer and network hardware of targets for espionage. One of those tools was a USB cable with embedded hardware called Cottonmouth-I—a cable that can turn the computer’s USB connections into a remote wiretap or even a remote control.
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A court in Dallas has sentenced Barrett Brown to 63 months in federal prison, minus 28 months already served. For count one in the case, he receives 48 months. For count 2, he receives 12 months. And for count 3, he receives 3 months. He is also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.
The government’s charges against the intelligence and security reporter stemmed from his relationship with sources close to the hacker group Anonymous, and the fact that Brown published a link to publicly-available copies of leaked Stratfor documents.
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His original indictment carried a maximum sentence of 105 years. But as per the terms of a 2014 plea deal, the journalist and firebrand now faces a maximum sentence of eight and half years in prison.
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“Jeffrey Sterling was the hero of Risen’s story,” prosecutor Eric Olshan finished his closing argument in the Jeffrey Sterling trial. “Don’t let him be the hero of this one.”
“They are patriots,” prosecutor Jim Trump ended his remarks, speaking of the many CIA officers the jury had heard from. “They do their work without accolades.” He then compared Sterling with those patriots. “Sterling is not a patriot,” he described after accusing Sterling of betraying the CIA and his colleagues. “He is the defendant, he is guilty.”
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This is yet another outrageous violation of press freedom by the British government, which has increasingly shown contempt for newsgathering and the rights of journalists.
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Britain’s cyber intelligence agency collected emails from numerous media outlets from Britain, the United States and other countries while also declaring in internal communications that investigative reports should be considered a threat to government operations.
With documents provided by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported that Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted emails from journalists working for American and European news sources. Those affected by the email sweep included the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC and The Washington Post.
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The president will have to address net neutrality, the Patriot Act and cybersecurity this year. The platitudes in the State of the Union aren’t reassuring
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In a rebuke to a legion of online supporters and what the journalist and one-time member of Anonymous called a “dangerous precedent”, Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison by a federal judge in Dallas on Thursday.
Brown’s backers from across the web had hoped he would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for what they insist was “merely linking to hacked material”. But the 33-year-old, who was once considered something of a spokesman for the Anonymous movement, will face more than twice that sentence. The judge also ordered him to pay more $890,000 in restitution and fines.
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We’ve written a few times about the ridiculous case against Barrett Brown, a journalist who took a deep interest in Anonymous and various hacking efforts. As we noted, a key part of the initial charges included the fact that Brown had organized an effort to comb through the documents that had been obtained from Stratfor via a hack. The key bit was that Brown had reposted a URL pointing to the documents to share via his “Project PM” — a setup to crowdsource the analysis of the leaked documents. Some of those documents included credit card info, so he was charged with “trafficking” in that information. Brown didn’t help his own cause early on with some immensely foolish actions, like threatening federal agents in a video posted to YouTube, but there were serious concerns about how the government had twisted what Brown had actually done in a way that could be used against all kinds of journalists.
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Child sex abuse campaigners have spoken of their fury that Leon Brittan has taken secrets of an alleged Westminster paedophile cover-up to his grave.
The former Tory Home Secretary has died after a long fight with cancer – leaving unanswered questions about his role in the disappearance of a dossier said to reveal the existence of an abuse network at the top of government.
And detectives declared they would still be investigating claims Lord Brittan raped a teenager in 1967.
The dossier was handed to him in 1983 by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens and the row over its “loss” led to Home Secretary Theresa May launching a wide-ranging public inquiry into the allegations of a paedophile ring.
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Internationally recognized agencies such as Amnesty International and Scotland Yard have undertaken an investigation into individuals who allegedly participated in acts of torture carried out in Cuba.
I came across this startling bit of news in the British newspaper The Independent on January 14. There, I read that the British human rights group Reprieve submitted a report to the renowned police agency, asking that it investigate a British company for alleged complicity in extremely serious human rights violations.
The accused company is named “G4S.” The British government, the newspaper adds, has been investigating G4S for some time to determine whether it has violated principles established by international conventions. According to the charges, the company offered administrative services to a harrowing prison, notorious for its abuses and for confining human beings without previous or due process: the United States’ Guantanamo Naval Base.
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DRM
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Last year, we wrote about a European Commission consultation on copyright, which revealed the vast chasm between the views of the public and those of the copyright industry. In particular, where the former wanted many aspects of copyright to change, the latter thought things were pretty good, and should be left as they were.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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First of all, I’m not quite clear on how the Sony Hack was really an “attack on free speech” unless you really believe the point of the hack was to get Sony to not show The Interview (a storyline that only showed up well after the hack). But, considering that some of the only real news to come out of the hack was an elaborate mulit-pronged strategy by the MPAA to censor the internet by twisting various laws, that statement is kind of ridiculous.
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The UK Conservative MP Mike Weatherley spoke at a second reading of the Intellectual Property Bill in Parliament and called for prison sentences for “persistent” downloaders. Mr Weatherley is a former entertainment industry executive and is Prime Minister Cameron’s Intellectual Property advisor. He also defended the idea of disconnecting families from the Internet if their router is implicated in accused acts of copyright infringement.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Virtual reality may be best known for its entertainment value, but its practical applications are at least as compelling. With Cave automatic virtual environments (CAVE), for instance, engineers can save time and resources by testing out products and solutions in the lab to see which are best-suited to a particular problem or site in the real world.
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It is with no small sense of regret that Linux Girl brings you this week’s Linux Blog Safari, dear readers, because in writing it she must convey some very difficult news.
Namely, Linux Girl is departing LinuxInsider — her home away from home for lo all these years — and so must hang up her cape for good. By the time you read this, she’ll be off on new adventures — traveling new lands, telling new tales and testing new tequilas.
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Desktop
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Yet the apparent reasonableness disappears on closer investigation. Blender, for one, was originally an in-house application for the Dutch design house Neo Geo and Not a Number Technologies (NaN) – a bit of history that immediately refutes any claim that it is not ready for professionals.
Similarly, Krita owes its increasingly popularity to the project’s habit of consulting designers about each feature. Boudewijn Rempt, Krita’s maintainer, adds that ImagineFX, a major print magazine for illustrators and concept artists, recently gave Krita its Artist’s Choice Award.
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Acer has unveiled two new Chromebooks aimed at schools and students, featuring durable construction to hold up under rough treatment and a myriad of technology features to help students get their schoolwork completed at home or at school.
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That’s a testimony to how far Wintel has fallen as a force in consumer-IT. Wintel used to have >90% of the market. Intel used to have 80% of the legacy PC market. Now they have to sell Atoms and Celerons to remain relevant because Chromebooks do more computing on servers. Of course Intel is doing great on servers but so is GNU/Linux. Acer struggled to make a living with Wintel but is thriving with ChromeBooks. Acer has 35% of that market and is making a 15.6″ ChromeBook.
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Chromebooks have generally been cheaper than Windows-based laptops…
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My personal experiences with Linux in the workplace actually started shortly after I adopted Linux on my home PC (well I was am still am dual booting Windows). I was at a startup who had installed Ubuntu on all the desktops, other than a few, and had no idea what they were doing. Luckily the IT guy and myself both were familiar enough with it to work through some of the early problems (mostly on the fly problem solving). Once we got past the growing pains that all start ups go though, we were in the clear. It saved the company a lot of money and, even though the new people we eventually hired did grumble about having to learn a new OS, it eventually worked out for the best.
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Server
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Want a good job in tech? Then learning Linux is well worth your time. In 2013, the tech job site Dice reported that senior Linux administrators were making $90,853. Last year, Dice stated that Linux jobs were more in demand than ever and that salaries and bonuses were going up.
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The Linux job market has been hot for a while, and system administrators make top dollar. But being a successful Linux system admin requires some education and training.
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In its first year, the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community created to leverage IBM’s POWER processor, went from zero to 80—figuratively and literally. After its formation in December 2013, the foundation now has more than 80 members across the full hardware and software stack from 20 different countries.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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So basically TraceFS provides the same functionality now for kernel traces that is done currently via DebugFS. With TraceFS though you don’t need to worry about enabling the potentially security-prone DebugFS and by having their own file-system it can implement features not supported by DebugFS (e.g. mkdir and rmdir support). Assuming it clears developer review fine, it’s possible we could see TraceFS for Linux 3.20 or another near-term kernel update.
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CoreOS developers have had enough issues with the Btrfs file-system that they’ve decided to move from using the Btrfs file-system to instead use EXT4 plus OverlayFS.
Since December the CoreOS developers and stakeholders have been debating switching off Btrfs due to issues. The original proposal mentioned, “We chose btrfs because it was the most straightforward Docker graph driver at the time. But, CoreOS users have regularly reported bugs against btrfs including: out of disk space errors, metadata rebalancing problems requiring manual intervention and generally slow performance when compared to other filesystems.”
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Last year at LinuxCon a Google administrator was talking up Btrfs and encouraging attendees to try it. That Google admin, Marc Merlin, traveled down to New Zealand last week for LCA2015 to further promote the Btrfs file-system.
Marc Merlin’s presentation at Linux.Conf.Au 2015 was entitled “Why you should consider using Btrfs, real COW snapshots, and file level incremental OS upgrades.” The talk was much like the one last August at LinuxCon Chicago where he was trumpeting Btrfs. Aside from openSUSE beginning to ship with Btrfs by default, most Linux distributions still tend to be EXT4/XFS based and leaving Btrfs as just an experimental install-time option. In fact, CoreOS switched away from Btrfs to EXT4+OverlayFS. Whether or not this next-generation Linux file-system is ready for production use remains a very controversial topic.
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Modular application development, in which a set of loosely coupled modules can be integrated into one large application, has been one of the most successful software development practices. The term “loosely coupled” highlights the fact that the modules are both independent and can communicate with one another. OSGI (the Open Services Gateway Initiative), a dynamic module system for Java, defines one such architecture for modular application development. The SDN controller OpenDaylight (ODL), which we will be discussing in this article, is one such controller (apart from Beacon/Floodlight) that is based on the OSGi architecture. ODL is an open-source collaborative project that focuses on building a multi-vendor, multi-project ecosystem to encourage innovation and an open/transparent approach toward SDN. We need to look at these terms, “open,” “multi-vendor,” “multi-project,” “innovation,” etc., in detail to really appreciate the strengths of ODL.
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Graphics Stack
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Martin Peres is now one of the newest members of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, working to improve the open-source Linux graphics support. On Monday there was a trivial Mesa commit but what was interesting is that it marked Martin Peres’ new email address as coming from “linux.intel.com.” After checking, on the X.Org BoD page it also now lists Martin’s affiliate as Intel. I’ve also confirmed Martin working for Intel through a source at XDC2014 last year in France where he originally heard this information, which was organized by Martin. (To be clear, Martin isn’t replacing Keith, the timing is just a coincidence.)
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Earlier this month we covered new Mir features that ended up being incorporated into the Mir 0.10 release. Mir 0.11 is now under development and it’s already packing significant improvements.
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OpenGL is a well-known standard for generating 3D as well as 2D graphics; it’s extremely powerful and has many capabilities. OpenGL is defined and released by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) and is a big state machine. Most calls to OpenGL functions modify a global state that you cannot directly access. WebGL is a JavaScript implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0 that runs on the latest browsers. The OpenGL ES (Embedded Subsystem) is the mobile version of the OpenGL standard and is targeted towards embedded devices. OpenGL ES is a C-based, Platform-Neutral API. The OS must provide a rendering context that accepts commands as well as a framebuffer that keeps the results of the drawing commands.
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It was just last June that Eric Anholt left Intel for Broadcom to focus on creating the Broadcom VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi to have a new DRM/KMS driver and a Gallium3D driver. In less than one year, he’s made a lot of progress.
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Benchmarks
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If you’ve been wondering about the impact of enabling full-disk encryption when doing a fresh install of Fedora 21, here’s some reference benchmarks comparing the Anaconda option of this latest Fedora Linux release.
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Applications
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Although I consider Mejiro more or less feature complete, I still find ways to improve and tweak my no-frills photo publishing application. The latest Mejiro release is a case in point. Previously, the application offered a rudimentary visitor tracking feature. When enabled, it saves visitors’ IP addresses in a log file. The new version of Mejiro replaces this functionality with a link to the CrazyStat web analytics PHP script. I forked and slightly modified CrazyStat for use with Mejiro and made the result available in a separate GitHub repository. To enable integration with CrazyStat, change the $stats = false; line in the Mejiro index.php file to $stats = true; This not only enables analytics, but also shows a minuscule visitor counter, which injects Mejiro with a dose of retro-chicness. The Little Mejiro Book provides instructions on how to deploy CrazyStat and make it work with Mejiro.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Most sane programmers hate writing tests. Because of that, we have a lot of testing frameworks around that make that task more streamlined, but it is still borring work.
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Games
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Linux Is Safe Again, Valve Fixes Steam Bug That Could Delete All Files on System
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I have often longed for a more adult orientated form of Pokemon, and to find the developer of Deity Quest reach out to me to take a look I was rather eager to get going.
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Invisible, Inc. is the new game from Klei Entertainment (think Don’t Starve) that has been in early access for a while without Linux support. Today they released an update with news of our much anticipated Linux support!
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The Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) Linux operating system is out with its first update of the year, fixing multiple security issues, in the privacy focused Linux distribution.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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One week after the Elementary 1.13 Alpha release, Enlightenment developers have released the first beta of v1.13.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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For more than 1800 years, the Tower of Hercules has guided ships sailing near A Coruña. Soon it will beckon KDE users and contributors, when Akademy—the annual KDE community meeting—is held in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain) 25–31 July. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE Community to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.
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KDAB has continued their interesting blog series about Qt3D 2.0 and what’s coming for this new component to Qt5.
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“Leaves” is the newest theme I created for KDE-Pairs as a part of my ongoing project ‘Theme Designing of Pairs’. This is done under the guidance of my mentor “Heena Mahour” who initially gave the idea about leaf structures. This will only work in 3 game modes namely, pairs, relations and logic.
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Following a month of usage at a group of pre-selected customers, Kolab Systems is happy to announce general availability for Kolab Enterprise 14. This latest feature release of Kolab Enterprise will be supported until 2019 and packs a whole set of new capabilities including tags, notes, better resource management, task delegation capabilities, usability improvements for deployments with very large numbers of shared groupware folders and much more.
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With the 5.2 release basically done, I decided to do some performance investigation and optimizations on KWin last week. From time to time I’m running KWin through valgrind’s callgrind tool to see whether we have some expensive code paths. So far I hadn’t done that for the 5.x series. Now after the switch to kdecoration2 I was really interested in the results as in the past rendering the decoration used to be a bottle neck during our compositing rendering loop.
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Martin Gräßlin has fixed some outstanding bugs and further tuned the performance of the KWin window manager for the KDE Plasma 5 stack.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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For a real-world example, see the GNOME MultiWriter example commit that uses this.
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Mutter 3.15.4 was checked in this morning by Florian Müllner and it has Wayland improvements and other exciting changes with GTK+ now drawing all window decorations, a change to replicate the monitor EDID parsing for Mutter on Wayland so it acts the same way as under X11, Mutter now handles input device configuration, and there’s support for pointer barriers with Mutter on Wayland. The pointer barriers on Wayland will ensure that the pointer never enters “dead areas” of the screen due to different monitor sizes, etc.
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GNOME now has support in Mutter to synchronize and apply input device settings via a session-wide configuration.
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It is no secret that we’ve been interested in sandboxed applications for a while. It is evident here, here, here or here, to name just a few.
What may not be widely known yet is that we have been working on putting together a working implementation of these ideas. Alexander Larsson has made steady progress, and we’re now almost at the point where it is useful for other people to start playing with it.
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New Releases
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Great news for Enlightenment fans: Bodhi Linux returns with a new release – 3.0.0 RC2 Reloaded.
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New command-line tool to globally change display DPI is introduced in Q4OS to be usable with high-DPI screens. Important core system packages updates and security fixes has been applied. Users could appreciate better system integration and cleaner dependencies of Adobe Flashplayer, especially in combination with Firefox 34 or later.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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So Red Hat are currently looking to hire into the various teams building and supporting efforts such as the Fedora Workstation, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and of course Fedora and RHEL in generaL. We are looking at hiring around 6-7 people to help move these and other Red Hat efforts forward.
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Fedora
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Today in Linux news Matt Hartley has the key to getting Linux adopted. Christian Schaller discusses some of the coming attractions of Fedora 22 and Phoronix.com is reporting that KDE 5 may also be coming to Fedora 22. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson gives Tumbleweed a roll and Softpedia.com is reporting that Steam is safe for Linux again.
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Fedora 21 was just released last month but already there’s a lot to get excited about for Fedora 22 when it’s released around the middle of May.
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For those of you keeping score at home, Smoogen is a long-time Fedora contributor who now serves on Fedora’s EPEL Steering Committee. And EPEL? That’s what’s commonly known as Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, “a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL),” according to their wiki.
[...]
My guess is that this proposal will be debated among those in the Fedora Project, and my hope is that it crashes and burns. Smoogen made a “Devil’s Proposal,” but I hope he was prepared to catch hell for it.
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Even though Fedora 21 is just over a month old, the Fedora Workstation developers are already hard at work planning the next release, Fedora 22. In a detailed post on his blog, Christian Schaller details some of the areas that the developers are focusing on for Fedora 22.
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I would like to apologize for my last blog post. My original intention was to make an absurd point by proposing to drop 32 bit architectures from being primary in Fedora. I didn’t communicate clearly that this was meant to be absurd. It also did not clearly state that the problem I am worried about is that with many core developers only focusing on x86_64 and hardware that is less than 4 years old that people using x86_32 and ARM32 are in effect on borrowed time.
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We have found some bugs in PackageKit and related components which require an update to fix. Unfortunately, the bugs can prevent Fedora Workstation’s default update mechanism – the ‘offline update’ system, where a notification of new updates appears, and you reboot to install them – from working correctly. The bugs can also cause problems with software installation and/or removal when using GNOME Software or Apper (the KDE software manager).
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For Python stakeholders using Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is preparing to ship Python 3 as the one and only Python implementation on the installation media.
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Earlier this month it didn’t look like GCC 5 would be added to Fedora 22 unless the release was delayed and at least week’s FESCO meeting, the committee decided not to delay Fedora 22. After this week’s FESCo meeting, GCC 5 will now be added as the Fedora 22 compiler while still aiming for a mid-May release.
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Debian Family
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A new version of Stellarium was recently released (0.13.2), so I wanted to upload it to Debian unstable as I usually do. And so I did, but it was rejected without me even knowing, since I got no e-mail response from ftp-masters.
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Derivatives
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Not long ago, the Linux Mint team has decided to change their release policy and adopt only the LTS versions of Ubuntu, the systems released between to LTSs being only point releases that update the main components. Also, they have moved Linux Mint Debian Edition’s (LMDE) code base from Debian Testing to Debian Stable.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Earlier today, Canonical (“the company behind Ubuntu”) announced the arrival of Snappy Ubuntu Core, an operating system for the Internet of Things. The lightweight OS is designed to power things like drones, robots, appliances, and home automation platforms.
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As I’ve noted before, open source is perfect for the currently-fashionable Internet of Things, where you need an extremely lightweight, low-cost, customisable but secure and rock-solid operating system that can be easily ported to thousands of devices. Only free software fits that bill. I’ve written a couple of times about AllSeen’s bid to become the de facto operating system for the Internet of Things. But of course, it would be too simple – and not necessarily advisable – if there were only one solution, even an open source one. And so it’s probably a good sign that other projects are starting to pop up to address this important sector.
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After years of hype, the Internet of Things is finally making its way into this here reality of ours. The array of connected devices trying to integrate themselves into our lives—from watches and workout clothes to kitchen appliances and cars—only seems to grow as time marches futuristically onward. And if the company behind Ubuntu Linux has anything to say about it, this vast array of intelligent objects will all be open source.
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The new effort will extend Ubuntu’s Snappy Linux technology to help enable the Internet of things.
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One of the elements of Ubuntu Unity that I have been able to handle the least is Scopes. Part of that is due to the fact that Canonical has done a pretty terrible job of properly showing people what Scopes are and what they do. The other part is… no… actually, that’s really the whole problem. Here is how Ubuntu defines this feature:
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“Smart, connected things” are redefining our home, work and play, with brilliant innovation built on standard processors that have shrunk in power and price to the point where it makes sense to turn almost every “thing” into a smart thing. I’m inspired by the inventors and innovators who are creating incredible machines – from robots that might clean or move things around the house, to drones that follow us at play, to smarter homes which use energy more efficiently or more insightful security systems. Prooving the power of open source to unleash innovation, most of this stuff runs on Linux – but it’s a hugely fragmented and insecure kind of Linux. Every device has custom “firmware” that lumps together the OS and drivers and devices-specific software, and that firmware is almost never updated. So let’s fix that!
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The Internet of Things promises to immerse us in a world of intelligent everyday objects, from self-regulating heating systems and chargers than know when your device is fully charged to weight-watching kettles to the cliched “internet refrigerator”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Not going to lie, talking with you a few weeks ago had me feeling a bit nostalgic about the project. This past weekend was one of my first full weekends at home in the last four months. I sat down to finish cleaning up the Bodhi build scripts and before I knew it I was spinning up some fresh ISO images.
My schedule in the future is looking to be less hectic and I was able to set aside more time in the next six weeks to get things really ironed out for the new release. The new folks are still helping with the project, but I feel I asked too much of them by dumping the responsibility of a new major release on them.
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The venerable PC/104 stackable connector/mezzanine form-factor has gone through half a dozen major updates during its 24-year history. This time, the advancement takes the form of the addition of a significantly more compact OneBank bus connector option, added as part of rev 3.0 of the PC/104 Consortium’s “PCI/104-Express and PCIe/104 Specification.”
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While this is certainly exciting, virtualization remains a roadblock to some in the smart car industry. I personally had the opportunity to demonstrate GlobalLogic’s Nautilus platform for automotive virtualization at GENIVI’s CES demo and networking event. Leveraging a TI J6 SoC, I demo’d a dual-screen virtual cockpit with one screen emulating a Linux-powered driver information display, and the other screen emulating an Android-powered IVI system. The entire configuration ran on Xen Project Hypervisor 4.5 with three domains: Dom0 (thin control), DomU (Linux), and DomU (Android).
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The infusion comes just a few weeks after investors backed Rethink Robotics Inc. and highlights the latest in a string of artificial intelligence startups leveraging algorithms based on user preferences that deliver different results as the user evolves.
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Phones
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General-purpose PCs have long since made a mature market and everyone in the food-chain is desperately trying to wring “value” from the legacy PC while they still can. There will continue to be a need for large screens, keyboards and mice but with voice-input becoming feasible in mobile, it won’t be long before keyboards will be optional on desktops. In such a market, adoption of GNU/Linux is one of the few ways forward that can still provide income to most of the food-chain. GNU/Linux costs less to buy and less to maintain but there’s still enough maintenance to provide a living to retailers and IT-types.
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Android
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The Document Foundation (TDF) is happy to see the LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) for Android released in the Google Play Store, allowing mobile users to access Open Document Format (ODF) files from devices such as tablets and smartphones.
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A few months ago we told you that one of the hottest office suites out there, LibreOffice, was in development for the Android consumer base. The report also mentioned that the app would be made available soon, but no specific dates were given.
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Is it the fate of every popular app — especially the open source ones — to be ported to Android? LibreOffice has made that leap, but don’t expect to take your work on the road with your tablet yet.
Collabra Productivity, a major contributor to the LibreOffice project and a provider of LibreOffice services and consulting, has released the first version of a LibreOffice port for Android. However, it is — by design — an extremely minimal application, not intended to do much more than preview text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.
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So, I started to check the apitrace (retrace) source code to see how and if it can be ported on Android. The challenge was to pass the application arguments and to redirect somehow the stdout and stderr from the device to the desktop.
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The BBC is giving the free BBC News app for iOS and Android its first major redesign since it launched in 2010. The new app will roll out for both platforms in the UK over the next few days and go global over the next few months.
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The Android of today is worlds better than what we had even a few years ago, but Google is certainly not infallible. Android has been evolving at a breakneck pace since it hit the market in 2008, and sometimes that has led to errors in judgement. Mistakes were made. There are plenty of examples where Google had to backpedal (or pull a feature entirely) after it failed to catch on, and here are four of the most prominent.
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The centerpiece of the announcement is the Android duo, the Pro Slate 12 and Pro Slate 8, slates in the truest of senses. The larger 12.3-inch model actually has a lower resolution at 1600×1200 pixels, resulting in a rather mediocre by today’s standards 163ppi.
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Are you an Android user who loves Instagram? Then you may soon have a chance to be an early beta tester of the photo-sharing app’s new features for Google’s mobile platform.
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Much of the initial work was done by Tor Lillqvist, while at SUSE (now Collabora), creating a cross-compilation framework which we continue to use for iOS, Android and was originally setup to do cross-compiles to Windows – so that we could have a predictable toolchain, and a reliable/repeatable free-software build environment. Tor also did some amazing bootstrapping work to overcome several debilitating limitations of C++ on Android, get to get the initial startup, and packaging into a good state.
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Android. It can be a divisive word in the free and open source software world. Some embrace it, others shun it. Some still use open versions of Android like Cyanogenmod and Replicant. If you do use an Android device—no matter what version of the operating system it is—there’s one thing that you need to get the most out of your device: apps. There’s just no way around that.
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In a relatively short period of time, mobile devices have become ubiquitous in the workplace. A recent survey of enterprise and small business workers found that just 3 percent of organizations ban their employees from using personal iPads or iPhones for business use, and only 7 percent ban Android devices. In fact, 40 percent of organizations provide iPhones for more than a quarter of employees, and 25 percent provide Android-based smartphones.
The open source community has responded to this trend with a host of new projects, including solutions that help enterprises track and manage mobile devices, mobile development tools for creating new apps and open source apps that enable greater productivity. This month, we’ve put together a list of 50 of these tools that are worth notice. While there are many good open source mobile apps for home users, this list focuses instead on those that would be most useful in the workplace.
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Marc Frons, senior vice president and chief information officer of the New York Times, discusses how The Times actively contributes to open source communities.
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Two major open source Java projects, Groovy and Grails, are looking for new sponsors.
Pivotal, a company which supplies tools for big data analytics and cloud-oriented agile development, has announced the end of its funding for Groovy (a dynamic language that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and Grails (a web application framework which uses Groovy) from March 2015.
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Whether you’re starting an open source project or deciding whether to participate in one, you don’t want to waste time in an endeavor that imposes arbitrary restrictions that will stop you in your tracks down the line.
The Open Source Initiative, of which I am president, has successfully focused on copyright licensing as a concrete expression of software freedom. OSI does not only provide guidance in the form of the Open Source Definition; it also manages a process by which the copyright licenses used for outbound licensing by open source authors can gain OSI approval.
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AnsibleFest comes around at an interesting time i.e. every major software player from CA to HP to IBM and onwards is currently trying to sex-up the abilities of its software orchestration engines, configuration management tools and continuous delivery offering — and the term DevOps is never far away.
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Events
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The Daala open-source, royalty-free video codec being developed by Xiph.Org and other organizations continues to be developed as an alternative to H.265 and VP9. While much progress is being made, it looks like another year of heavy development will be needed before Daala is ready for primetime.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Users of an experimental build of Firefox will be able to explore virtual reality inside the browser after Mozilla added support for the Oculus Rift headset.
People running Firefox Nightly will be able to explore 3D environments inside web pages using the Rift, following the addition of support for the WebVR API.
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Since last week, WebVR support has been present in Firefox Nightly builds for having core VR support to work with devices like the Oculus Rift.
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Mozilla’s Servo Engine that’s written in the Rust programming language and designed to be a highly parallel layout engine continues to be advancing very well and could see an alpha release this year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Earlier this month, Mirantis announced the launch of Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, the latest version of its OpenStack cloud computing distribution. According to the company, it is based on OpenStack Juno, and version 6.0 is the first OpenStack distribution to let partners write plugins that install and run their products automatically.
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“Pure-play” OpenStack vendor Mirantis believes existing cloud computing training programs for OpenStack don’t meet the soaring demand for expertise in the open source cloud platform. That’s why it’s expanding its OpenStack training offerings with two new courses and a certificate verification portal.
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Platform9 is hoping to make it easier for organizations to adopt private cloud with the introduction of Platform9 Managed OpenStack. The company is describing the new solution as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that “transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes.”
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A conversation on the OpenStack-Community listserv caught my eye this week, which started with a simple question: “I’ve been contemplating starting a new OpenStack meet-up and am excited about meeting with and hearing what folks are doing in the local area. While continue working on this, I’m wondering how others who have created user groups got the word out and evangelized?”
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Recently, Mesosphere has been covered here on OStatic in a series of posts, including an interview with the company’s Ben Hindman, in which he discusses the need for a “data center operating system.” Mesosphere’s data center operating system is built on the open source Apache Mesos project, which is being leveraged by many organizations for distributed resource and network management.
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IBM is announcing a significant stride in its bid to be the best cloud company with a $500 million services contract today with Anthem.
Under the deal, IBM will build a hybrid cloud environment for Anthem, transforming that company’s information technology infrastructure. IBM recently formed its IBM Cloud business unit, bringing together a team of services, software, development, and research initiatives to further fuel IBM’s momentum in this market and accelerate new innovations into the marketplace.
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CMS
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The winner this year will not be a surprise to anyone as it’s the very CMS that has been taking over the world of content management of late. We would be remiss to not hand this award to the incredibly popular..
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Business
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Open Source Strategies has released opentaps CRM2, a new free extension for online stores running Magento.
Using big data analytics, the opentaps CRM2 extension for Magento automatically links email with orders. All past customer communications, support requests, and tasks for a customer are right where the customer’s orders are.
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BSD
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So, I dug in to how to set this up in an OpenBSD environment. First of all, whatever porting effort needed to make it run was already fixed, so “sudo pkg_add afl” takes care of that. Then you need to have a space to run the tests in, and since the fuzzer is going to create a huge amount of junk files to throw at your program, you really want this to be inside a tmpfs or mfs. This affects the speed a lot. It doesn’t need to be very big, just fast in creating and deleting files.
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Adam Nemet as part of Apple’s compiler team is looking to work out loop distribution and partial vectorization for upstream LLVM. He explained, “We’d like to propose new Loop Distribution pass. The main motivation is to allow partial vectorization of loops. One such example is the main loop of 456.hmmer in SpecINT_2006. The current version of the patch improves hmmer by 24% on ARM64 and 18% on X86. The goal of the pass is to distribute a loop that can’t be vectorized because of memory dependence cycles. The pass splits the part with cycles into a new loop making the remainder of the loop a candidate for vectorization.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 5 feature development is over and as of today the mainline code is in “stage four” development ahead of the GCC 5 release.
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Project Releases
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Popular messaging service WhatsApp over 700 million monthly active users has now launched a new services called WhatsApp web. “Today, for the first time, millions of you will have the ability to use WhatsApp on your web browser”, Jan Koun, founder of WhatsApp posted on facebook. Let’s see how to use this on our PC or Chromebook.
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Stellarium is an open source planetarium software that displays a realistic and accurate sky in 3D that is built for multiple platforms. The supported platforms include Linux and the developers have added a large number of features and they’ve also ported some of the changes to an older version.
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The latest feature added to NetworkManager is support for WiFi power-savings.
With devices that support WiFi powersave for WiFi adapters that support a power saving mode, NetworkManager will now enable it when appropriate.
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Public Services/Government
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The Dutch municipality of Arnhem wants to increase its use of free and open source solutions, says Martijn Leisink, municipal executive councilor responsible for ICT. The primary aim is to replace proprietary server solutions by open source alternatives. Getting rid of IT vendor lock-in on the desktop workstations will be difficult, and is deferred until later.
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Licensing
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As we know, use of the term “infographic” generally causes involuntary gagging and may result in unwelcome skin irritation.
Paradoxically, open source licensing and vulnerability management solutions company Protecode (pron: pro-ta-code) appears to be using the “information graphic” (to use the old school expression) approach to good effect.
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Openness/Sharing
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If you’ve been keeping up with augmented and virtual reality news, you’ll remember that spacial haptic feedback devices aren’t groundbreaking new technology. You’ll also remember, however, that a professional system is notoriously expensive–on the order of several thousand dollars. Grad students [Jonas], [Michael], and [Jordi] and their professor [Eva-Lotta] form the design team aiming to bridge that hefty price gap by providing you with a design that you can build at home.
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Open Data
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As a former database manager of a junior exploration company, I have had the run-down of how data should be kept: a secret. The majority of mining data is proprietary and companies carefully guard this data for a variety of different reasons. One of these reasons is the sheer cost of obtaining this data. My company spent over $20 million in exploration and at the end of the day what remains valuable is the data. Another reason that data is guarded so carefully is that it needs to go through a careful vetting process before it can get released to the public. Geologists must qualify for professional designation before being eligible to release technical reports to the public, in Canada; those technical reports are referred to as 43-101s. This requirement is in place to stop market scandals and hold geologists accountable for their scientific integrity. I agree that geological data should be released to investors and the public with ethical standards. The last reason that mining data and methods are kept proprietary is to maintain an edge over competitors. Logically speaking, it does make sense to avoid leaking trade secrets, however, the world is a rapidly changing place and we should consider radically new approaches to one of the oldest industries.
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Open Access/Content
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I first met Stephen O’Connor, a fifth grade public school teacher at Wells Central School, at the New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education Conference in 2007. I don’t recall the exact subject of his presentation, but I came away from his presentation with some new information that helped me implement Moodle in my classroom. He pointed me in the direction of a good hosting company that allowed me to work on Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress development, which I was most interested in at the time.
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Open Hardware
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An open hardware computer is a computer for which all the specifications for manufacturing the computer are provided, not just the source for the software that runs on it. Software source code of an application enables experienced developers to rebuild, modify, and extend that software application. Similarly, the source code for an electronics printed circuit board (PCB) or mechanical drawings for a computer enclosure enables experienced developers to build, modify, and extend the hardware. By hardware, I mean that computer board in a case you put on your desktop, by your television, in your car or wherever you might be using it, even in your thermostat or water sprinkler.
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Programming
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At MediaFire, it’s no secret that we are huge fans of the open source community. From server management, to building next generation storage applications, open-source tools enable us to do great things.
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Open source has helped shape the team at PushAgency.io into the programmers and developers we are today. We’ve used it throughout our educations and careers, and now incorporate it into the products and services we deliver.
We look up to people like Linus Torvalds and companies like 37Signals for their contributions to the open source movement, and it’s a goal of ours to give back to the community in some way. Now that our business has reached a level of maturity, we feel we’ve made it to the point where we can devote some development time to open sourcing small parts of our product, SimplyBuilt. This is how our first open source project materialized.
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When biicode began, almost two years ago, many risks were taken by both the founders and investors. Our funders invested a lot of money with just a simple prototype in their hands. Our founders quit their safe and well-paying job positions at prestigious universities. The opportunity was huge though, because there are approximately 4 million C/C++ developers, and both languages represent up to almost 20% of the world’s code. Moreover, these tools easily become standardized. Once the most popular and reused libraries of a specific programming language are handled with ease and effectiveness by a given dependency manager, this tool naturally becomes the standard.
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Facebook developers have released version 3.5.0 of HHVM as a faster alternative to the reference PHP implementation.
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Standards/Consortia
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As part of the Open Consortium Interconnect, led in particular by Samsung, Intel and Cisco, published a first version of the Internet of Things (IoT) source code standard IoTivity. It will allow connected devices from different manufacturers to communicate and compete with AllJoyn standard, led by Qualcomm, Microsoft and LG.
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Science
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A new study from the University of Exeter has found that viruses carried by commercial bees can jump to wild pollinator populations with potentially devastating effects. The researchers are calling for new measures to be introduced that will prevent the introduction of diseased pollinators into natural environments.
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Security
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And that thing about federal prison I opened the post with? That’s the way the DOJ wants it. The CFAA currently allows for misdemeanor charges under certain circumstances. But this proposal does away with that. Instead of a misdemeanor-to-3 year sentence range, punishments start at 3 years and escalate to a 10-year cap. Unless, of course, your hacking is part of the commission of another felony, in which case the government proposes it should get to double dip (at minimum).
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And while Java, once a favorite exploit platform, gets harder and harder to compromise, attackers have simply moved on to new targets such as Silverlight.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The BBC led their 10 O’clock News today with a five minute piece on the delay to the Chilcot report. It gave a retrospective on the Iraq War that did not mention, once, Weapons of Mass Destruction as the raison d’etre but told us the war “removed a brutal dictator”. They said the dead of the war were in thousands – not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands. “Thousands died”, they said. Literally true, but diminishing the scale. They could equally have said dozens died, also literally true – just an awful lot of dozens.
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We caused it by our invasions, occupations and bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, none of which had ever attacked the UK. We caused it by all the dead women and children that British bombs, missiles or bullets killed accidentally. We caused it by the terrible deaths of the people we killed deliberately, who were only defending their country from foreign invaders, just as most of us would do. We caused it by the detainees killed or tortured. As a country, the United Kingdom caused it.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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CNN offered just a tiny bit more, saying that “she was a tea party favorite for her positions on everything from abortion to the federal minimum wage”–on the latter, “she doesn’t believe in a ‘one-size-fits-all approach’”; her position on abortion, and on everything else, went undescribed.
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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly falsely claimed that he had no role in hyping the myth that Muslim “no-go zones” exist throughout France, just days after Fox News apologized for spreading the fiction. In fact, O’Reilly previously cited the so called “no-go zones” as one of the contributing causes of the Paris terror attacks.
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Newly-elected Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) will give the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, perhaps providing further proof that the Koch political network has evolved into an independent political force.
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The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank complains that Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t have enough terrorism in it. Why, it only mentioned “terrorism,” “terror” or “terrorists” nine times!
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Rogers is a Republican strategist who chairs and co-founded the BGR Group with former Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) in 1991. As the Post itself has reported, the firm is one of the top Washington D.C. lobbying firms, having banked more than $15 million in 2014. The newspaper’s reporters have described Rogers as a “Republican mega-lobbyist,” “lobbyist extraordinaire,” and “a go-to guy for Republicans.”
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This week, Republican presidential hopefuls like Gov. Scott Walker, Gov. Chris Christie, and Sen. Rand Paul will travel to an exclusive resort near Palm Springs, Florida to kiss the rings of David and Charles Koch.
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After a scorching two-year controversy involving a “John Doe” criminal investigation into potential illegal coordination between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and outside big money groups, state GOP leaders are readying a legislative package to dismantle the nonpartisan elections board.
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Censorship
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BROADCASTER SKY is joining the puritanical push for pornography filters and, like the rest of the industry, is throwing up a thick curtain in front of the more salacious elements of the web, and some of its security risks.
Such curtains, we’ll call them sainted aunt filters, are employed by the majority of ISPs because that is how the UK government likes it.
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Privacy
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The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.
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I remain convinced her and the Cabinet’s position on encryption is based on a non-technical misinterpretation of detailed advice from within the Home Office. Her response, and other responses by her colleagues and by the US government, imply that the security officialdom of the US & UK believes it can resurrect “golden key” encryption where government agencies have a privileged back door into encryption schemes.
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“I guess seeing your passwords on someone else’s computer screen generates some strong feelings,” cyber expert Markus Alkio said to me, as I stared at the results of what he’d managed to dig up.
He was right. After two weeks of having my personal information raked over by researchers tasked with digging out as much as possible, I was indeed bewildered by just how much of what I’d thought was private turned out to be nothing of the sort.
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Civil Rights
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Video games developer Zoe Quinn is fighting a hate-filled online campaign against her by launching Crash Override – a service dedicated to helping other whose lives are made miserable by online abuse and threats
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The chaos behind the scenes of the official inquiry into child abuse has been laid bare with accusations of bullying and silencing members as the investigation struggled to get off the ground.
One panel member, Sharon Evans, an abuse survivor and chief executive of the Dot Com children’s charity, told MPs the inquiry’s counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, had in effect taken it over in the absence of an appointed chairman, and had made threats and intimidated panel members.
She made the accusations to the Commons home affairs select committee as the home secretary, Theresa May, considers whether to disband the independent panel and create a fresh statutory inquiry.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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To derail February’s expected unveiling of Title II-based neutrality rules, the broadband industry is engaged in a last ditch effort to pass some of the flimsiest net neutrality rules we’ve seen yet. Spearheaded by Senator John Thune and Representative Fred Upton (the latter a particular magnet of Comcast campaign contributions), the goal appears to be to propose intentionally awful neutrality rules, offer a few meager concessions, then insist the marginally-less-awful result was crafted only after a long “public conversation” and with bipartisan support.
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The Senate and House are holding hearings today on a legislative proposal to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling online traffic. It is encouraging that the bill’s sponsors, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), now recognize that net neutrality is a legitimate public policy concern rather than a “solution in search of a problem,” as Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, described it last year. However, as is often the case in policymaking, the devil is in the details.
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DRM
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This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today’s topic is “you bought it, you own it,” — a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA — the You Own Devices Act — which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it without creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Because of the complicated nature of power-sharing in the European Union, some international agreements require the approval of both the European Parliament and of every Member State — so-called “mixed agreements.” It is generally accepted that both the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) and TAFTA/TTIP are mixed agreements, and will therefore require a double ratification: by the full European Parliament, and all the EU governments. Indeed, the European Commission has frequently cited this fact to bolster its assertion that both CETA and TAFTA/TTIP are being negotiated democratically, since the European public — through their representatives — will have their say in these final votes.
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Copyrights
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From phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment, software is helping our stuff work better and smarter. But those features come at a high hidden cost: the rapid erosion of ownership. Why does that matter? Because when it comes to digital products, owners have rights. Renters on the other hand, have only permission.
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In 2012, a contest for US schools to win a gig by Taylor Swift was hijacked by members of the 4chan website, who piled on its online vote in an attempt to send the pop star to a school for deaf children.
Now, imagine a similar stunt being pulled for a general election, if voting could be done online. Far-fetched? Not according to Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden’s Pirate party.
“Voting over the internet? Would you really want 4chan to decide your next government?” he said, during a debate about democracy and technology in London, organised by the BBC as part of its Democracy Day event.
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Over the past two years, as talk of copyright reform has escalated, we’ve also heard complaints about the supposed expansion of fair use, or “fair use creep.” That kind of talk woefully misunderstands how fair use works.
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It may seem odd to say so during Copyright Week, but copyright in itself isn’t very important. Sure, EFF expends a lot of time and energy arguing about copyright law, and some of our adversaries spend even more. But we don’t do so because copyright has any independent value. Rather, its value is derived from its ability to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (in the words of the US Constitution), as well as to promote other important values such as the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, education, and participation in cultural life.
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Send this to a friend
01.21.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ArduPilot is the open source software which controls our own Vulture 2 spaceplane on the 3DR Pixhawk autopilot. As Tridge demonstrated, it can now be deployed on a range of hardware which, with the addition of a suitable interface, allows aficionados to create a fully-functioning autopilot.
Last year, for example, a group of Russians successfully raised funds for the Navio, an autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi.
As part of his talk, Tridge connected live to a model aircraft in Canberra, in this case equipped with an embedded Linux box – the BeagleBone Black – coupled to a PixHawk Fire Cape (PXF).
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Desktop
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I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS). Here are my thoughts.
I’ve spent many years in the visual effects (VFX) industry from the perspective of being either an artist, compositor, video editor, or systems engineer. (I’ve even got film creds on IMDB!) In the past, I had the pleasure of cutting on, training people on, setting up, and supporting Avid Media Composer, the cream of the crop of professional real-time video editing tools for film and TV alike—at least before things like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere became useful enough to professionals.
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Every few months, new articles roll out proclaiming “this year” to be the year of the Linux Desktop. A wide selection of reasons are cited, explanations given, and various acts of patting we Linux users on the backs takes place.
I’d be first to admit that it’s worth celebrating each time something is made more secure or easier. But we’re still a long ways off from the average person trying out any Linux distributions on their own.
In this article, I’ll discuss an untapped resource that can be used to get desktop Linux into the homes of casual users and finally jump start Linux adoption outside schools, governments and geek circles.
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Microsoft is engaged in a silent war and it’s actually losing. They are fighting an enemy that is so insidious and so cunning that it’s actually hurting the company more than anything else. The enemy is called Chromebooks and they are using Linux.
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Windows fans are worried that the desktop PC will follow too closely the design of Windows 10 for phones and tablets, and they are right to do so. This all plays out due to Microsoft’s plans for convergence, but it’s a twisted approach that only makes things more complicated than they should be.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open source operating system, has raised controversy with remarks about diversity and “niceness” among open source programmers.
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The number of companies that base their systems (especially those that don’t actually distribute their kernels outside the company) on the long-term stable releases of Linux caught me by surprise. We dismissed the idea of basing on long-term stable releases in Fedora after giving it a try circa Fedora 14, and it generally being a disaster because the bugs being fixed didn’t match up much to the bugs our users were seeing. We found that we got more bugs we cared about being fixed by sticking to the rolling model that Fedora is known for.
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On the Internet, no one cares if you’re a dog, the saying goes. In open source, no one cares if you’re a jerk.
That seems to be the lesson emerging from Linux founder Linus Torvalds’ latest run-in with the sensitivity police. In the open source world, code is king (or queen). The people who write it don’t necessarily matter.
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He switched to Mandrake Linux because his Windows machine kept crashing and built his Linux skills by tinkering on his home computer. As he learned more, he took a series of sysadmin jobs that were progressively more advanced. He’s now a Linux Foundation Certified Engineer and is looking for his next career opportunity.
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A question and answer session at Australia’s national Linux conference has led to a bitter Twitter attack on Linux creator Linus Torvalds by Shanley Kane, founder of tech and culture essay publisher Model View Culture.
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Graphics Stack
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My personal Nvidia repository has seen quite a few updates on versions, CUDA enablements, legacy drivers and Delta RPMS.
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After a decade of working for Intel, he left the company and started working at HP. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now serving as a “distinguished technologist” at HP. Prior to joining Intel in late 2005, he had worked for HP for a couple years as an engineer following his SUSE days. The X.Org BoD page has also been updated to reflect his employment now by HP.
Outside of his open-source graphics roles as the X.Org Server release manager and X.Org BoD member, he also remains a member of the Debian Technical Committee.
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Applications
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Right before the 2014 holidays, and more than 10 years after the first line of NetworkManager was typed, we released version 1.0. A huge milestone on the way to making NetworkManager more cooperative, more flexible, more configurable, and more useful than ever before.
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No need for a introduction to Telegram, right? Telegram is a popular free Instant messenger application that can be used to chat with your friends all over the world. Unlike Whatsapp, Telegram is free forever, no ads, no subscription fees. And, the Telegram client is open source too. Telegram is available for many different platforms, including Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and Mac OS X. The messages which are sending using telegram are highly encrypted and self-destructive. It is very secure, and there is no limit on the size of your media and chats.
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Linux programs to make a detailed recording of themselves as they run, claimed Undo Software of Cambridge as it announced a product called Live Recorder.
“Until now, in order to solve a problem reported on code running in production, developers have needed to gather information relating to the failure to write a test case and, or, reproduce the bug in-house,” said the firm. “Recording enables developers to debug an exact copy of the original program’s execution, allowing them to track down bugs without needing to reproduce them in-house, write test cases, or make visits to customer sites.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Verde Station is a strange game. It lets you wander through a space station. You’re all on your own for a full year and just need to keep the station running. You can think of it as a sort of a solitude simulator.
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Age of Wonders III is confirmed to be heading to Linux, and it has seen more activity on the SteamDB, but the developer has noted the Linux build is a “bit too Michael Bay at the moment”. Hah!
For those that don’t know, Michael Bay is a director who loves his explosions, so it means the Linux version is a bit unstable right now, but it is coming!
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Steam has done a lot for us, and they are always adding useful features people get excited about. Game streaming is huge now, and Steam wants a bit of the pie.
What better way to keep customers around than to get them to buy and watch games on Steam directly?
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Xonotic is a free and fast-paced first-person shooter for multiple platforms, including Linux, developed by a team of people from all over the globe. The latest version is now 0.8 and it gathers a large number of improvements.
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Cue heavy breathing, Shadow Warrior, the fantastic and brutal looking FPS from Flying Wild Hog and Devolver Digital has some very promising signs it’s going to come to Linux.
The game has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam from 5,804 people. With very few bad reviews, and that’s quite amazing.
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4MDoom 11.0 Beta is a new Linux distribution based on 4MLinux distribution and basically booting directly into a game, without any kind of other desktop or features.
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I know quite a few people who will be waiting on this, and it looks like The Banner Saga is preparing their Linux release now.
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Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath is an interesting looking mix of adventure and RPG that has graphics similar to “Realm of the Mad God”.
It has been out on Linux for over a year now, but has finally made its way onto Steam. Nice to see too, as I had completely forgotten about it, did you?
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As a big Star Wars fan I approve of this. STAR WARS: DARK FORCES is now officially available and supported on Linux and is available from GOG.
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Heroes of Steel is a top-down RPG game developed and published on Steam by a studio called Trese Brothers. The developers have just released a patch that makes the game compatible with Linux platforms.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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One gap that has not been closed yet is support for Wacom tablets. The required libinput changes and Wayland protocol extensions did not quite make it into libinput 0.8 – but much of the work has been done and will hopefully land before long.
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Reviews
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MakuluLinux 6 Cinnamon, a Linux distribution based on the Debian testing branch, Jessie, that provides stability, speed, and a modern desktop, has been upgraded to version 2.0 and is now ready for download.
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New Releases
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Today I’ve released a new version of uid_wrapper (1.1.0) with full threading support. Robin Hack a colleague of mine spent a lot of time improving the code and writing tests for it. It now survives funny things like forking in a thread. We also added two missing functions and fixed several bugs. uid_wrapper is a tool to help you writing tests for your application.
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HandyLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian and Xfce that comes with a special kind of launcher and desktop interface, has been upgraded to version 1.8.0. The developers have made a large number of improvements and that is quite obvious from the big changelog, although many of them are not very complex.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux has received a new update pack and the developers have upgraded many of the core components and applications. This particular update was made available for testing more than a week ago and now it’s ready in its stable form.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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For the past several years, there have been two semi-official rolling release distributions for openSuSE Linux. The obvious one, the ‘Factory’ distribution, was actually supposed to be where development for the next release was going on, but a lot of people (including me) were willing to use it despite the inherent instability. I learned the hard way, for example, that the Factory Live images were very frequently the first thing that got broken during the development cycle, and the last thing to get fixed before a new release was made. So it was always better (safer) to use the full-blown installer images.
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Red Hat Family
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OpenSCAP support has been integrated into Red Hat Satellite and into the Spacewalk open source management platform.
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The enterprise software company said Tuesday that it has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure with advanced IT services that includes its open-source Linux operation system for the space agency’s user communities.
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The European Space Agency has developed a “flexible and reliable” private cloud infrastructure, called ESA Cloud, which offers advanced IT services for its user communities. ESA Cloud, which partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is based on VCE systems, on a blade x86 architecture. It is managed entirely by Orange Business Services.
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Red Hat, Inc. RHT, -0.06% the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure that offers advanced IT services for the agency’s user communities. The infrastructure partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and has proven to be flexible and reliable – critical for ESA’s environment. After seeing exceptional results, ESA has finalized the implementation of a similar infrastructure for another datacenter.
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Red Hat‘s OpenStack focus continues to move the company beyond its popular distribution of the Linux operating system, and investors are starting to notice. The company’s stock was up around 25 percent last year on the heels of several moves expanding its position and its place in the cloud ecosystem.
Its bigger vision and strategy is the open hybrid cloud. Red Hat provides common management, common storage and middleware that enables building workloads across footprints in heterogeneous environments. It helps an enterprise with its hybrid strategy by helping put the right workloads in the right place. Open source is the way to make everything work together and enable true hybrid cloud.
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Fedora
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I am going to make the uncomfortable and ugly proposal to drop 32 bit in Fedora 23 and only look at 64 bit architectures as primary architectures. All 32 bit architectures (arm7hl, i386) would be moved to being secondary architectures that would require their own build teams and ‘koji’ to maintain builds in future releases. At the moment that would make the only 64 bit primary architecture x86_64 with arm64 and ppc64 possible candidates for mainstream support in F24 (if they aren’t ready by Fedora 23).
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To get a context of changes, you will have to visit the current AskFedora instance and observe the changes. Newer slides and the desktop views are on the way. Even though this takes time, its important to have an idea of how you want your interaction with the application to be and FAD gave me a change to do some mockups before we dive into code and CSS.
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So taking into consideration most of the suggestions I had obtained during the recent Design FAD at Red Hat, the initial slides of desktop version are also ready. Maybe these are enough to start off with a basic CSS template which we can build upon iteratively while we work on more mockups for other major pages in parallel. Here is the updated mockup:
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For KDE users on Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is seeking to focus on the still-maturing Plasma 5 shell that’s powered by KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5.
An in-progress change proposal for Fedora 22 is to use Plasma 5 (and KF5/Qt5) with the latest KDE components to be fully-packaged in time for F22, an upgrade path be provided from KDE 4, and to retire any KDE 4 packages in Fedora that aren’t compatible with the “KDE 5″ work.
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Today in Linux news Matt Hartley has the key to getting Linux adopted. Christian Schaller discusses some of the coming attractions of Fedora 22 and Phoronix.com is reporting that KDE 5 may also be coming to Fedora 22. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson gives Tumbleweed a roll and Softpedia.com is reporting that Steam is safe for Linux again.
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Debian Family
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Soon after publishing the chromium/chrome extension that allows you to edit Debian online, Moez Bouhlel sent a pull request to the extension’s git repository: all the changes needed to make a firefox extension!
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Debian Linux doesn’t usually make many headlines about commercial software products. But the open source operating system is part of the latest anti-spam and anti-virus platform from Proxmox Server Solutions, which was released this week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical released a “Snappy” version of its lightweight, Ubuntu Core OS for IoT, featuring an app store, hacker-proof updates, and a 128MB RAM footprint.
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Canonical is today bringing Snappy Ubuntu Core out of the cloud and into physical devices with the reveal of Snappy Core for smart devices.
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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, wants to bring its operating system to more connected devices and intelligent objects with the launch of its “snappy” Ubuntu Core for the Internet of Things today. Over the last few months, the company launched “snappy” versions of Core on a number of cloud computing services, but given that the whole idea behind Core is to offer stripped-down versions of Ubuntu that developers can then easily customize based on their needs, the Internet of Things and robotics applications are a logical next area of focus for Canonical.
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Ubuntu could soon been powering all manner of connected devices and autonomous machines with the newly unveiled Snappy Ubuntu Core, which has been designed specifically for the Internet of Things.
As the latest and lightest version of the Ubuntu operating system, Snappy — as we will affectionately refer to it — is aimed at developers who want to create connected devices or robots using an open, safe system that isn’t overly clunky, and so can be easily customised.
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Ubuntu has released a number of patches for security vulnerabilities in several versions of the OS, including some remote code execution flaws in Thunderbird, which is included with Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been updated in order to fix a couple of RPM vulnerabilities that were identified.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi is a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that features low system requirements. The developers have just released a new Reloaded edition for the distro, but they decided to keep the RC tag, at least for now.
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Here’s some news that should make Bodhi Linux users happy. Jeff Hoogland has returned to Bodhi in his former position as project manager/lead developer.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Recent leaks show three new Samsung Tizen devices: a pair of cameras, and a round-faced “Orbis” watch with a digital crown, bezel, and wireless charging.
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Android
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Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: Get 73 per cent off 20×40-inch canvas photo prints from Big W, crashed RC plane captures amazing aquatic life, the worst bugs in Android 5.0 Lollipop (and how to fix them).
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Android 4.3 and earlier suffers from a vulnerability Google doesn’t plan on patching itself. Jack Wallen tells you what you can do to avoid possible exploits on your aging Android device.
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If you’re sceptical about rooting your Android smartphone for several reasons but still wonder what rooting exactly is or should you root your device or why do rooted phones get software updates so quickly and easily or how safe it would be, this article is for you.
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A video by Simrandeep Singh Garcha shows Tizen operating on the Samsung Z1, and demonstrates that Android apps are compatible on Tizen once an extra runtime layer is installed.
Samsung also unveiled its first range of smart televisions equipped with Tizen at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in Las Vegas, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Google. Plans for a Tizen TV have been in the works since last year, when the South Korean electronics giant showed off a prototype version at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Samsung has also rolled out Tizen-based digital cameras and smartwatches.
Tizen was born after Intel and the Linux Foundation decided they were going to abandon the MeeGo platform, and is an alternative operating system to Android and Apple’s iOS.
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With Android 5.0 Lollipop Google has slightly improved the lockscreen. There’s now a shortcut to the dialer by swiping left to right, and notifications are more useful and interactive. Shown right on the lockscreen they can be swiped away, slide down to expand, or double tap to instantly unlock right into that app or notification. Everything is simple and smooth, and we still have full-screen album artwork on the lockscreen while playing music.
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QualityTime, a new app for Android devices which launched today, hopes to make you more aware of how much time you spend on your device.
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Events
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Open source storage now has a convention all its own in the form of Vault. Organized by the Linux Foundation, this event will take place for the first time in March with speakers and sessions focused on distributed storage, the Btrfs and Ext4 file systems, memory management and much more. Read on for details.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Canonical published details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, which means that a new version is now available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Oracle Board of Directors today announced that it has unanimously elected the Honorable Leon Panetta, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the company’s Board of Directors. The election is effective as of January 19, 2015 and increases the size of the Board to 12 directors.
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Public Services/Government
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A public competition has been launched to boost the development of Oskari – a collection of map tools made available as open source by National Land Survey of Finland. Interested software developers have until the end of this month to submit proposals for applications using Oskari or for improvements to the existing tools. National Land Survey of Finland will award EUR 3,000 to the best application and EUR 1,000 for the best concept. Two more prices, EUR 1,000 each, will go to the next best projects.
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Peterborough City Council is looking to drop Microsoft and its “expensive” user agreements in favour of other, more open source applications and collaborative tools.
That’s what Richard Godfrey, ICT, strategy, infrastructure and programme manager for Peterborough Council, revealed to Computing in a recent interview.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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NON-WRESTLING ORGANISATION the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) has published its latest Open Data Barometer and awarded the UK government the ‘most open’ crown.
However, Tim Berners-Lee, head of the WWWF, said that it is a shallow win, and does not mean that the UK government is really open, just more open than others.
Openness, in these instances, relates to the way in which governments make official data available and usable.
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Page Three has split opinion in recent years. A ‘No more Page Three’ campaign, started in 2012 by Lucy-Ann Holmes and featuring the tagline “boobs aren’t news,” has attracted more than 200,000 signatures. It’s also been backed by MPs and anti-sexism charities.
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Here are 14 nightmare clients you may very well encounter on your quest for success as an independent software developer. May you have strength in recognizing, avoiding, and neutralizing them, when possible. Please feel free to add your own in the comments below.
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Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
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For the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the quality of Apple software. From the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, to the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, I’ve gotten a bad feeling about Apple’s software quality management. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
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The rise of iPad apps such as Microsoft Office would make the transition easier than you might expect, but it’s still no slam-dunk
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a recent video from Saudi Arabia, three uniformed security officers and a professional swordsman in a white gown struggled to placate a woman cloaked in black and sitting in the street.
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Surprisingly, there have been a number of mainstream celebrities to actually speak up about the blatant propaganda film and its celebration of death.
Actor Seth Rogen was even bold enough to compare the movie to a Nazi propaganda film.
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On Tuesday, Shiite insurgents overran Yemen’s presidential palace, posing a coup-style threat to current President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Should Hadi be pushed out, it’ll likely have broad consequences: Hadi had proven himself a loyal ally in the fight against al-Qaeda’s much-feared branch in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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The U.S. government should immediately close and evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
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To Khalek, any movie that lionizes Kyle represents “dangerous propaganda that sanitizes a mass killer and rewrites the Iraq War.” She said Kyle was consumed by “unrepentant bloodlust” fueled by “hatred, bigotry and enthusiasm for killing Iraqi ‘savages.’” Khalek got death threats almost immediately for her comments.
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In the wake of this month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, European leaders are calling for significant changes to what has long been a paradox of their borderless continent: Their citizens can move freely, but information about them does not.
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China dismissed accusations it stole F-35 stealth fighter plans as groundless on Monday, after documents leaked by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on a cyber attack were published by a German magazine.
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Transparency Reporting
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (2012) predicted this banality of evil in the digital age, alerting us to how the internet has been transformed into a “threat to human civilization” (p. 1). In his recent book When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014), Assange exposed Google’s part in the hijacking of large swaths of the Internet for surveillance in collusion with the U.S. government. He pointed out how by getting close to Washington halls of power, this Silicon Valley tech giant lost the “language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing” (p. 60).
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Finance
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The Bank of Canada surprised markets today by cutting its key overnight lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point, citing the economic threat posed by plunging oil prices.
Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz will hold a news conference at 11:15 a.m. ET Wednesday from Ottawa to comment on the bank’s rate cut as well as the lowered growth outlook. CBC is livestreaming his remarks.
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The British Bankers Association (BBA), which represents organisations including Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, has written to the Chancellor warning that his push to make Britain a haven for virtual currencies could be putting the country at risk.
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By 2016 the richest 1% of people in the world will own over 50% of its wealth, according to a study by Oxfam.
The latest calculation shows an increase on the 48% of wealth owned by the wealthiest 1% in 2014.
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Billionaires, world leaders and pop stars are clogging up the skies with their private jets as they descend on the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to liaise over issues such as terrorism, the central banks and growing economic inequality.
Over the course of this week, approximately 1,700 private jets are expected to fly into the region, resulting airport traffic increasing by 10% which means that landing spots are in short supply.
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In Switzerland, a whistleblower has been found guilty of violating bank secrecy laws by giving information on offshore accounts to WikiLeaks. Rudolf Elmer headed the Cayman Islands office of the bank Julius Baer until his firing in 2002. In 2011, he publicly handed compact discs containing information on offshore account holders to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a bid to reveal what he called the “damaging” impact of hiding money offshore. Elmer’s attorney has vowed to appeal the guilty verdict, which comes with a suspended fine, but no prison time.
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A former private banker found has been found guilty in Switzerland of breaking the country’s strict secrecy laws by passing confidential client data to WikiLeaks in 2007.
Rudolf Elmer claims he was trying to expose rich tax evaders banking with his former employer, Julius Baer, which fired him in 2002.
Elmer’s lawyer, Ganden Tethong, says Zurich’s district court also found her client guilty of forging a document purporting to be a letter from the bank to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The mayor of Paris plans to sue Fox News for its reporting on the city in the wake of the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“When we’re insulted, and when we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”
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Censorship
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Sky Broadband have announced they will force web-filters on all customers, starting this week, unless the account-holder opts out.
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All ISPs promised David Cameron they would make all customers choose whether to use filters or not. Sky is not offering a choice however – they are imposing filtering unless customers opt out – an approach that the government rejected after running their own consultation. In addition, most households do not contain children so, Sky’s default-on approach seems over-reaching.
Could Sky Broadband be seeking to increase adoption of web filters through “nudge” tactics in order to avoid Government criticism for a lack of uptake? Public interest in activating filters has been low since the Government started pressuring ISPs to introduce them in summer 2013. Ofcom said in July 2014 that just 8% of Sky Broadband subscribers had switched them on. The same report showed a 34% adoption-rate for competitor TalkTalk, who promote filters aggressively, and have made them the default option for new subscribers for a long time. Nudge tactics rely on the principle that most people don’t bother changing defaults.
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As part of David Cameron’s plan to protect young internet users, broadband providers have been forced to offer an “unavoidable choice.” This impels new subscribers to decide whether they want to enable or disable blocks on adult content. However, UK consumers have already highlighted their dislike for such filters, with only one in every seven customers letting the big four UK ISPs guard them from porn and the darker parts of the internet. One of those major providers, Sky, saw just eight percent of customers enable the option before July 2013, but that statistic could change drastically as part of new measures announced today.
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Privacy
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“cryptography is bypassed, not penetrated”
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Microsoft’s Outlook email service was subject to a cyberattack over the weekend, just weeks after Google’s Gmail service was blocked in China.
On Monday, online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China. A MITM attack intrudes on online connections in order to monitor and control a channel, and may also be used to push connections into other areas — for example, turning a user towards a malicious rather than legitimate website.
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The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records. But is that the best way to catch a terrorist?
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The FBI wants to search through your electronic life. You may think it’s a given that the government is in the business of collecting everyone’s personal data — Big Brother run amok in defiance of the Constitution. But under the limits of the Fourth Amendment, nothing it finds can be used to prosecute its targets. Now the FBI is taking steps to carry out broad searches and data collection under the color of authority, making all of us more vulnerable to “fishing expeditions.”
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Inbox has the right idea, in that the protocol and API set it has devised are open source (GNU Affero GPL licensed), and the project is designed to appeal most directly to developers of email applications building on mobile platforms. A similar project both in its approach and its design is JMAP, a protocol proposed by FastMail. JMAP uses JSON to encompass and package all the possible requests and responses used for email: sending and receiving, calendaring, contacts, and so on.
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At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
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In the past, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics firm Palantir, has called wealth “culturally corrosive.” A former money manager for high-net-worth individuals, the cofounder of the CIA-backed data analytics firm has maintained that personal riches were of little importance to him, despite associating with some of the world’s wealthiest to raise funds for his company.
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Civil Rights
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On January 22, jailed American journalist Barrett Brown will finally learn his sentence. This had been expected to happen last month, on December 16, but the government unleashed a torrent of exhibits, supposedly to demonstrate “relevant conduct”, and wasted the day with testimony from an FBI agent, eventually leading the judge, Sam A. Lindsay, to decide that he needed more time to make his decision.
Judge Lindsay should sentence Mr. Brown to time served. The man has been in jail for 28 months now, and I’ve been advocating for him at each step of the way. By now, many people have heard his name, and much has been written about him. The popular perception of Mr. Brown is based on his work with Anonymous and his crowd-sourced research outfit Project PM. He’s noted as an activist who made an impact to exact greater transparency: helping to overthrow Middle Eastern dictatorships, and investigating private intelligence firms.
Not a spokesperson for the group, but one who thoroughly understood its potential for collaboration and effecting change, Brown holds some Anonymous operations closest to his heart: OpTunisia, OpBahrain, the hack of HBGary’s Aaron Barr and the investigation that followed, which was termed OpMetalGear. He focused on the secret surveillance regime at a time when it was regarded as a paranoid conspiracy, as in before Snowden. Because of his activist brand of journalism, people messed with him – starting with security contractors and confidential informants, and rising to the FBI. This is all true and known information.
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GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.
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A Hockessin man arrested about 30 minutes after multiple gunshots were fired near Vice President Joe Biden’s Greenville home says he was “accosted” during an altercation with New Castle County Police.
Rock Peters, 57, was not charged in connection with the shooting incident, The News Journal has learned. But he faces reckless endangering and resisting arrest charges after fleeing from an officer near the Biden estate and scuffling with two others just before 9 p.m., according to a police affidavit.
“They’re lying through their teeth,” Peters said Monday night during an interview at his Hockessin home, saying the officers were the aggressors.
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Midway through the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, one comment stands out. “A criminal case,” defense attorney Edward MacMahon told the jury at the outset, “is not a place where the CIA goes to get its reputation back.” But that’s where the CIA went with this trial in its first week — sending to the witness stand a procession of officials who attested to the agency’s virtues and fervently decried anyone who might provide a journalist with classified information.
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In another tweet, the activist explained that he has to pay 200 BHD (£350) bail if he wants to stay out of prison until the appeal.
Rajab, who is president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) was freed in May 2014 after serving two years in prison for his role in the pro-democracy uprising. He was arrested again last October and charged with publicly “insulting a public institution” on the microblogging site.
The Bahraini ministry of interior said they summoned Rajab “to interview him regarding tweets posted on his Twitter account that denigrated government institutions”.
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“There is no hairdresser privilege,” the judge presiding over the case, Leonie Brinkema, ruled.
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While the jury will likely neither note nor learn of them, there were details from last week’s testimony in the Jeffrey Sterling trial that resonated with two other notable cases involving the CIA: the New York Police Department’s spying on Muslims and the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.
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The 466-page handwritten manuscript was written in his single cell at Camp Echo in 2005. The Guardian and Canongate Books worked together to publish a declassified version. It still was censored by the United States government, and 2,500 black bars appear throughout the text accentuating the criminality described vividly by Slahi.
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Memoir serialised by Guardian tells how Mohamedou Ould Slahi endured savage beatings, death threats and sexual humiliation
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A Dutch court on Tuesday blocked the extradition of a man accused of having fought against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying it could not be ruled out that the CIA had been involved in his torture after his arrest in Pakistan.
Dutch court documents showed the suspect, a Dutch-Pakistani dual citizen named Sabir Khan, was tortured after his arrest by Pakistan’s ISI security service.
He faces charges in New York of conspiracy to commit murder and of supporting al-Qaida.
The court said the Netherlands could not transfer him because Dutch and international law prohibits the extradition of torture victims to countries that played a role in abuse.
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John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee to go to prison in connection with the agency’s torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he revealed information on torture to a reporter.
Kiriakou is the Central Intelligence Agency officer who told ABC News in 2007 that the CIA waterboarded suspected al-Qaeda prisoners after the September 11 attacks, namely Abu Zubaydah, thought to be a key al Qaeda official. Although he felt at the time that waterboarding probably saved lives, Kiriakou nevertheless came to view the practice as torture and later claimed he unwittingly understated how many times Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.
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Four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a junior member of Congress introduced a bill to establish a federal holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader.
Five decades later, the holiday is on the calendar, and that lawmaker, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), is now the longest-serving member of Congress.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Virgin Media, Vodafone and EE have promised to be more upfront with their subscribers about traffic management policies two and half years after rival, big name UK ISPs signed up to the voluntary “Open Internet Code”.
The telcos have also vowed not to choke the services of competitors, such as over-the-top players – Microsoft’s Skype for example, and the BBC’s iPlayer.
However, the code has long made it clear that it is perfectly acceptable for ISPs to throttle traffic to “manage” congestion or block sites and services based on a court order to, for example, cut off access to pirated material or to prevent illegal child abuse images from being served up on broadband networks.
BT, Sky, EE, KCOM, giffgaff, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone are signatories of the code, trade body the Broadband Stakeholders Group said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After signing an anti-piracy deal with Xunlei last year the MPAA is already suing the Chinese file-sharing giant. What went wrong is unclear but documents obtained by TorrentFreak reveal the toughest and most shocking set of anti-piracy demands to be found anywhere on the planet.
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Julia Reda, a politician for the German Pirate Party and member of the European Parliament, has this morning released her draft report for the overhaul of EU copyright. In her role as rapporteur, Reda says that EU copyright rules are “maladapted” to the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet.
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It would be something of an understatement to say that European copyright is a mess, with different rules applying in each of the 28 Member States, making cross-border cultural exchange and business hard to the point of impossibility. But worse than that inconsistency is the fact that European copyright is simply not fit for the digital age. There is now a huge gulf between what copyright allows, and what the public would like to do – and, in many cases, is already doing online, irrespective of the law. That was revealed in the results of the European Commission’s consultation on copyright last year – shown most dramatically in this interesting visual representation of the widely-differing views on various aspects.
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As that small sample makes clear, this is pretty heady stuff. The copyright industries will doubtless fight very hard against practically everything here, as is their wont when any change to copyright in favour of the public is proposed.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.20.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To make matters worse, Microsoft finds itself competing in mobile with companies it thought it had eliminated from the market — like Nokia for instance.
Microsoft may have bought the Finnish company’s mobile division back in 2011, but that hasn’t kept the “old” Nokia from keeping a hand in the mobile game, where it had once excelled.
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Desktop
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`Albert` is a relatively new quick launcher for Linux, which might remind you of Alfred (Mac) or Synapse (Linux). Using it, you can quickly launch applications, open files or perform web searches.
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Kernel Space
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For those interested in the annual Linux.Conf.Au conference that’s filled with tons of Linux/open-source technical talks but weren’t down in New Zealand last week for the event, the videos are available.
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Open source has come under fire by some recently for lacking enough diversity. Now some jokesters have responded by creating a fake Linux fork that pokes fun at feminism and diversity in software development.
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Not being a jerk doesn’t just mean tolerating noobs, though. Communities should have an established code of conduct which addresses both annoying and mean actors. When the code of contact is being repeatedly breached, the violator needs to be nudged in the right direction. When a community is welcoming and actively works to remain that way, it thrives. That’s how it can get the diversity of ideas and grow the technical competency that Linus Torvalds so desires.
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Another week, another -rc.
Fairly normal release, although I’d wish that by rc5 we’d have calmed down even further. But no, with some of the driver tree merges in particular, this is actually larger than rc4 was.
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Despite sounding fine when played by SMPlayer, the audio clips that sounded distorted/scratchy and too loud when played by Thunderbird also sounded that way when played by VLC. Then I discovered several other .wav files on various Web sites that sounded distorted when played by the browser’s Windows Media Player plug-in (Gecko Media Player). So the problem clearly was not caused by Thunderbird itself. I began to wonder if PulseAudio was the cause. So I adjusted PulseAudio’s sampling frequency, number of fragments and fragment size, and all the clips that previously sounded distorted and too loud now play fine. Here is what I did to fix the problem…
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The Paris Observatory has confirmed that, on the appointed day, atomic clocks will be programmed to add in 11:59:60 to compensate for the idiosyncratic nature of the Earth’s orbit. Linux- and Unix-based systems are expected to go tits up.
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People are less willing sometimes to brush the problem under the mat, and leave it up to vendors that have disclosures, like infinity long disclosure times,” he said. “I’m a huge believer in just disclosing, still somewhat responsibly, but security problems need to be made public — and there are people who argue, and have argued for decades, that you never want to talk about security problems because that only helps the black hats — and the fact is that I think you absolutely need to report them, and you need to report them in a reasonable time frame.
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Linus Torvalds has released yet another update for the Linux kernel 3.19 branch and this is the fifth Release Candidate in the series. The development cycle is getting closer to its end and that can be observed from the changelog.
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Graphics Stack
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A new stable NVIDIA driver has been released and the developers have made a series of very important improvements, implementing support for new video cards and Linux kernels.
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Benchmarks
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Like the reasoning for the mass OpenCL Linux comparison, the 2D benchmarks were done since having all of these graphics cards out and testing them on the latest proprietary drivers for the Unreal Engine 4 / Metro Redux game comparison. With not having done any big 2D performance comparison in a while, I ran these few extra tests to look at the 2D performance with the NVIDIA 346.22 driver compared to Catalyst 14.12 for the many different graphics cards.
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Applications
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As a Linux user, you always want to keep your files and folders up to date, and this is especially true in those situations where you can create a backup. This is why you have to use a tool that automatically syncs the content of two folders in order to keep them up to date. FreeFileSync is a utility that fits the bill quite nicely, since it automates the aforementioned process and makes it easy for you to compare as well as synchronize the content of any two different or similar files that are located on your computer or network.
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Documenting processes and systems or just keeping a diary of the daily happenings are things that many computer users are doing very often. RedNotebook is a professional application that allows you to create a log or journal of all those tasks as well as document issues with your network. The app can be seen as a professional journal for IT experts, although it can also be used by home users as well.
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PhotoQt 1.2 was released recently and it includes some important improvements, like better SVG support, XCF support, better handling of large folders (15,000+ files), shuffle and loop options for the slideshow and much more.
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PhotoQt is an image viewer written in Qt 5 with a very basic interface, yet many options under the hood, and a fullscreen mode by default. The latest release brings many new features and bug fixes.
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Data is growing both in volume and importance. As time goes on, the amount of data that we need to store is growing, and the data itself is becoming more and more critical for organizations. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to back up and restore this information quickly and reliably. Using cloud-based systems spreads out the data over many servers and locations.
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Proprietary
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A new Opera development version has been released and the makers have made a number of important improvements to the browser that include better bookmarks and new themes for the application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the biggest driving factors behind the design of Qt3D 2.0 is the ability to configure the renderer in order to accommodate custom rendering techniques. In this blog post I will explain how to render a scene in Qt3D with shadows.
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Games
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The issue is being a bit overblown though, as you need to do some pretty specific stuff to make it happen, and it isn’t just on Linux, the issue does exist in some form on Windows too. On Windows for example if you install Steam inside a folder with other data, it will remove that too…
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I have been following this realistic survival game for about a year now as they stated Linux support on their official website. Some of its main features include an infinite procedurally-generated world, dynamic weather, hunting, crafting and on top of all that it has great graphics.
They will soon be on Steam Early Access, but don’t expect Linux support at that time. The good news though, is the developers have verified that they didn’t forget penguin lovers, but just won’t deliver the game for us at the initial release.
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This is a game that flew under the radar a little bit since its Linux launch a couple of months ago. Son of Nor is an action adventure title set amidst rolling dunes, temples and oases. Challenging collectibles, environmental puzzles and four player coop are just some of the game’s highlights.
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Aspyr Media, one of the studios that have been doing some of the biggest and most important ports for the Linux platform, has revealed that it’s almost breaking even financially and this is actually great news.
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Aspyr Media has revealed that it is betting its future on the success of Valve’s SteamOS project, and that despite the tiny minority of machines running Linux is already approaching a break-even point.
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Move or Die, a new competitive party game developed and published on Steam by Those Awesome Guys studio, has been released for all the supported platforms, including Linux.
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Rich Geldreich, the former Valve developer associated with some of the game company’s past Linux and OpenGL projects, is getting close to releasing LZHAM v1.0 as his lossless data compression library.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Around 1999 I discovered an SUSE Linux live CD and I was fascinated with the open source communities who were behind this operating system and the different applications. But I was young and inexperienced. I thought that I had to use the industry standard tools to be competitive. As I grew up, I realised that they were just tools and I was the artist. These days I think that open source communities are more important than ever! They are like a torch in the dark.
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I know I know, the PIM sprint has already been last November, but in my defence (@David: !!!), the VDG and KDE as a whole has been so buzzing with activity in the meantime that I didn’t find the time to write the blog post I had meant to write about it. So here it is, better late than never.
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Krita is considered to be a digital painting application, but it’s best described as a raster graphics editor. No matter what you call it, the Paris 8 University has decided to drop Adobe’s Photoshop and to adopt Krita instead.
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As a part of my ongoing project “Adding new themes for KDE Pairs game”, a new theme ‘Stationery’ is added. The motivation behind selecting the particular theme lies on its simplicity. Stationery objects are very much familiar with pre-school children rather than other objects. Hence these stationery items can be used in the ‘Pairs’ game to develop their logical skills, rather than worrying about their familiarity with the domain.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Ubuntu developers have corrected a small issue with GTK+, which would allow users to bypass the lock screen in certain conditions. It might be a trivial matter, but it had to be fixed nonetheless.
According to the security notice, “Clemens Fries discovered that GTK+ allowed bypassing certain screen locks by using the menu key. An attacker with physical access could possibly use this flaw to gain access to a locked session.”
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The Linux Mint developers are not only working on the next iteration of the operating system, they are also trying to improve upon the Cinnamon desktop environment, which is also built by them.
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For the average desktop computer user I would recommend Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary and openSUSE as first choices with Debian, Fedora, Mageia and CentOS as secondary options. I would only choose Arch if you really want to control every aspect of your computer from top to bottom or you have an interest in learning more about the underpinnings of using Linux.
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Manjaro Xfce 0.9.0 Pre1, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, is now ready for testing and download.
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Reviews
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How shall I put it? Let there be no doubt. Manjaro 0.8.11 is a better version than 0.8.5 that I tested a while back. But calling it the best and most awesomest KDE around, as I’ve seen here and there in various forums and social media sites is literally pushing it. Now, it does deserve a lot of praise, A LOT, regarding its visual appearance. However, that is not enough to distract from or reduce the impact of the underlying system bugs.
Desktop effects, printing, broken Steam packages, weird menu entries, misbehaving media player, an identity-confused collection of software, installation issues, missing swap use and very high memory consumption, all of these are big problems that the Manjaro dev team needs to address. But overall, the important thing here is progress.
But if you’re asking me, the distro needs to simplify its mission statement, and focus on the core message of practicality. Hopefully, we will see that happen soon. Let’s call it the emergence of Manjaro into its own rightful place. At the moment, it’s trying to do so much, at the same time, it’s like a juggler with one ball too many. Grade wise? Hmmm, well, something like 7.5-8/10, and I am being generous. However, if all else fails, it so damn beautiful. Definitely one of the top three. Imagine Plasma 5 there. Looking forward to the next version.
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I downloaded the most recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” which is said to feature Unity 8 running on Mir. I then tried running the technology preview in VirtualBox and on a desktop machine. When running in VirtualBox, at first Ubuntu with Unity 8 seemed quite similar to Ubuntu running the classic Unity desktop. The system booted, asked if I would like to try running the desktop in live mode or if I would like to install the operating system. Attempting to try the live desktop mode brought me to a login screen. I was unable to login or reach a terminal from the login page and so I rebooted my VirtualBox instance and tried installing Ubuntu’s Vivid preview.
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If you are looking for a trouble free KDE distro for long term use, look no further than Linux Mint. The Linux Mint 17.1 KDE is perhaps the best KDE distro I’ve used in quite sometime. Though it presents the stock KDE DE but it irons out a lot of bugs and presents a really stable, smooth to use and super efficient distro. The RAM and CPU consumption is one of the lowest I have noted among KDE spins, the boot time is decent and the battery life is simply the best among Linux operating systems. It symbolizes the amazing work done by the developers before releasing a distro. I wish all other distros were like Linux Mint.
So, by now you have understood that Mint 17.1 KDE is definitely recommended from my side for all users looking for a good KDE distro devoid of bloat and is very efficient. I go with the highest score I ever gave to a KDE distro for Linux Mint 17.1 KDE.
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New Releases
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Some of you might already noticed that some of our developers started in September last year to work on our next release series we call Bellatrix (0.9.0). With this series we switch over to a more modern graphical installer framework called Calamares.
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MakuluLinux Cinnamon Edition 2.0 [MCDE] is now live, Read the release notes and grab your copy by clicking here, or via the Cinnamon section in menu above. Please take a minute to read the release notes, they give vital information about the release.
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Screenshots
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Ballnux/SUSE
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It’s been more than five years since SUSE delivered its last full release, and a lot has happened to the company during that time. In our testing we find that SUSE Linux 12 has been worth the wait. SUSE 12 is a broad set of Linux distributions ranging from desktop through enterprise level. We tested several instances and found them quite ready for enterprise use. All in all, SUSE 12 is a worthy competitor to Red Hat and Ubuntu in the enterprise Linux market.
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Red Hat Family
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An ambitious proposal is seeking to make Fedora 23 — the Linux distribution release due out around October — 64-bit-only for both x86 and ARM architectures.
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Fedora
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So Fedora Workstation 21 is done and out and I am extremely pleased to see the positive reception and great reviews. But we are not resting on our laurels here and are already busy planning for the Fedora Workstation 22 release. As many of you might know Fedora Workstation 22 is going to come up relatively fast, so we only have about 6 more weeks of development on it feature the freezes starts to kick inn. Luckily we have a relatively long list of items that we started working on during the Fedora Workstation 21 cycle that is nearing completing and thus should make the next release. We are of course also working on bigger long term developments that you should maybe see the first outline of in Fedora 22, but not the final version. I thought it would be nice to summarize some of the bigger items we expect to land and link to the relevant blogs and announcements for each one.
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Since the middle of last week we’ve been aware of some bugs with the PackageKit stack. The initial bug report was for offline updates failing, but during testing of the fix for that, various other bugs were identified which could potentially cause problems with many PackageKit transactions – that’s mostly documented in this report. Mostly, though, folks only seem to have been noticing issues since libhif 0.1.7 came out as an update in late December.
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In Fedora Infrastructure, all our applications are Free software. It’s one of our base requirements, allowing anyone out there to examine source, improve or modify things. Sometimes, just having the source of an application isn’t enough, you need the raw data to figure out some issue or generate some metric or support a theory.
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While Wayland by default replacing the X.Org Server as the default display environment has been talked about for a while within the next-generation Fedora world, it looks like Fedora 23 could finally be the time that the switch happens.
Fedora 23 already has ambitious possibilities like only supporting 64-bit software while one of the more likely proposals is enabling Wayland by default. With Fedora 21, Wayland is shipped with Fedora Workstation as a log-in-time switch for GNOME, but the X.Org Server is still depended upon. With Fedora 22, the Wayland experience will be even better and then for Fedora 23 is when there might be the switch.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting events in five different areas every week. Here are the five events for January 16th, 2015:
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Debian Family
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Spamassassin hasn’t been providing rules as part of the upstream package for some time. In Debian, we include a snapshot of the ruleset from an essentially arbitrary point in time in our packages. We do this so Spamassassin will work “out of the box” on Debian systems. People who install spamassassin from source must download rules using spamassassin’s updates channel. The typical way to use this service is to use cron or something similar to periodically check for rule changes via this service. This allows the anti-spam community to quickly adapt to changes in spammer tactics, and for you to actually benefit from their work by taking advantage of their newer, presumably more accurate, rules. It also allows for quick reaction to issues such as the one described in bug 738872 and 774768.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced that an unzip exploit has been found and fixed for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
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Mars One is a project that aims to put people on planet Mars by 2025, before NASA and everyone else. The kicker is that it’s designed as a one-way trip for the colonists. The good news, if you can call it that, is that they seem to be favoring Linux.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint project is using Ubuntu as its base and there is even a branch that’s using Debian, but it looks that for the moment it won’t be using systemd as the default init system.
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Bodhi Linux founder, who recently resigned from the project, has announced that he’s decided to return. Accompanying that news was also the announcement for Bodhi Linux 3.0 RC2. Elsewhere, Gary Newell briefly recaps the top 10 distributions of 2014 and Phoronix.com is reporting that Fedora 23 is likely to default to Wayland. Adam Williamson introduces Updatrex™ in response to PackageKit bug and Softpedia.com said today that Ubuntu will probably be the first operating system on Mars.
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Just over four months ago I announced that I was stepping down from the active role I had maintained in the Bodhi Linux project since it started a little over four years ago. Today I am happy to share that I am returning in my full capacity as project manager/lead developer and I come bearing gifts!
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First, the 338TP uses the .338 Lapua Magnum long-range rifle for its base. This rifle started as a design for a US Marine sniper rifle. Then, to acquire the target, the rifle uses a laser to enable you to “tag” your target. More than just a laser-targeting system, its sensors also track wind speed, direction, temperature, and barometric pressure. As serious shooters know, all of these factors must be taken into account for an accurate shot at great ranges.
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An “EVB” Kickstarter project replaces the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot’s ARM9 brick with a BeagleBone Black, adding performance, expandability, and sensors.
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Samsung Electronics Co. have revealed that they plan to sell 30 million Tizen TVs in 2015, according to an Industry source. Samsung aim to ship an estimated 60 million TVs in 2015 with Tizen TVs expected to be over 50% of that figure. These will be using the new quantum-dot display technology which has the capability of showing 1 billion colours, which is 64 times more than what current TV models can perform.
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Israel’s maker of small fanless computers CompuLab has revealed a tiny computer for Linux lovers, the MintBox Mini. A fifth of the size of the original MintBox, which was based on the company’s fit-PC3 and launched in 2012, the silent, fanless Mini will come with a quad-core processor, solid state storage and be available in the second quarter of 2015 for US$295.
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Phones
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Android
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In general, your Android device probably already includes a fair bit of Lollipop features — even if you don’t actually have the full system upgrade installed. The only exceptions would be hopelessly outdated devices that simply can’t run newer Google Play Services and Google Search apps, or users who prefer updating their apps manually and haven’t gotten around to it in the last several weeks.
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The wait is finally over. OnePlus One owners can rest their curiosity as the company has decided to shower the first stable version of CyanogenMod-based Android 5.0 Lollipop update over its flagship smartphone. The updated ROM will be rolled out to OnePlus One owners in India starting next month, one of the top CM engineers revealed during an interview with Android Central.
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Starter apps are the ones you want to use to ensure your child’s digital journey starts with a bang and not with a thud. These introductory apps set the stage for what kids can expect going forward. But your child’s age is relevant, so the following five starter apps — selected for their ability to provide a positive experience — are divided into two age categories. And iOS owners, these apps are available on your devices as well.
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So, is Google setting more than half its users up for a fall? In practice this may not have a huge impact for most. It may encourage phone manufacturers and the telecoms companies that sell them on to us to be more forthcoming with software updates for their devices, reducing the number of devices running out-of-date software.
Ultimately, the key message is that we need to start thinking of mobile devices as computers, not just phones, with all the caveats about security software, updates and precautions which that entails. This could be the tough love from Google that pushes people in that direction.
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With a Nexus Android 5.0.2 Lollipop release date now here for two more devices, we want to offer up some helpful tips to Nexus users poised to receive the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update from Google. These tips should help make release day go a lot smoother for Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 users looking to make the move.
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This is the Gold-East MS937, and it looks a lot like the iPhone 6. Everything from the size of the bezels along the side of the screen to the gold trim look reminiscent of the iPhone.
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Just a few weeks after Samsung started pushing out the Lollipop update to Galaxy S5 owners in Poland and Spain, reports are now indicating the update has gone live in the United Kingdom.
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There have been quite a few reports in the media announcing the end of Google Glass. Some journalists have even written what amounts to obituaries for the much-maligned Glass technology. But is Google Glass really going away? I think not and in this column I’ll tell you why Glass 2.0 just might be the next iPod.
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One of the most interesting new companies leveraging an open source Apache project has to be Mesosphere, which OStatic covered in a recent post. The company offers a “data center operating system” (DCOS) built on the open source Apache Mesos project, and has announced a recent round of $36M in Series B funding. New investor Khosla Ventures led the round, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and others.
According to Mesosphere’s leaders, the tech industry now needs a new type of operating system to automate the various tools used in the agile IT era. They argure that developers and operators don’t need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacenters.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 35 has been pushed to the Stable channel recently by Mozilla and while the majority of users did not notice any incompatibilities or issues, some users noticed that one or multiple of installed browser add-ons stopped working suddenly.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Open source NoSQL companies are making headlines for investment figures, but they’re offering knowledge and building communities too
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Google is rapidly becoming our Internet overlords, if they aren’t already. Gmail and Chrome are not Google products…we are the products. We are the marketable items. Gmail and Chrome are simply the useful playgrounds given to us in order for them to collect our data. Why does the choice between a red pill and a blue pill come to mind?
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BSD
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FreeBSD hasn’t been out in the clouds that much but that may be changing. DigitalOcean has announced FreeBSD on their cloud and thats a company who has till now only done Linux as their OS. Someone quickly posted the Dmesg output to show it was a real thing too. This could be a very special year for FreeBSD.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Indeed it’s been made using Free Software only and goes through the work of the foundation for the past thirty years.
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The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.4.5.
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Project Releases
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This release fixes the integration with recent systemd (as in Debian Jessie), makes logging more consistent and eases integration into downstream distributions. It’s available in Debian Sid and Jessie and will show up in Wheezy-backports soon.
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QEMU 2.2 was just released last month while already for QEMU 2.3 is a long list of changes.
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Public Services/Government
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MIMO, France’s inter-ministerial working group on free software, is expanding its reach. The responsibility of the working group now includes the selection and certification of solutions that allow large-scale desktop management, including inventory management and software deployment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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One professor at the University of Illinois thought textbooks were getting too expensive, so he partnered with other educators to write their own book and make it available online to download for free.
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Open Hardware
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First, what do I mean by open hardware? I mean that the components that make up a device are available for the user to see. No secret formulas. The ingredients are completely transparent, and if you chose, you can source the raw parts and assemble them yourself. You can also learn from the process of assembly and with a team spirit share any problems encountered, then improving the formula of the device. For example, you could suggest better parts or improve the code to make it run faster.
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Programming
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At some point last year I started to write a Launchpad API client in Ruby, for the very simple reason that Kubuntu CI tooling is almost entirely written in Ruby and I wanted to avoid round tripping into Python to use launchpadlib for trivial things such as querying the version of a package in a PPA. Not only would that be slightly slower it also raises the ever so unfortunate problem of how to exchange data between Ruby and Python.
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Security
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The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
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To do the controlling the NSA has to replicate the total world in realtime in their computer model!! The whistleblowers I read about and spoke to had in fact suggested to only filter the massive incoming flow of surveillance data, to extract certain patterns, and NOT STORE IT or keep files updated about all individual citizens. The generals decided to do that total storage We already see the first symptoms by USA and the five eyes countries of ‘simplification’ by law enforcement and legal system that perform arrests, judgement and jailing based on secret info provided by the NSA. Many other things are already going wrong in conflict with the Constitution and Human Rights. Civilisation is only a thin layer, can be gone in minutes.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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When Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 he warned against the growing menace to democracy of “the military-industrial complex,” to which The Nation devoted an entire issue in October of 1961 authored by Fred Cook, who more or less single-handedly revived the muckraking tradition in the United States with his issue-length investigations in the 1950s of the CIA, the FBI and the culture of political corruption in New York City. Here, in “Juggernaut: The Warfare State,” Cook investigated and expanded on Eisenhower’s warning, which had, up to that point, received relatively little attention in the mainstream press.
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On Sunday morning’s Reliable Sources, The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill reiterated his critique of cable news’ habit of hosting “terror experts” who have financial stakes in prolonged and expanded military conflicts.
The concept of terror experts/analysts was heightened in the past couple weeks following the Paris attack, and some outlandish statements by the likes of “terror expert” Steve Emerson.
“CNN has some great reporters on the ground,” Scahill said. “When you get into this kind of fear-generating territory is when you have these so-called ‘terror analysts’ on the air, many of whom also work for risk consultancy firms that benefit from the idea of making us afraid.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Humans are ‘eating away at our own life support systems’ at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years, two new research papers say
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Finance
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Putin did not invade Ukraine to invade Ukraine, but as a genius invasion against the U.S. Dollar. Almost all media have missed the high-level geopolitical chess at play and focused so narrowly on the individual moves, that they’re completely missing the big picture. There’s currently a war about what reserve currency the world should use – and the U.S. is poised to lose.
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Two companies, handling the collection of the funding for Wikileaks, have demanded that Valitor, which handles VISA in Iceland, should be made bankrupt due to an unpaid claim for damages, amounting to about 10 billion kronas (approx: 75 million dollars) with interests.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Mind pollution has permeated the internet. Computer articles are mostly written from the point of view of a person who uses Microsoft products. The assumption is that everyone uses Microsoft Windows and Windows software. To be fair there are a few OSX and Linux articles. Heaven help you if you use something really unusual like Plan 9 or HaikuOS. I can only assume those folks have a lot of patience and a strong will.
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Stelter: “I’m Worried That All Of This Content On Fox … Plays Into A Narrative That Portrays Muslims As The Other, As Somehow Evil”
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Censorship
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Want to get the latest issue of the world’s most controversial magazine but can’t get your hands on a paper copy? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that.
The Charlie Hebdo app features the so-called “survivors’ issue” of the satirical magazine, which sold out within minutes in France and across Europe this week. Versions are available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Once downloaded, users can purchase the latest edition for $2.99.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Prior to Wallenberg’s arrival as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest in July 1944, some 430,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in only 10 weeks — the fastest, cruelest, and most efficient mass murders of the Nazi genocide. Yet Wallenberg rescued more Hungarian Jews than any single government, notably saving 20,000 by issuing Schutzpasses, documents conferring diplomatic immunity. He even went to the trains as mass deportations were underway, distributing Schutzpasses to people otherwise consigned to death.
Wallenberg saved an additional 32,000 by establishing dozens of safe houses in a diplomatic zone protected by neutral legations. He organized hospitals, soup kitchens and childcare centres, and when thousands of Jews were sent on a 200-kilometre death march in November 1944, he followed alongside, distributing improvised Schutzpasses, as well as food and medical supplies.
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“Guantánamo is a betrayal of American values,” the former military officers wrote. “The prison is a symbol of torture and justice delayed. More than a decade after it opened, Guantánamo remains a recruiting poster for terrorists, which makes us all less safe.”
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On Friday, Depression Quest developer and doxing victim Zoe Quinn launched an online “anti-harassment task force” toolset, staffed by volunteers familiar with such attacks, to assist victims of a recent swell of “doxing” and “swatting” attacks.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The new rules triggered a lively debate by the US public, with users leaving four million online comments on the FCC website.
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President Obama’s strong support for community internet networks drew sharp criticism on Wednesday from cable and telecom industry groups, as well as Republican lawmakers who called the White House’s plan to boost local internet coverage and speeds an unacceptable breach of “states’ rights.”
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DRM
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When an incomplete and early version of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked to torrent sites in 2009, Twentieth Century Fox announced that the uploader “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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EU copyright rules simply aren’t suited to cope with the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet…
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Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij is currently the last person serving his sentence for his involvement with the notorious torrent site. To make his stay in prison a little easier he’s hoping to receive letters, cards and other goodies from people around the world.
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Kim Dotcom has never been shy. And in December 2011, roughly a month before things for Dotcom were set to drastically change, he still oozed with bravado: Dotcom released a song (“The Megaupload Song”) in conjunction with producer Printz Board. It featured a number of major pop stars—including the likes of Kanye West, Jamie Foxx, and Serena Williams—all singing that they “love Megaupload.” If the star power wasn’t enough, Dotcom placed an exclamation point at the end. In the lyrics, he claimed that Megaupload comprised four percent of all Internet traffic. He rapped that the site received 50 million hits daily.
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With a rather peculiar takedown request Hollywood is going after OpenCulture.com, one of the largest collections of cultural and educational media online. According to a takedown notices the MPAA sent to Google, Open Culture’s list of 700 free public domain movies contains copyright infringing material.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.18.15
Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I want to buy an inexpensive, low to medium-end notebook that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu. I want it to have hardware that is supported by the latest Linux kernel so I can put any GNU/Linux distribution on it that I want. I want it to look nice, you know, like all those fancy HP Stream notebooks and Chromebooks that you’re selling. I want it to cost $300 to $450.
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Desktop
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We need that choice everywhere to make the world of IT a very different place. Go ahead, retailers, offer GNU/Linux and that other OS on more or less identical hardware and see what your customers want. Aren’t they always right? I believe when consumers first got a crack at GNU/Linux on the netbook, that movement should have spread to all PCs but was stifled by M$ and “partners”. It’s time that was revisited and the supply chain starts producing what the consumer wants.
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Kernel Space
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Sometimes in life YOU have to be the wolverine, and fight for what’s yours with tooth and claw! Reach inside and unleash your inner wolverine. It’s in there and it’s waiting for you to use it when the need arises to defend yourself or what’s yours. So if you go into open source or anything else, stand up for yourself when you need to and don’t let anybody walk all over you.
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Are you all thumbs when it comes to Linux? If you follow [Chris]’s guide to building a handheld Linux terminal, that particular condition could work to your advantage. His pocket-sized machine is perfect for practicing command line-fu and honing your scripting skills on the go.
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While Google’s Chrome OS supports asynchronous device/driver probing, the mainline Linux kernel does not. However, patches are working toward this feat in order to speed up the kernel’s boot process for hardware/drivers that are slow at probing.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel developers are in the process of landing their GLSL shader cache into mainline Mesa.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The sequel to the puzzle racer Audiosurf is now in the early-access phase and is also available for Linux.
In the “classic” game mode MONO, the player controls a spaceship on a track that matches the music the player has selected from his music library.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma and Konversation, I’ve been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby last year). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English.
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These and more features and bug fixes are available on latest master version of Marble. It still needs some polishing and improvements but you can start using/testing it already.
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Phones
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I just received an email on Sailfish Developer Mailing List regarding the Sailfish OS road map for 2015 which is a rather long one but worth reading. I decided to share it with you as it’s important to know where we’re going with our devices in the coming year.
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Android
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Android Lollipop is a HUGE update that sees Google taking its already mature platform several steps further. The Big G has tightened up nearly every element of its mobile platform, refining the look and feel of Android across the board, as well as touching up back-end tools and protocols to make the platform even more efficient.
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This weekend ownCloud turns 5 (5 years old, not 5.0 :P), congratulations to Frank Karlitschek and the entire ownCloud community!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) continues to strengthen the region’s free and open source ICT service providers. The region’s Technology Support Centre (BILIB) is helping companies pilot cloud solutions based on this type of software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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When Professor Jonathan Tomkin went looking for a textbook to use in his introductory Earth Systems class, nothing was quite right.
He couldn’t find a book that he felt was worth the high price tag for students. So he put one together with a few colleagues — for free.
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Science
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We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
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Health/Nutrition
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Before it was shadowed by the heinous attacks in Paris, France last week, it emerged that the NHS is in a grim state. Numerous hospitals across the UK declared major incidents.
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One of the many messes the United States is leaving behind as it formally withdraws from Afghanistan is that it’s more or less a narco state. Despite the United States spending nearly $8 billion to fight the Afghan narcotics trade, the country is producing more opium than ever. It’s unlikely to get better anytime soon: Last month, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan “are no longer a top priority.”
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Militant Group Has Gained Territory Despite U.S.-Led Strikes, Raising Concerns of the Obama Administration’s Mideast Strategy.
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At 11 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2007, 10 F-15 fighter bombers climbed into the sky from the Israeli military base Ramat David, just south of Haifa. They headed for the Mediterranean Sea, officially for a training mission. A half hour later, three of the planes were ordered to return to base while the others changed course, heading over Turkey toward the Syrian border. There, they eliminated a radar station with electronic jamming signals and, after 18 more minutes, reached the city of Deir al-Zor, located on the banks of the Euphrates River. Their target was a complex of structures known as Kibar, just east of the city. The Israelis fired away, completely destroying the factory using Maverick missiles and 500 kilogram bombs.
The pilots returned to base without incident and Operation Orchard was brought to a successful conclusion. In Jerusalem, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his closest advisors were in a self-congratulatory mood, convinced as they were that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was seeking to build a nuclear weapon and that Kibar was the almost-completed facility where that construction was to take place. They believed that their dangerous operation had saved the world from immense harm.
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In a SPIEGEL interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses the dangers of poor relations between Russia and the West in the Ukraine crisis, saying there is a danger that things could get worse. Germany, he says, has a significant role to play.
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Chinese army hackers apparently caused more than $100 million worth of damage to U.S. Department of Defense networks, according to NSA research detailed in documents from the Edward Snowden cache.
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Notwithstanding the president’s endorsement, a legislative attempt at rewriting the rules for metadata collection and storage by way of Congress came two votes short of advancing when the USA Freedom Act failed in the Senate in November.
According to Volz, however, the forthcoming report will indeed include details about what’s been accomplished as far as adjusting policies for metadata collection goes, along with information concerning a proposed technological solution to the dragnet surveillance issue described in a report released on Thursday by the National Research Council. That report – assembled in response to the Presidential Policy Directive 28 the White House issued one year ago in concert with Obama’s Jan. 17 remarks – concluded that “no software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence, but methods can be developed to more effectively conduct targeted collection and to control the usage of collected data.”
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Allowing US private sector actors to conduct offensive, retaliatory cyber attacks deserve some consideration, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said at a cybersecurity conference.
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A CIA drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki also killed another US citizen, Samir Khan – the FBI had considered recruiting him as al-Qaeda informant.
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PESHAWAR: At least seven suspected militants have been killed while four others were injured in a US drone strike near the Pak-Afghan border in South Waziristan Agency.
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The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies.
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Eyewitnesses and a Syrian opposition human rights organization claim an unannounced U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 civilians in in a government building located in a small city in the country’s north.
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The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan by the United States dropped by more than 32 per cent in 2014 as compared with the previous year, according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies’ (PIPS) Pakistan Security Report 2014. A total of 21 strikes were reported last year, killing an estimated 144 and wounding 29 over a period of six months.
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When the U.S. targets a person for murder, it kills 27 additional people.
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You might not have noticed, but the world has acquired a new country. With its own capital, army and self-styled “emir,” this domain possesses some of the features of statehood. But don’t expect an application to join the United Nations: the consuming ambition of this realm is to reverse just about every facet of human progress achieved over the past millennium.
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For more than a decade, there have been drone and aircraft strikes in countries including Yemen and Pakistan and allegations that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of civilians have been killed. For the first time, the U.S. government has admitted that there may be civilian deaths in the campaign against ISIL as well. CCTV America’s Jim Spellman reported this story from Washington, D.C.
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Imagine living in a town or neighborhood where a serial killer is on the loose. The killer’s primary weapon is a pipe bomb filled with small metal projectiles like BBs and nails. The bombs are designed to kill and maim those in the vicinity of the explosion. The killer’s weapons are usually aimed at male targets, but quite often several others in the vicinity are also killed, including women and children. Oftentimes, a note is sent to the media after the attacks warning of future attacks unless the people being targeted give in to the killer or killers’ demands. The fact of the attacks’ unpredictability has created a perennial fear in the region, leaving every resident uncertain of their future and their family’s safety.
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Security forces in Niger used tear gas to disperse hundreds of opposition supporters taking part in a banned demonstration in the capital Niamey.
The political altercation came after 10 people were killed in two days of violent protests against a French publication’s cartoon depicting Islam’s prophet.
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The U.S. might at this point retain close to exclusive control over deadly drone warfare but it has neverthless created an easy to imitate model of targeted violence where the claimed legitimacy of the violence is not defined by its instruments or the authority of its perpetrators but simply by the idea that the targets are not innocent.
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A woman accused of setting fire to her newborn baby girl in the middle of a road has been charged with murder.
Burlington County prosecutors said Hyphernkemberly Dorvilier, 22, of Pemberton Township, New Jersey, was in custody on 500,000 dollars (£331,000) bail. She tried to flee after starting the fire but was detained by residents, according to a witness.
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From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union until that crisp September morning of 2001, Americans lived without the specter of fear. Our sense of security was shattered on that day and our country has spent the better part of the past decade striving and fighting to restore what was lost.
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Isolation and desperation are the likely cause of young men becoming “terrorists,” argues Larry Beck.
The “terrorists” have struck again, offering up last week’s version of mindless violence in the name of some cause. When this happens, I am appalled at the violence, heartbroken that innocents usually die and always left wondering what it is about some causes that seemingly provide a framework for destruction. This is particularly so when I can’t figure out what the cause really is.
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Transparency Reporting
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1. How would you describe the current situation of investigative journalism in the UK?
I think it’s a mixed situation as always. There’s certainly a lot of interest in investigative journalism, with a lot of people taking the initiative to launch their own projects. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been particularly notable in that respect, but also the work of Brown Moses stands out.
Crowdfunding in particular is playing an increasing role (one of my distance learning students at Birmingham City University raised over $6000 for her investigation), but also campaigners and activists publishing their investigations, and data journalism techniques being used by a wider number of people.
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One of the grossest hypocrisies of Washington officialdom is the willingness to denounce leaks of some classified information and to countenance leaks of other classified information. But the gap between indignant pretense and standard practice has widened into a chasm in recent years, with Barack Obama’s administration prosecuting leakers in record numbers while protecting its own. Selective prosecution of leaks in the name of national security has never been more extreme.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A Texas hunting club was once again scheduled on Saturday to auction off a chance to kill a large animal whose numbers are dwindling, a year after it faced international criticism over doing the same with a permit to shoot an endangered black rhino.
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I don’t know how we missed this chart on its first go-around (it was created by Eli Dourado in May 2014, using data extrapolated from a 2013 op-ed by Jon Mooallem, who spent the summer of that year keeping track of power outages caused by squirrels), but it is everything, and you deserve to know that it exists.
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Finance
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The future demands a new political consciousness. We can’t just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.
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For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
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Nearly three years after he famously said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” former presidential nominee Mitt Romney told Republicans in a speech Friday night the party must focus on helping “lift people out of poverty.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981.
Despite Casey being under investigation by Congress for being involved in a major disinformation plot involving the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi in 1981, and despite Casey arguing on the record that the CIA should have a legal right to spread disinformation via the mainstream news that same year, this quote continues to be argued by people who weren’t there and apparently cannot believe a CIA Director would ever say such a thing.
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Censorship
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Here is what they say about themselves: “Index on Censorship is an international organization that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.”
Reidy wrote a scathing article about me and others who dared to question the right of people to object to an Irish Famine sitcom. The idea for the sitcom was recently made public.
Padraig waxed eloquently and with lots of anger against people who would dream of censoring such a remarkable project as a sitcom about Ireland’s Holocaust that Britain’s Channel 4 is considering.
He continued his rant in the Irish Examiner newspaper during the week, slamming those who dared to think that the Famine was not a fit subject for humor.
I decided to write a response to the Index on Censorship, given that he had certain facts wrong about my contribution, especially the one that I had called for the show to be banned.Help! I’m censored on Famine sitcom by anti-censorship mag
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Twitter and Turkey have a bit of a love-hate-hate-hate-hate relationship, insofar as Twitter users love to publish unflattering facts about the government, and the government hates that and tries to get Twitter to censor messages. In this particular case, the government is threatening to outright block Twitter unless it takes down “offending” messages.
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On his way to the Philippines this week, the Pope was asked to pronounce on the question that has been on everyone’s minds: What limits should we draw around freedom of expression? The Pope answered, quite sweetly, that he would punch in the nose anyone who swore at his late mother. Then, more troublingly, he said, “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith. … There is a limit.”
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Regarding Leon Pitt’s letter (“The Interview,” Jan. 6 Review-Journal), it seems he would like some form of censorship for movies and how the media portray certain aspects of a war we did not ask for. The fact that he is able to express his opinion in a daily publication shouldn’t be lost on him.
“Saturday Night Live” isn’t a movie, but every weekend since 1975, it has lampooned every sitting president, former presidents and many other elected officials. Although the show never did an assassination skit, the political skits aired on “SNL” would not be seen in North Korea — or many other countries, for that matter — because of the basic lack of freedom.
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British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “in a free society, there is a right to cause offense about someone’s religion,” taking issue with Pope Francis’ assertion that there are “limits” to free speech.
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Says his condemnation of Paris attack was to support freedom of expression but sees ‘tricky calculus’ in countries where that’s restricted
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China’s most popular television drama has been re-edited to get rid of the plunging necklines featured in the show.
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Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said there should be no censorship for anyone above the age of 16. The director, who was in Delhi for a panel discussion with FICCI Ladies Organisation, said if a person can vote, he can censor a film too.
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On Sky News, former Charlie Hebdo journalist Caroline Fourest was trying to explain how “crazy” it is that certain journalism mills in the United Kingdom won’t show the cover of the latest edition of the magazine. Well, Sky News provided a stronger explanation than Fourest ever could have. Watch some memorable seat-of-the-pants censorship, live.
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In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, the principal message has been, quite rightly, to defend free expression and to condemn those who would use violence to respond to messages they dislike. Yet at the same time, the French Ministry of Justice has ordered prosecutors to enforce with “utmost vigor” a law that itself imposes violence, albeit of the state-sanctioned variety, on speech whose messages the French majority dislikes.
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On the day another cartoonist victim was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, the pope came as near as dammit to suggesting that Charlie Hebdo had it coming. “One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith,” he said.
Oh yes, you can. You may not choose to. It may not be wise or polite or kind – but you can. And to show you can, without being gunned down, Charlie Hebdo has just gone on sale in the UK, in bolder outlets, proudly defiant with an image of Muhammad on the cover – though with a tear and a kindly thought: “All is forgiven.”
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Arrests for speech at a march in support of free speech? Mais oui!
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Abby Martin discusses the flogging of a Saudi Arabian blogger for insulting Islam and the State Department’s non-reaction to the event, plus the hypocritical arrest of a French comedian for his controversial social media comments in the wake of a mass demonstration in Paris defending free speech.
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Privacy
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The NSA’s mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars — a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.
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The U.S. government amassed a secret law enforcement database of Americans’ outbound overseas telephone calls through administrative subpoenas issued to multiple phone companies for more than a decade, according to officials and a government affidavit made public Thursday.
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The database only stored metadata, which is the information regarding what phone number is calling where, when the call took place and the duration of the call. The content of the calls was not stored. The data was collected for the Drug Enforcement Administration to be able to monitor calls made by U.S. citizens connecting with people in countries “determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.”
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Yet another secret U.S. government database containing the phone records of American citizens has been revealed this week.
Disclosed in a new court filing, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is said to contain a record of calls made to and from foreign countries by Americans. Metadata from the calls are collected through the use of administrative subpoenas, which can be issued by the DEA without prior judicial oversight.
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…fear that the spread of encryption globally would cause NSA to “go dark.”
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We live in remarkable, transformative times. We have the library of Alexandria at our fingertips; all the recorded knowledge of the world is being digitized and made available through the Internet Archive, a free, non-profit digital library offering universal access to books, music, knowledge, news and web pages.
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Following the recent data breaches at Sony and the attacks at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, certain politicians have wasted no time calling for increased government surveillance, broader anti-hacking statutes (with stiffer penalties), and, in the case of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a call to limit non-government use of encryption technologies. Oddly enough, a leaked cybersecurity report from the U.S. government pointed out just how important crypto is to everyday internet functionality.
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President Barack Obama said Friday that police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.
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New Snowden documents show that the NSA and its allies are laughing at the rest of the world. National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet.The new documents presented by Der Spiegel show that NSA surveillance programs are at the foundation of efforts to create sophisticated digita
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A team of nine journalists including Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras have just published another massive collection of classified records obtained by Edward Snowden. The trove of documents, published on Der Spiegel, show that the National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet. Der Spiegel reports that the intelligence agencies are working towards the ability to infiltrate and disable computer networks — potentially giving them the ability to disrupt critical utilities and other infrastructure. And the NSA and GCHQ think they’re so far ahead of everyone else, they’re laughing about it.
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We meet a former FBI undercover agent, Edwards Snowden’s lawyer, and journalists including Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, who are publicizing his findings. Greenberg speaks of a cat-and-mouse game in which the “mice” are challenging the secrecy of the surveillance state. We also meet and hear from Snowden himself, as well as officials from inside the intelligence community.
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Incidentally, the NSA is only one of 16 US intelligence services, together employing perhaps some 200,000 spies.
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When it comes to intelligence, everybody, be they democracies, dictatorships, or in between, wants it all.
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It’s difficult to establish an exact dollar amount, but “experts have estimated that losses to the U.S. cloud industry alone could reach (US)$180 billion over the next three years. Additionally, major U.S. tech companies like Cisco and IBM have lost nearly one-fifth of their business in emerging markets because of a loss of trust,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute.
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A top NSA researcher has gone on the record to condemn the agency’s long-standing endorsement of a controversial cryptographic tool even after learning of its flaws – including a vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers and spies.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has offered some sort of apology for pushing insecure cryptography solutions to businesses, describing it as a “regrettable” move.
Michael Wertheimer, former director of research at the NSA, made the admission about the agency’s support of the widely criticised Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) in a letter published by the American Mathematical Society (PDF).
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DPM backs ex-MI5 chief’s statement that UK needs to ‘retain the ability to intrude on the privacy’ of terrorists but rejects blanket power to retain records of every website visited by general public
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With Congress not only failing to rein in National Security Agency (NSA) spying, but actually expanding its power in a recent funding bill, many privacy activists are looking to the states to take action to block warrantless surveillance programs. A bill filed this week in Indiana would not only support efforts to turn of NSA’s water in Utah, but have some practical effect in the Hoosier State should it pass.
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Surprise! An academic advisory panel, chaired by director of national intelligence James Clapper — yup, the same guy who lied to Congress — has concluded that there’s no alternative to bulk data collection. Sorry, citizens.
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“The report doesn’t provide justification for continuing mass surveillance programs,” says Neema Singh Guliani, the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel.
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The NSA’s former director of research Michael Wertheimer says it’s “regrettable” that his agency continued to support Dual EC DRBG even after it was widely known to be hopelessly flawed.
Writing in Notices, a publication run by the American Mathematical Society, Wertheimer outlined the history of the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG), and said that an examination of the facts made it clear no malice was involved.
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Metadata collection also failed to prevent attacks such as the Fort Hood shooting of 2009 and the 2013 Boston Marathon attack, and has proved massively detrimental to public trust.
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The 231-page report, obtained by the New York Times, explains that “in 2008… the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system.” It also developed the protocols that were used to ensure that the email accounts that were targeted didn’t belong to U.S. citizens.
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Much like the secret NSA and FBI databases, the DEA got its information under subpoena from American telecommunications companies, irrespective of whether or not the target had committed any crime. The dialing and receiving number were stored, along with the data and time of the call, and who it was billed to.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration formerly maintained a secret database of Americans’ telephone calls to some foreign countries, the Justice Department revealed this week.
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Calling the Stasi “secret police” is misleading. The name is an abbreviation of STAatsSIcherheit, or State Security. Founded in 1950 as the East German Communist Party’s “sword and shield,” it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980s, more than 260,000 East Germans—1.6 percent of all adults in the country—worked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.
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Do you want a hands-on lesson on staying clear of NSA snooping? If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, you’re in for a treat. Later this month, you could be part of a seminar on how to keep your personal information private.
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Do you want to use the Internet without fear of the National Security Agency or other government operatives snooping on your business? The public library in our nation’s capital is here to help.
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A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.
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As Sargent says, the Patriot Act is coming up for reauthorization this year (which may or may not be necessary to keep operating the dragnet). It would be relatively straightforward to design an NSA reform (or better yet, a top-to-bottom reorganization of the whole intelligence community) that preserves the ability to surveil genuine suspects while protecting innocent Americans’ constitutional rights. Indeed, there is a strong case that doing so would improve the quality of their work.
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Although today’s agreement between the US and the UK to step up intelligence-sharing to defend their financial services sectors against cyber-crime, it is ironic that it is the taxpayers of both countries who are – once again – forced to step in and save the bankers, who have left themselves wide open by outsourcing data to save money and make profits.
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The countries’ intelligence agencies will work together and conduct cyberwar games later this year to test the security of financial institutions.
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UK security startups like Darktrace and Surevine have been invited on the trip to discuss cyber terrorism and grow their businesses in the US.
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One of the UK’s fastest growing cyber security companies has pushed forward plans to open its US headquarters after seeing a surge in demand following the Sony cyber-attack.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lived in Hawaii before leaking classified information about the government’s secret surveillance programs.
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The FBI claimed the man, Christopher Cornell, plotted to bomb the Capitol building, and had cited “tipsters” who told them about Cornell’s Twitter posts, crediting their own informants for the arrest. They never mentioned the NSA.
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A bill filed in South Carolina this week would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
South Carolina Sen. Tom Davis (R-Beaufort) introduced the South Carolina Fourth Amendment Protection Act on Jan. 13. S.275 would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the third state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
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Leaked documents from the U.S.-based National Security Agency (NSA) published in a German weekly have shown that data from the famously malware-resistant iPhone can be accessed even when the device itself has not been compromised.
The documents detailing ways employed by the British GCHQ to track targets through their phones revealed that when an iPhone syncs with a compromised computer, any data on the phone can be pulled out, reported The Verge.
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The case served as an early test of the limits for researchers who had hoped to use the National Security Agency’s phone records collection program as a treasure trove for their efforts. But Judge James A. Boasberg, sitting in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., said the NSA is within its rights to refuse to say what kinds of records it has, and unless researchers can specifically prove the agency has them, the NSA doesn’t have to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.
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The NSA was obviously aware of the trick, and Wertheimer says they are constantly changing their algorithms, which means it is likely that nowadays spam email is the domain of bad marketeers rather than jihadists.
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Introduced by Sen. Branden Petersen (R Dist. 35), SF33 stipulates that “a government entity may not obtain personal identifying information concerning an individual without a search warrant
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Since its founding in 2004, Palantir has managed to grow into a billion dollar company while being very surreptitious about what it does exactly. Conjecture abounds. The vague facts dredged up by reporters confirm that Palantir has created a data mining system used extensively by law enforcement agencies and security companies to connect the dots between known criminals.
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Leaked documents obtained by TechCrunch have shed new light on Palantir, a secretive data analysis company whose tools are used more than a dozen U.S. government agencies, including the NSA and FBI.
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Privacy has never been so important, but in a digital age where personal information made public is easily retrievable, and even private data isn’t necessarily safe, what alternatives have been produced to respond to the growing demand for online solitude?
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During a joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, President Obama agreed with his plan to pressure U.S. tech companies to cooperate with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in fight against terrorism.
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Mass surveillance by the NSA was apparently just the beginning. The agency is now preparing for future wars in cyberspace, in which control over the internet and rival networks will be the key to victory, documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal.
The National Security Agency’s aim is to be able to use the web to paralyze the enemy’s computer networks and all infrastructures they control – including power and water supplies, factories, airports, and banking systems, Der Spiegel magazine wrote after viewing the secret files.
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The arrests came quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There was the Muslim man suspected of making anti-American statements. The Middle Eastern grocer, whose shop, a tipster said, had more clerks than it needed. Soon hundreds of men, mostly Muslims, were in American jails on immigration charges, suspected of being involved in the attacks.
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In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The New York Times, the Justice Department has declassified additional portions of these two inspector general reports about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is the legal basis for the once-secret National Security Agency program that systematically collects records in bulk about Americans’ domestic and international phone calls.
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A major row between the political parties is brewing over demands by David Cameron and the intelligence services for even more surveillance powers in the wake of the terrorist atrocities in Paris last week.
David Cameron has promised new legislation so that terrorists no longer have “safe spaces” to communicate.
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Cameron is essentially calling on companies like WhatsApp and Apple to install backdoors in their systems to allow the UK authorities access them whenever they want.
Not only is this a huge invasion of people’s privacy, it will also mean that such services will now be much more vulnerable to attack from everyone from cyber-criminals to hacktivists.
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The USA is called the land of the free, but there is no freedom in the analysis of a citizen’s conversation.
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The document at issue is not an order issued by a judge, but an order template used by law enforcement in San Bernardino County (CA) to draft anticipated order applications seeking authority to operate cell site simulators. It is common practice for law enforcement to create order applications from templates prepared by state or federal prosecutors. These templates have wording such as “Detective Name” and “Crime Definition,” which are replaced with case-relevant information before filing the applications in court. Requiring law enforcement to use templates, rather than letting them write their own legal documents, allows prosecutors to use preset legal strategies while defending the legitimacy of the resulting orders in court.
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Following last week’s tragic events in France, the world has spoken out in solidarity against religious extremism, and in support of the freedom of expression. But alongside this, another narrative has emerged. In the name of safety, British officials have begun arguing in favour of stronger powers for the security services to intercept personal data.
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The US Department of Justice has been maintaining a secret record of all phone calls in and out of United States even before the start of its National Surveillance Programs, according to a new report.
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The NSA isn’t the only American government agency keeping track of phone call metadata… or rather, it wasn’t. A Department of Justice court filing has revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration maintained records of every call made from the US to Iran and other nations for nearly 15 years, stopping only when the initiative was discontinued (prompted at least partly by leaks) in September 2013. The DEA didn’t get the content of those calls, but it also didn’t get court oversight — it used administrative subpoenas that only required the approval of federal agents. And unlike the NSA, this program was meant solely for domestic offenses like drug trafficking.
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When the rights of a people are violated, what do you do? Do you do nothing, or do something, even if that something is unpopular or illegal. Edward Snowden chose to do something, making information that needed to be known public. In doing so he opened the eyes of the American people to living in a “fishbowl of constant surveillance” (Turley). Though many believe the leaks to be dangerous, the release of data was reviewed and contained little that could damage national security. It also opened debate on the legality of unconstitutional spying. But the discussion quickly switched to Snowden’s personality, an irrelevant and distracting subject. Whatever his personal motives, the information Snowden divulged will have ramifications for years to come.
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Kalashnikovs trained on free speech, police protection for Jewish schools and 10,000 troops out on “sensitive” streets in Britain’s nearest neighbour. The last few days in Paris stir searching questions about the nature of European society, the values it holds dear, and the right way to protect them. One might hope for answers reflecting fresh thinking, but the emerging response of SW1 is drearily familiar – mass surveillance on the assumption that “the gentleman from Whitehall knows best”.
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The Paris gunmen had been on watchlists for years. Building up extra intelligence on all 66 million residents of France would not have helped; keeping an unflinching eye on the few thousands who provoke serious fears might have done. If the question were resources, the spies would deserve a fair hearing. But they seem more interested in the power to add hay to the stack, a perverse way to hunt the needle. For all the claims made for untargeted sifting, the sole “plot” that the US authorities can hold up as having been disrupted by it is a taxi driver’s payment of a few thousand dollars to al-Shabbab. Terrorists, from 9/11 to the Woolwich jihadists and the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik have almost always come to the authorities’ attention before murdering. Society can’t afford too many scruples about the privacy of those who provoke such suspicions.
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Presumably for anyone to use encryption in Cameron’s world would require escrowing decryption keys so the government could examine any and all communications as they pleased.
[...]
If Western governments want that kind of control over their citizens then it has to be symmetrical which would mean that all government activities other than those that could be proved to be truly in the national interest (for example, how to make nuclear bombs) should become, in turn, completely transparent. That means every government committee meeting, every government memo, every government phone call, every donation to any politician, every political deal, all of it … completely and immediately transparent with severe consequences for any kind of evasion or failure to do so. No more backroom deals, no more horse trading, no more obfuscation. And along with that all surveillance by a government would have to be justified and authorized and documented.
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A trenche of fresh Snowden leaks published in Der Spiegel by Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and others detail the NSA’s infiltration of other countries’ intelligence services, detailing the bizarre, fractal practices of “fourth-party collection” and “fifth-party collection.”
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Civil Rights
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On Wednesday, Mr. Holder announced revisions in Justice Department guidelines for issuing subpoenas and search warrants to journalists or for their newsgathering materials. The revisions are being made to an earlier update of the guidelines, an effort that followed the uproar over leak investigations involving the Associated Press and Fox News. The new revisions reflect nearly a year’s discussions between the Justice Department and a coalition of news organizations and journalists, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press and this newspaper, among others.
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A CIA manager testified under cross-examination in a trial near Washington that more than 90 people knew about a covert Iranian mission that was leaked to the media.
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A lawyer in Saudi Arabia who founded a human rights group was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His wife, a women’s advocate who won a courage award from the State Department, says she is barred from leaving the country. Her brother, a writer who ran a liberal online forum, is also in jail and was sentenced to be caned regularly in a public square over the next few months.
International condemnation of the writer’s sentence, which also included a prison term and a heavy fine, has mounted since a video of him receiving his first round of blows appeared on YouTube, and the State Department and the United Nations have called for the caning to stop.
The Saudi authorities did not administer the second round of blows as scheduled on Friday. But the case of the writer, Raif Badawi, has nonetheless drawn new attention to the Saudi government’s harsh treatment of dissidents for acts that are considered anything but criminal in the West.
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Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.
Rare video of Monday’s killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.
In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. “I did not kill. I did not kill,” she screams repeatedly.
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In the coming days, Ali al-Marri, former enemy combatant, is scheduled to be released from federal criminal custody, clearing the way for his removal by immigration officials to Qatar, and thus ending a legal odyssey that began more than 13 years ago with Mr. al-Marri’s arrest by the FBI in Peoria, Illinois. [Disclosure: I served as al-Marri’s lead counsel in his habeas corpus challenge to his military detention]. Al-Marri’s case raised issues central to the war on terrorism, including the distinction between combatants and civilians, the legitimacy of responding to terrorism through a military, as opposed to law enforcement, approach, and the geographic scope of the armed conflict itself. Above all, al-Marri’s legal challenge raised the important question—never definitively resolved—whether the president’s detention authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) extended to individuals lawfully present in the United States. Below, I offer some lessons to be drawn from his case and suggest why it provides a cautionary tale against domestic military detention.
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Israel is lobbying member-states of the International Criminal Court to cut funding for the tribunal in response to its launch of an inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, officials said on Sunday.
ICC prosecutors said on Friday they would examine “in full independence and impartiality” crimes that may have occurred since June 13 last year. This allows the court to delve into the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014 that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis.
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Sterling denies leaking any information to Risen. Defense lawyers say the leak could have come from anywhere and that Sterling has faced unfair suspicion because he sued the CIA for racial discrimination.
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The wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi has called on the international community to pressure the Saudi Arabian authorities to release her husband, after his public flogging was postponed this weekend.
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The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. That’s a cliche, but politicians often follow the hoariest routes to power, and attempting to enact change by doing the same thing repeatedly is one of them.
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For the first time in a long time, American police departments are on the defensive. They’re on the defense in New York, where, after the NYPD’s open insurrection against the mayor, 69% of New York “voters, black, white and Hispanic” disapprove “of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at funerals for two police officers” according to a Quinnipiac poll – and now, even some cops have started openly airing their disgust with their own union leadership. They’re on the defense in Washington, where they’re “on the hot seat” at President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And they continue to be on the defense in municipalities across the country, as every new police shooting sparks intense national scrutiny on social and in traditional media.
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“Our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populations – they feel themselves to be Americans,” Obama told a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
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Indeed, there are so many legitimate reasons questioning the moral credibility of the huge march.
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Senior Conservative MP David Davis has issued a stark warning about Britain’s possible role in the US’s secret drone war against militants in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
The former Shadow Home Secretary told the Bureau that any British complicity in the US drone campaign is “in the same moral space, as far as I’m concerned, as collusion in torture”.
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It is particularly appropriate that we are gathered here around International Human Rights Day and our theme is Peace and Living It. I believe that Peace is a Human Right for everyone, and its presence is necessary in order to protect and sustain all the other rights enshrined in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I am sure we can agree that although we have a Universal Declaration, we have a long way to go to ensure that our Governments implement and uphold all these rights. In spite of this I am full of hope because I believe that we, the human family, are at a turning point in history.
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When the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America’s most high profile missing person cases.
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The police are poised to tell US authorities they want to see the uncensored version of a CIA torture report as part of their investigation into extraordinary rendition flights.
Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, Scotland’s top prosecutor, has confirmed that the force has been “instructed to request and consider the unredacted version” of the US Senate study.
SNP MSP Kevin Stewart urged the US authorities to co-operate fully with Police Scotland and “hand over an unadulterated copy”.
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Less than a quarter of the 119 detainees named in the US Senate’s summary report into the CIA’s secret torture programme remain in the military prison for the most ‘hardline’ terror suspects—Guantánamo Bay—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established.
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Hearing the testimony from CIA operatives, it’s clear that the agency is extremely eager to make an example of Sterling. Despite all the legalisms, the overarching reality is that the case against Sterling is scarcely legal — it is cravenly political.
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When the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling got underway Tuesday in Northern Virginia, prospective jurors made routine references to “three-letter agencies” and alphabet-soup categories of security clearances. In an area where vast partnerships between intelligence agencies and private contractors saturate everyday life, the jury pool was bound to please the prosecution.
In a U.S. District Court that boasts a “rocket docket,” the selection of 14 jurors was swift, with the process lasting under three hours. Along the way, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema asked more than a dozen possible jurors whether their personal connections to the CIA or other intel agencies would interfere with her announced quest for an “absolutely open mind.”
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New York Times reporter James Risen prevailed over the U.S. government in its three-year effort to force him to testify at trial about a confidential source as part of a CIA leak prosecution.
The request by prosecutors that Risen be dropped as a witness capped a longer battle to avoid revealing his sources. The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing attention on the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder reacted to the controversy by issuing guidelines last year restricting the use of subpoenas and search warrants for journalists.
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For the past seven years, New York Times journalist James Risen has been embroiled in a legal battle with two presidential administrations over his refusal to reveal an inside government source.
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The CIA held prisoners in a secret Lithuanian prison despite official denials, a detailed investigation by human rights investigators claims to show.
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In the most recent New York Review Of Books, there’s an excellent interview about the now-largely-forgotten report from the Senate about how the United States government’s regime of torture was developed, and about how it was operated, with Mark Danner. Along with Marcy Wheeler, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage and very few other reporters, Danner was one of the people who thought that this country’s decision to torture people — in contravention of treaties, American law, and over 200 years of military custom — was worthy of extended acts of journalism. In one of the more striking passages in the interview, Danner explains how a complicated infrastructure of mendacity was constructed and how it became equally as vital to the torture program as were the waterboard and the rectal feeding tube. Not only did the CIA arrange this infrastructure in order to lie to the American people about what was done in their name, but also the CIA built this infrastructure to provide an institutional basis for the American government to lie to itself.
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For the last three years, Bozeman artist Deb Vanpoolen has taken part in an annual fasting and protest against torture and perceived American imperialism in Washington, D.C. This was the first year she got arrested for it.
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You just renewed your oath to support the Constitution. Please make sure that things get done which are constitutional.
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Human rights campaigners criticise American media hypocrisy
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As with the two protestors arrested on a “Torturers Tour” outside Dick Chaney’s residence on January 10th, we must place our hopes that Hoffman won’t be easily silenced, and he will be equally ruthless and fearless should the accusations against the APA hold true, whether the torture techniques were effective or not.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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At the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Chairman Tom Wheeler of the Federal Communications Commission made clear that his agency plans to re-enact strong net neutrality rules in late February.
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DRM
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Remember when the entertainment industry was thrilled about its temporary defeat of the Pirate Bay? Well, the victory – such as it was – hasn’t stopped the pirates from removing the DRM that was supposed to protect this year’s Oscar movie screeners. Yep, the pirates simply stripped the watermarking and uploaded the files anyway to many other torrent sites.
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Send this to a friend
01.17.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Last summer Microsoft talked its partners into trying to stop the growing popularity of Chromebooks in its tracks by making a big push during the holiday season. While full retail results won’t be in for a while, we do know the laptop sales results from the most important retailer of them all, Amazon. Guess what. With that retailer at least, Microsoft and its buddies failed. Miserably.
Amazon reports that its top three computers sold over the holidays were — drum-roll, please — Chromebooks. It was that way last year too. Oh, wait, I’m wrong; Microsoft did worse this year. In 2013, one of Amazon’s top three sellers was a Windows machine, The Asus’ Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 “2-in-1” device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.
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Collabora has been making improvements to the Tegra-based Chromebooks for running the non-ChromeOS Linux desktop.
The Nyan Blaze and Big Tegra K1 powered Chromebooks should now work nicely with Linux given the eleven new patches done by Tomeu Vizoso of consulting firm Collabora.
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Kernel Space
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The systemd-import command is now more powerful after the latest batch of changes committed by Lennart Poettering prior to starting the weekend.
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Asked about diversity in the workplace, a current focus of many tech companies, Torvalds responded: “All that stuff is just details and not really important.”
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Few pieces of software in history have been so fiercely debated as Systemd. Initially a replacement for Sysvinit, the boot scripts that start up a Linux installation, Systemd has grown into a hugely powerful – and sometimes complex – replacement for the “bag of bits” that make up the Linux base system. It’s growing all the time and now handles logging, device hotplugging events, networking, scheduled actions (like Cron) and much more. Almost every major Linux distribution has adopted Systemd, but there are still some unhappy campers out there, so Mike and Graham ventured to Berlin to meet the software’s lead developer and get his view.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman posted the thirteen KDBUS patches in their latest form on Friday to the kernel mailing list. This new version rewrites major parts of the meta-data implementation to allow for per-recipient namespace translations, KDBUS_ITEM_CREDS changes, removed KDBUS_CMD_CANCEL, monitors are now entirely invisible, compile warning fixes, and a variety of other changes.
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Yesterday ArsTechnica.com quoted Linus Torvalds saying a focus on diversity is distracting and apparently it didn’t set well with some folks. Today Torvalds emailed ArsTechnica.com in an effort to explain what he meant more precisely. Elsewhere, a mock distribution seems to be poking fun at feminists and diversity crowd. In other news, Mageia 5 Beta 2 is out after a bit of bad luck that may delay the final.
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On Friday, following comments made by Linux legend Linus Torvalds about diversity in the open source development community, a new Linux fork went online at Github, apparently to mock diversity advocates. Dubbed ToleranUX, the fork, created by a one-day-old Github account called The Feminist Software Foundation, was announced with a lengthy diatribe full of over-the-top mockery of feminist and diversity movements within the tech sector.
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Linus Torvalds, the internationally famous creator of the Linux operating system (which powers your Android phone and most of the internet), does not in way, shape or form suffer from Imposter’s Syndrome.
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Prominent for Util-linux 2.26 is a “completely new” sfdisk command that’s now based on the libfdisk library. This new sfdisk command now supports MBR and GPT disk labels (along with potential but untested SGI and SUN disk labels). Those dependent on sfdisk, a partition table management program for Linux, are encouraged to re-test their scripts against this new version, per the official release information on 2.26-rc1.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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In having 22 graphics cards out for testing and swapping them all in the same system for the recent Unreal Engine 4 Linux benchmarking and 22-Way AMD+NVIDIA Graphics Card Tests With Metro Redux On Steam For Linux, I ran some OpenCL tests on all of the graphics cards.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Just Add Water have just revealed when PS3, Xbox One and PC gamers can get their anxious little mitts on their delicious remake of Oddworld Inhabitants PSX classic, Abe’s Oddysee. Titled Oddworld: New n’ Tasty, the completely rebuilt game stays true to the Abe’s Oddysee formula, adding a glossy sheen of much needed beauty.
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The original game, which was released in 1997, was recently remade and fans of the puzzle platformer are patiently waiting for it’s release. Oddworld has already released remakes of some of their games, like Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD and Munch HD.
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Linux desktop gamers should know of a bug in Valve’s Steam client that will, if you’re not careful, delete all files on your PC belonging to your regular user account.
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Users have found out that Steam for Linux is capable of deleting the entire home directory under certain circumstances, which would present a major problem for users.
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While some are pondering the state of SteamOS and Steam Machines rumors, Valve has put out SteamOS Update 153 after being in the Alchemist Beta state for the past week.
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Cities: Skylines is an upcoming city-building game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It’s a sequel of sorts to the transportation-focused Cities in Motion franchise but with a much broader scope; it’s now a fully-fledged city simulation game. Zoning, construction, taxation and infrastructure management are some of the things that set apart the game from its predecessors. Some of you may be familiar with the game as GOL has covered it twice already (here and here) but the new information we’ve gotten in the past few months from the developers make it worth revisting.
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Aspyr Media, who are one of our favourite developers, has noted on reddit that they are getting close to breaking even on their Linux ports.
If you are living under a rock: Aspyr ported Borderlands 2, Borderlands TPS, the latest two Civilization games and the newest Geometry Wars to Linux
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To summon your inner Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, you don’t need to join a detective squad anymore. There are many new games that allow you to solve crimes, catch the bad guys, and prove to the world that there is a master detective in you waiting to be recognized. These games let you play as a detective or a cop for hours and make you rack your brain to come up with clues that will help solve the mystery.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I want to thank publicly the 788 donors that helped us raise over 22000 euro.
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The KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser has finished. Thank you everybody who supported us in this fundraiser. Go to the KDE donation page if you want to support us further.
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As a Krita developer, I’m not too happy comparing Krita to Photoshop. In fact, I have been known to scream loudly, start rolling my eyes and in general gibber like a lunatic whenever someone reports a bug with as its sole rationale “Photoshop does it like this, Krita must, too!”.
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Reviews
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Once in a while I run into a Linux distribution that surprises me in terms of how much I enjoy using it. MakuluLinux is definitely one of those distros. I found an article about it when I was doing my usual news roundup article for my blog Eye On Open on ITworld. I was intrigued enough to want to do a full review here on Desktop Linux Reviews.
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One of the things you can count on in the Linux community is love and understanding from the wider audience, especially if you write a less favorable review of a distribution favored by a particular segment of the community. The smaller they get the fiercer the response. Most people would decide the flak was not worth their time, file relevant distributions under the ignore label, and move on to friendlier crowds.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic, an operating system that employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, has been upgraded to version 2015.01.13 and is now ready for purchase and download.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is a Linux distribution that distinguished itself in the past year or so with some very interesting releases, and the users expect to see the same kind of quality from the current ones as well. The developers know this and they want to provide the best experience possible, which is also the reason they had to delay this release for short while.
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After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! You can find more information here.
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After being challenged by delays, Mageia 5 Beta 2 was officially released on Friday. A revised release date for the Mageia 5 official ISOs has also been determined.
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Red Hat Family
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Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has announced the release of libinput 0.8 and with this update comes many new features for the input handling library.
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Goldman Sachs downgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note released on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. They currently have $70.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $67.44.
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Debian Family
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Diversity is something that society needs. In all aspects. Also within the Debian project.
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As I said, I did not certain events that begun with “lea” and end with “ing” prevent me from organising a Debian/m68k hack weekend. Well, that weekend is now.
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There was a spin of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi during the early days of its release, but that was quickly dropped in favour of Raspbian when it proved to be a bit slow and buggy. It was almost two years after this incident that a proper version of Fedora was released on the Raspberry Pi in the form of Pidora. An almost straight-up port of the codebase to the specific ARM architecture of the Pi, Pidora has had a few tweaks to let it run on Pi hardware without much loss in performance, at least.
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Phones
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Tizen
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South Korean tech giant Samsung seems to have some really big plans around the Tizen open source operating system this year. After launching its first commercially available Z1 Tizen smartphone in India, the company is now looking to launch numerous Tizen based devices throughout 2015, reports Phone Arena.
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Android
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We brought you our last top 5 Android list back in October and, as it’s already the first quarter of this year, it’s time to revisit that list. There are certainly some new models to discuss, the G Flex 2 was just introduced during CES 2015, for example, but we’re also just a couple of months away from Mobile World Congress, where it’s almost certain that the following phones will be replaced by the next batch of flagships.
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Everyone and their mother (in Tech News) is monitoring Xiaomi, the *fourth largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung, Apple and Lenovo (owners of Motorola). But that doesn’t mean everything they put out is gold.
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When Google acquired Android back in 2005, Android quickly became the “open” mobile platform of choice, a haven for developers that didn’t like all of Apple’s rules and the walled garden of iOS.
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It’s time for this week’s Android and iOS app round-up. As usual, the apps included will be a combination of the best of what has been released this week, but also my favourite must-have apps that I’ve recently come across.
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Google will this year launch its modular DIY smartphone, dubbed Project Ara, but only in the US territory of Puerto Rico.
Ara, announced by Google 15 months ago, was developed by Motorola’s Advanced Technologies and Products (ATAP) group as a fully modular system where components such as batteries, screens, GPS and cameras, can be swapped in and out of a basic smartphone framework.
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To root or not to root? It’s a question that most people don’t ever ask themselves, because Android devices are powerful and customizable from the get-go, and rooting can be risky.
But it’s not that risky. And if you want to really unlock the full potential of your device—if you want to be able to control everything, backup everything, customize everything, and do all sorts of fun things like install custom ROMs and get Android Lollipop ahead of the pack—you’ll need to root your phone.
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Citrix announced that CDFMonitor – the Swiss Army knife of CDF trace collection – is being released as an open source project under the MIT license.
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Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,
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Security researcher and member of SoundCloud security team, Michael Henriksen has developed a open source command line tool that can crawl the GitHub repositories and reveal sensitive information back to him.
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Free online code repositories such as GitHub provide a valuable collaboration service for enterprise developers. But it’s also a trove of potentially sensitive company and project information that’s likely to warrant attention from hackers.
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Events
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This year’s program showcases how free software is used around the world, from “Engaging Nepali kids with free software” to “Implementing electronic medical record systems in rural Haiti”. We’re also taking a close look at how international treaties will affect free software users, with sessions from April — a French free software activist organization — and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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SaaS/Big Data
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BSD
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Following last month’s LLVM 3.6 plans, the mainline code of LLVM was branched for preparing the 3.6 release so now the master/trunk code is for LLVM 3.7.
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The FreeBSD Foundation has issued their latest quarterly status report for covering from October to December 2014.
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Project Releases
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An update of the open-source Xen Hypervisor to v4.5 brings reduced footprint, increased power efficiency, and new “experimental” real-time services.
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Public Services/Government
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Sweden’s public administrations will increasingly turn to open source and open standards, expect ICT procurement specialists at the National Procurement Services, the central purchasing body for the country’s public sector. The agency is readying a new approach for the acquisition of sofware and ICT services. When using these frameworks, only open standards and open source can be mandated. This greatly facilitates public administrations to prefer this type of software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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Since last year the Khronos Group and their partners have been busy working on “OpenGL-Next” as the first huge overhaul to the OpenGL API and designed to compete with AMD’s Mantle, Microsoft DirectX 12, and Apple’s Metal. They’re still working towards this new API but they need your help.
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The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida has gone to the dogs. Well, at least its rugs have.
Department spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda said Wednesday that a new, $500 rug at the sheriff’s administration building said “In Dog We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”
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Science
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When the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of “men whose minds the Dead have ravished” he was attempting to describe the mysterious effects of shellshock which started appearing during the First World War and of which he himself was a sufferer.
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Security
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Those following me on various Intarweb Media may have noticed I’ve spent half the week staring at openssl source code and weeping. Here’s one of the results of that.
OpenSSL has two somewhat different mechanisms for deciding what uses a certificate is good for: trust and purpose. This is quite subtle and not terribly well documented, so I thought I’d write it up here.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.
“Keep a sound mind, don’t panic and don’t lose clear thinking,” the manual explains. “Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world.”
The manual, which the Defence Ministry will send to libraries next week and also distribute at army events, says Lithuanians should resist foreign occupation with demonstrations and strikes, “or at least doing your job worse than usual”.
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Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.
In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a “systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,” according to Human Rights Watch.
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An anti-terror court on Wednesday indicted Pervez Musharraf over the 2006 killing of a separatist leader, the latest legal hurdle facing the former military ruler since his return from self-imposed exile two years ago.
The charges by the court in Quetta are unlikely to cause any immediate problems for the 71-year-old, who has not attended a single hearing in the case since it began in 2013. He was previously indicted for treason in March last year over his imposition of emergency rule in 2007, but proceedings have stalled since then as the country’s civil authorities and judiciary appear to lack the will to take on the military.
“The anti-terrorist court has indicted Musharraf along with former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao and former home minister [of] Balochistan province Shoaib Nosherwani in Nawab Akbar Bugti’s murder case,” said public prosecutor Taimur Shah. He added the court would resume hearings in the case on Feb. 4.
Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in a military operation in 2006, sparking deadly nationwide protests and inflaming a separatist insurgency in resource-rich but impoverished Balochistan.
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Reports that emerged on Thursday evening that a Burmese woman was publicly beheaded in Mecca by Saudi authorities for allegedly killing her step-daughter has outraged social media users.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Is this the right way or the wrong way to cover the news of the record heat? That depends. Is the purpose of an article like this to convey how open-minded the New York Times is? If so, then the piece is a success, managing to give one-third of its quotes to a proponent of a fringe theory without giving any indication that his eccentric views are virtually absent from peer-reviewed science.
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Although it may not have been warm where you live, scientists announced Friday that 2014 was the Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The climate milestone was made possible in large part by exceptionally mild ocean temperatures and above-average temperatures on most continents.
Remarkably, the warmth came without the assistance of an El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean. These events are naturally occurring ocean and atmospheric cycles that tend to boost global temperatures. Previous El Niños have been responsible in part for the prior warmest years, such as 1998 and 2005, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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The planet’s warmest year on record was 2014, federal scientists announced Friday.
“Humans are literally cooking their planet,” said Jonathan Overpeck, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Arizona.
The global temperature from 2014 broke the previous record warmest years of 2005 and 2010 since record-keeping began in 1880.
Two separate data sets of global temperature — from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — confirmed the record. Another data set released last week by the Japan Meteorological Agency also found 2014 was the planet’s warmest.
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Finance
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On Thursday afternoon Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel filed a settlement in a class-action lawsuit [PDF] involving former employees of the companies, agreeing to pay them $415 million. The 64,000 employees and former employees who made up the class alleged that their employers had agreed not to cold call or poach each others’ employees, creating artificially low wages for the employees for years.
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In the following interview, New School professor and economist Richard Wolff provides his analysis of the causes of the economic crisis in Greece and in the eurozone, debunks claims that the Greek economy is recovering and offers his proposal for what a post-capitalist future could look like for Greece and the world.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“This isn’t an election–it’s a rerun,” he complains. He’s talking about all the people that are running or might be running who have run before or have relatives who have run.
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Censorship
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The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It’s gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government’s “failure” to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.
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The only people who still feel they can clearly define who is and isn’t a journalist are legislators. They’re almost always wrong. Journalism isn’t a career. It’s an activity. Anyone can do it and, thanks to the internet, anyone can find a publishing platform and readers. But, according to many politicians, it ain’t the press unless it involves one.
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Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties.
In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.
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The French authorities are moving aggressively to rein in speech supporting terrorism, employing a new law to mete out tough prison sentences in a crackdown that is stoking a free-speech debate after last week’s attacks in Paris.
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More recently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.
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Raif Badawi was flogged in public 50 times last week. He has 950 lashes and nearly a decade in prison left to serve – simply for blogging about free speech.
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The latest issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has ignited controversy in the Middle East and elsewhere due to a caricature of the prophet Muhammad depicted on its cover.
Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the journal’s central Paris headquarters last week and murdered 12 people, they said to avenge the publication’s regular lampooning of Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous and the decision to again publish a cartoon of Muhammed has caused widespread debate.
The cartoon itself depicts the Prophet shedding a tear while holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie” — the slogan which has become popular around the world as a declaration of solidarity with the victims of the attack — under a headline that reads “All is forgiven.” It was drawn by the weekly’s cartoonist Luz, who escaped the massacre because he was late arriving for work.
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Privacy
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Ladar Levison, who ran Edward Snowden’s email account, said moves to allow government access to encrypted data would weaken safety online for everyone
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The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.
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The cypherpunks are winning the second crypto-war against government spies. What will happen when everyone is anonymous?
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In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the European Commission to deliver on its “promise” of a new EU-wide data retention directive to replace the one struck down by the EU’s highest court last year.
Merkel wants to implement this new directive into German law. There’s only one problem: the Commission doesn’t seem to have promised any such thing, at least not in public.
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This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters.
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We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible.
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Last week we wrote about how a ruling by Europe’s highest court, the EUCJ, that blanket data retention was “invalid,” had received a further boost from an analysis by the European Parliament’s legal services. That, in its turn, made it more likely that more overbroad data retention laws in EU nations would be challenged, as has already happened in the UK and Sweden.
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Google’s smartglasses have ‘graduated’ from the company’s development lab placed under the control of the father of the iPod
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Civil Rights
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Before the Law chronicles sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder’s arrest, three-year incarceration in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, and the months following the dismissal of his case without a trial. On May 15, 2010, Roberto Bautista reported to the police that he had been robbed. The police detained Kalief, but he was not in possession of any of the stolen items. When they spoke with Bautista after the search, he changed the date of the robbery to two weeks prior. On Bautista’s inconsistent accusation alone, Kalief was arrested on multiple felony charges and held without bail.
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The prisoner could barely stand. He and a group of fellow detainees at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, had started a riot in a cell and the unit of soldiers that I led, the Quick Reaction Force, had quelled the violence with whatever it took — fists, boots, clubs, shields and rubber bullets.
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That’s because the state’s contract with private prison corporation Corrections Corp. of America includes the stipulation that CCA can impose penalties on the state if the number of prisoners from Vermont drops below 380, Pallito said.
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Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime.
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Some two years following her rape, Ripley attended a Salt Lake City council meeting and discovered that it was not only her case that had been brushed aside. Approximately 79% of SLCPD’s rape kits had never been sent to the lab for testing. Ripley’s kit was one of over 1,000 collected by the SLCPD in an eight year period – of these, 788 were either destroyed or still sitting on a shelf in the police department. Salt Lake City’s unprocessed rape kits make up only a small portion of the number across the United States – which, according to a January 2014 White House report total well over 20,000.
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Mount Holyoke College, the historical women’s college in western Massachusetts, will no longer participate in the now-decades-old tradition of performing “The Vagina Monologues” in February, to raise awareness of gender-based violence, out of concern that the play is not inclusive of transgender students. The school, which recently changed its definition of “woman” to include male-to-female trans students, has become a site of controversy over the decision to retire Eve Ensler’s 1996 feminist classic permanently.
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Oklahoma executed Charles Warner on Thursday night, the state’s first lethal injection since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.
Attorneys for Warner and three other Oklahoma inmates asked the US supreme court for a stay, but the court denied the request in a 5-4 decision. The lawyers argued that the first of three drugs in a lethal cocktail – midazolam – would not properly sedate a person, even if the drug were properly administered.
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Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.
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Riseup, a tech collective that provides security-minded communications to activists worldwide, sounded the alarm last month when a judge in Spain stated that the use of their email service is a practice, he believes, associated with terrorism.
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The worst offenders include Northumberland and Leeds local councils, both of which have more than 500 officials with powers of entry, whilst Hertfordshire, Chorley and Cornwall all have more than 300.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Draft net neutrality legislation released Friday by Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or selectively slowing legal Web content, but it would allow them to engage in “reasonable” network management.
The proposal would give broadband providers wide latitude to engage in network management, with a management practice deemed reasonable “if it is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose.”
The draft legislation would also prohibit the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband as a regulated public utility, and it would stop the agency from creating any new net neutrality rules.
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Net neutrality legislation unveiled by Republicans today would gut the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the broadband industry.
As expected, the bill forbids the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, preventing the commission from using authority it has under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This is the statute the FCC uses to regulate landline telephone providers.
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Ajit Pai, part of the commission’s Republican minority, has clashed with Netflix over its use of technology that is not compatible with “open caching software” used by Internet service providers. Netflix says that it “obscured certain URL structures to protect our members from deep packet inspection tools deployed to gather data about what they watch online,” which apparently had the side effect of forcing ISPs to use different caching systems. Netflix does offer caching appliances to Internet service providers, but the bigger carriers have refused, demanding payment for connections to their networks.
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Last month I noted how longtime domain registrar Tucows had decided to try and kick-start stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a fixed-line residential broadband market all-too-often dominated by just one or two giant, apathetic players. Ting promised to offer 1 Gbps speeds at a sub-$100 price point, while at the same time promising to respect net neutrality.
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