Russia’s government has been flirting with the idea of switching to open source for some time, but often that’s been just another example of waving the threat around to encourage Microsoft to offer more favourable licensing terms for using its software, as has happened frequently in the UK. However, a new move by the Russian authorities might finally see them making the switch:
Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace US microchips Intel and AMD, used in government’s computers, with domestically-produced micro processor Baikal in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.
Despite all the improvements we have made over the years, Linux is still too hard. We need more users, more designers, and more UX experts looking at and using Linux desktops every day to isolate and eliminate these pain points. The way we gain more users is concentrate on the user experience during every step of development. The more people we have extolling the virtues of the Linux desktop, the more people it will attract to the platform. Eventually, developers will follow the people, but we’ve got to provide a solid foundation first.
On the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers, which a group of researchers update twice each year to coincide with supercomputing conferences, the combined performance of all the machines increased from 250 petaflops in November 2013 to 274 petaflops in June 2014.
While there are competing vendors, chip architectures, core counts and networking fabrics at play in the list of the worlds top 500 supercomputers, when it comes to the operating system of choice, there is no debate. Linux dominates the list with a 97 percent share, being installed on 485 systems on the top 500 list.
IBM is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing, with the goal of assisting enterprises in integrating existing infrastructures into the cloud space. To this end, IBM said it is working on an open integration model with Docker, an open source platform for developers and systems administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications, and the open source Docker project community.
At the invitation only Linux Enterprise End-User Summit held at the Convene Center Financial District, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, told an audience of several hundred Wall Street executives and top Linux developers what he sees as the future of technology.
SUSE developers continue to pursue mainlining their kGraft approach that’s an alternative to the existing Kslice option or Red Hat’s Kpatch mechanism for live kernel patching. To date there’s been no concerted effort to try to merge these kGraft and Kpatch solutions. Today’s revision to kGraft addresses developer comments during the first round of upstream kernel developer review.
LFTP 4.5.2, a sophisticated file transfer program with a command-line interface that supports FTP, HTTP, FISH, SFTP, HTTPS, and FTPS protocols, is now available for download.
Every operation made with LFTP is reliable, which means that, if any non-fatal error occurs, the operation is retried automatically.
This latest version of LFTP is not a big update, but the developers have made a few interesting changes and improvements.
FFmpeg 2.2.4 is the latest major release and this current build is just a maintenance version, with a few updates and minor changes.
“It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 2.2 release branch, which was cut from master on 2014-03-01. Amongst lots of other changes, it includes all changes from ffmpeg-mt, libav master of 2014-03-01, libav 10.1 as of 2014-06-23,” reads the official announcement.
Back in 2006, when I was contemplating a move from Windows to Linux, I knew I would have to give up computer games. This wasn’t because there were no games written for Linux, it’s just that they weren’t very good. Most of the best commercial games were (and still are) written for Windows, but that’s been changing dramatically over the last year, thanks to Steam, the Internet-based software distribution platform from Valve Corp.
The move to support Linux came fairly late but is drawing impetus from the top.
In July 2012, Valve managing director Gabe Newell had complained that Windows 8 was “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.”
Observing that many people still stayed away from Linux because of a lack of games, he said Valve was working to bring Steam titles to Linux as a hedging strategy.
However, following a string of harassment from Linux users in the Steam forums (and perhaps more worryingly, in private emails), the developer has stated that he is now only working on the port in a much more limited way and has abandoned working on it in his spare time since the abuse has taken away any enjoyment he got from it. As a result, the port will take far longer than anticipated. At the same time, I fear that any ‘backlash’ of abusive comments could lead to all work being abandoned…
As Michael Bohlender (known to some e.g. for his GSoC project about Kmail Active last year) needed to do some interviews for his anthropology course at the university he decided to reactive the People behind KDE series or, as they are now named, the People of KDE series.
Plasma Media Center 1.2 was released as a Christmas gift. Now, we bring to you Plasma Media Center 1.3! As always, we have made sure to make it easier to enjoy your favorite videos, music and photos – both from your collection as well as online sources. A big focus has been performance improvements when showing you the media on your computer as well as general polish for the UI.
Boxes is an GNOME application in Fedora that is used to create, manage, and run virtual machines, and Google Summer of Code student Adrien Plazas is working on implementing multiple monitor support in Boxes.
In a recent forum post, John Lindgren, Audacious Manager and Developer, notes that the long-term goal is to switch to Qt however, the GTK+ interfaces need to remain stable in the meantime and “going back to GTK2 appears to be the only way to achieve this”.
GNOME Boxes is still on the road of maturing into a nice open-source program for managing virtual machines and remote systems.
GNOME Boxes is a very easy-to-use program from the GNOME Desktop that uses libvirt for managing virtual machines with the various forms of Linux virtualization or connecting to a remote system. Of course, virt-manager remains the dominant open-source Linux solution in this area, but GNOME Boxes continues to work out very nicely for strictly desktop users and other simple use-cases.
A special PPA containing GTK+ applications with support for Mir has been recently created, enabling the users to test the new file manager, browser, image viewer and other apps specially developed for Mir and currently used only on Ubuntu Touch. For now, only Gedit, Gnome Calculator and Simple Scan are available for Mir, but new apps will join this list soon.
I thought it might help a few people (including myself!) to perform the following categorized and referenced summary of the current “families” of non-commercial Linux distros. All of these distros have brief descriptions and rankings at the DistroWatch.com listing site [1].
There are quite a few Linux distributions that take direct aim at the Windows users, but not all of them are as appreciated as Zorin OS. The developers have managed to release a fresh take on the old desktop paradigm used by Windows. It somewhat resembles that well-known interface, but it manages to also feel new.
This latest edition is still in the development stages and it will take a while until it is ready, but, from the looks of it, Zorin OS 9 RC is already a winner. It’s now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), which was released a couple of months ago, meaning that it will also come with extended support.
The Clonezilla team has just a released a new development version for this Linux distribution, but unlike the latest versions, the current build integrates a larger number of improvements, besides the regular Debian updates.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 24, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so i don’t exptect for there to be any major surprised: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.
As usual, the release announcement gives a good overview of the what and why in this release. The most important specifics are that it is built on Linux kernel 3.14.7 and KDE SC 4.13.1. The download images are available from the Makulu Linux KDE page, it is a 32-bit (i686) build that is approximately 1.7GB in size. It is a hybrid ISO, so you can burn it to disk or dump it with dd to a USB stick, and it does not support UEFI boot.
Mageia is a fork of the good old Mandriva, uses systemd as the default init event manager and GRUB1, while all the modern systems have switched to GRUB2. As you may know, Mageia 4 has been released in February 2014.
Recently, a point release of Mageia 4, Mageia 4.1 has been released, being powered by Kernel 3.12.21, in all the traditional flavors: KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, RazorQt, MATE, and Cinnamon.
Arch Linux fans are frequently requesting more benchmarks of their preferred Linux distribution at Phoronix over claims that it’s faster than the likes of Ubuntu, more versatile, etc. Every once in a while I do deliver benchmarks of Arch but it’s not too frequent given that it’s a rolling-release distribution that’s very open to end-user tweaking and modification, thus hard to give a defined reference point for other users to compare their results against ours, as opposed to just say “download XYZ ISO, install, and then benchmark!” Thus when benchmarking a distribution like Gentoo or Arch, I prefer using one of the derivatives that at least deploys out of the box quickly, gives some sane default values to use for benchmarking, etc.
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat believes the wait should be over. In a phone conversation over a two-day period following Red Hat’s earnings report last week, Whitehurst assured me his company has a stacked deck in that all-important new frontier known as OpenStack. With the sort of confidence you would expect for someone of Whitehurst’s pedigree, he proclaimed “no one knows OpenStack better than us.” Investors and analysts have no reason to doubt him.
As the adoption rate of Linux on the desktop grows, so does the number of people who are considering making the switch to Ubuntu. These folks have heard all the good things, but, as per usual, not enough in the reality check department.
This article will offer a reality check, in addition to offering some critical advice to anyone thinking of making the leap over to Linux on the desktop.
Ubuntu.com, the website of Canonical’s Linux-based operating system for PCs, servers, the cloud and (maybe soon) mobile devices, has received a series of subtle but significant upgrades recently, and more are on the way. Here’s a look at the latest site updates and additions for the cloud, Canonical’s partner network and more.
After it reaches EOL, Ubuntu 13.10 will be still usable, but the users will not receive any updates and security patches anymore. Also, the developers will not be able to add applications on Lauchpad, with support for Ubuntu 13.10. Along with the EOL of Ubuntu 13.10, also the derivative systems like Linux Mint 16 will die.
The Ubuntu One file service has been shut down by Canonical and the announcement was made a while back. Now, the company is also providing a very useful script for users to download their files before the service is closed for good and becomes inaccessible.
Now that Mir 0.3 is past, Canonical developers remain hard at work on introducing new functionality to the Mir Display Server for the Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” release cycle.
The team behind Linux Mint unveiled its latest update this week—Mint 17 using kernel 3.13.0-24, nicknamed “Qiana.” The new release indicates a major change in direction for what has quickly become one of the most popular Linux distros available today. Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, and this decision appears to have one major driver. Consistency.
Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 17 KDE codenamed Qiana. It’s based on KDE Software Compilation 4.13.0.
Some of the new features of LMK 17 include the ‘Update Manager’, which the team says “…shows more information, it looks better, it feels faster, and it gets less in your way. It no longer needs to reload itself in root mode when you click on it. It no longer checks for an Internet connection or waits for the network manager and it no longer locks the APT cache at session startup.”
As you may know, Elementary OS is a popular Ubuntu derivative, which most likely has the most beautiful user interface amongst the Ubuntu derivatives (using Pantheon, a customized Gnome Shell version as the default DE). Due to the fact that the Elementary developers use only the LTS versions of Ubuntu as code base, Elementary OS 0.2 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Elementary OS 0.3 (not yet released) is based on Ubuntu 14.04.
When we consider the Linux desktop, most often GNOME 3, Ubuntu Unity, KDE, Cinnamon, and XFCE come to mind. Those desktops range from the old-school functional to the new-school modern. Each has its strengths and weaknesses along with a vocal following to give it a push into the eyes of the public. For the most part, we use one of those desktops with little thought to making a switch. That’s been my modus operandi for the longest time. Ubuntu Unity has been my desktop. I enjoy its combination of efficiency, powerhouse search, and modern flare.
But then along comes Linux Deepin, a distribution from China that looks to upturn the Linux desktop with an almost Apple-like sensibility. Linux Deepin offers a keen UI design that outshines most every desktop you’ve experienced. Along with that total redesign of the UI, comes a few bonus apps that might easily steal the show from most default apps.
This latest iteration of Peppermint was released a year ago and, back then, it was using Ubuntu 13.04. The developers have moved up from that version and they are now using Ubuntu 14.04, which is the latest LTS released by Canonical.
Future Peppermint users will benefit from this decision made by the developers because it means that the support period for the OS will most likely coincide with the one for Ubuntu, which is five years.
Atrust unveiled a “t66″ thin client that runs Linux on a quad-core Freescale i.MX6 SoC, and supports Citrix ICA/HDX, RDP, and VMWare Horizon View protocols.
As power consumption grows in priority, the thin client world is increasingly turning to ARM processors. Atrust Computer Corp. offers a number of ARM-based thin clients, and like its x86-based Intel Atom- and Via-based systems, they run a custom Atrust Linux OS. While the company’s previous ARM systems ran on single-core Cortex-A8-based Sitara system-on-chips from Texas Instruments, the Atrust t66 runs on a faster, quad-core, Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. No clock rate was supplied for the t66, but the i.MX6 typically runs at 1.2GHz, and offers 2D, 3D, and video coprocessors.
Quirky unveiled an open, Linux-based “Wink” home automation hub and mobile app that control devices available at GE, The Home Depot, and elsewhere.
New York City based Quirky announced its new Wink subsidiary, home automation hub, and smartphone app in The New York Times, and released a brief announcement in preparation for next week’s full launch. A Quirky rep confirmed our suspicions that the Wink Hub runs embedded Linux, but offered no further hardware details.
Nest Labs is buying Dropcam for $555 million, and will integrate Dropcam’s Linux-based surveillance cameras into its own Linux-based home automation system.
Nest’s deal to acquire Dropcam for $555 million was revealed by Recode and confirmed in a Nest blog post by co-founder Matt Rogers. The acquisition follows Nest’s own acquisition by Google for $3.2 billion, announced back in January.
Dropcam is probably the most popular home monitoring start-up, and now the company is owned by Google. Dropcam was acquired recently by Nest for a cool $555 million, the same company Google acquired for $3.2 billion just four months ago.
According to the company, it is undertaking this acquisition on its own without Google’s oversight. Furthermore, we understand that Dropcam will be folded into the Nest brand after everything is completed, and employees of the company will have to adopt the culture at Nest.
The third “early adopter” release of Jolla’s Sailfish OS platform is now available for Google’s Nexus 4 “Mako” smart-phone.
As actual Jolla hardware is still in short supply around the world, Jolla continues investing in their Sailfish for Android effort to port their interesting Linux-based MeeGo-derived platform to various Android devices. With today’s Sailfish OS EA3 release for the Nexus 4 there’s Jolla Store support and much more.
Two years after the initial launch in the US, Google’s now infamous Glasses are finally available to buy in the UK. However they are not going cheap retailing in the UK for a neat £1000 (roughly $1650). Furthermore Google have restricted the sale of Glass to only individuals over the age of 18 and who have a credit card. This is probably due to the technology still being in a ‘beta’ stage and Google not wanting to expose minors to the technology which was of yet is undecided as to its health and eye complications.
It’s the end of a fiscal year and the beginning of a lot of headaches. It’s as if every part of your body screams “pay your taxes!” But hey, who has the time to sit down and crunch all those numbers? It gets even more difficult to manage them if you are always on the move.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t worry. We have a list of Android apps you can use to help you manage your taxes no matter where you go.
Michael Williams, BIRT Product Evangelist & Forums Manager at Actuate, outlines some key points to keep in mind for building your own open source community.
Cisco has released a new open-source block cipher called FNR that is designed for encrypting small chunks of data, such as MAC addresses or IP addresses. The cipher is still in the experimental stage, but Cisco has released the source code and a demo application.
Open source is the combined contributions of millions of independent volunteers. This single concept brings with it a few inherent realities. In this article let’s look at a few potentially concerning points about the nature of open source contributions.
One of the major, oft-touted benefits of open source software is the diverse, large, and ever ready army of developers contributing to the project. This can be an incredibly powerful argument when demonstrating the value of open source to a corporation. However, the larger the community and the bigger the pool of contributors the more opportunity there exists for problems or potential security risks.
Open source is a growing and arguably successful strategy for making our corner of the world a better place. While altruism motivates many individuals and some companies to make things open source, others are in it for the money. On the other hand, many companies use or are forced to use open source for its perceived cost-saving value, often disregarding its risks. So what’s the business case for open source?
Yesterday, the Knight-Mozilla Open News initiative announced that it will lead a collaboration among Mozilla, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to create a new platform. With $3.89 million in funding, they’ll work together on a platform that will allow readers and users to upload pictures, videos, and other media for news outlets to use. From the release:
ownCloud is organizing an ownCloud conference/hackathon at the Technische Universität Berlin this August. And as Steffen Lindner shared on twitter, the German REWE supermarket is offering cheap tickets to go to Berlin from all over Germany during the event!
As the cloud market matures, customer behavior is changing and questions remain about where the true value of the technology will lie in the future.
A group of industry professionals tackled a variety of topics as part of a panel discussion on the future of the cloud last week at a Cloud Standards Customer Council symposium. They discussed the impact of savvy customers and looked ahead at trends around burgeoning cloud services, vendor lock-in issues and the role of open source.
“When it gets there, we will support the OpenStack API,” Mikos relented.
Dholakia noted that CloudStack, like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, has long maintained a “compatibility layer for the Amazon API precisely because, as business folk, we follow the dollars.”
Over the last several months, GoGrid CEO John Keagy has been quietly holding meetings with partners and rivals alike to share an ambitious plan.
His brainchild has the potential to shake up the entire cloud services industry by uniting some of its largest players around an open source project: a universal cloud orchestration engine called OpenOrchestration.org.
Being able to present that content effectively depends on having the right foundation for your site, and that means choosing a content management system (CMS) that will best match up with your site’s intended purpose.
I ask more questions in this survey of free and open source healthcare developers for my thesis project: “The state of open source electronic medical records: An anthropology study.” My goal is to better understand the characteristics, motivations, and knowledge background of healthcare developers in order to determine what is behind the success of free/open source software in healthcare.
With LLVM developers already having lots of C++1y / C++14 support implemented, they have begun working on “highly experimental” support for C++1z — the next major revision to the C++ programming language anticipated for release in 2017.
C++14/C++1y should be officially released this year as a small update over C++11, for which LLVM/Clang (and GCC) already have decent support. In fact, with the current Clang 3.4 stable release all of the key C++11 functionality should be in place.
The Swiss government is to survey the economic potential of public administrations’ use of open source software, and the federal government is to review its 2005 strategy on this type of software solutions, following questions by two members of the Swiss Parliamentarian Group on Digital Sustainability.
Open source is an environment where no permission is required to use the source code; the flexibility to do as you wish is already provided. The open source license creates this permissionless environment, and developers are able to gather around a source code commons to meet their individual needs without having to seek approval from anywhere. Requiring a CLA to contribute immediately obstructs this goal.
Open source software has been brought to wider public attention by brands like Linux and Firefox, both of which who have thrived to gigantic proportions due to their open nature. The concept of open source is quite simple and Wikipedia essentializes it quite well:
“I do think that everybody should learn to code, at least on a basic level,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “It would teach them to break down a problem into small, manageable portions and solve each of those parts logically.” It’s actually “less about the code itself than solving a problem logically,” he said. “That’s a skill that I think everybody should have.”
Intel has asked AMD about access to their Mantle technology for experimenting with this graphics API alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL.
Intel and AMD confirmed to PCWorld that the two companies were communicating about Mantle cooperation but “[Intel] remains committed to what it calls open standards like Microsoft’s DirectX API.”
Do you know that the URL bar in your browser is a potential security hole? I didn’t either. I barely look at the thing unless I’m punching in a search term. But according to Drew Davidson, vice president of design at ÄKTA, that thin strip of UI chrome is a little keyhole that a hacker can use to infiltrate a company’s website.
In the wake of Heartbleed, there may soon be as many variants of the open source OpenSSL software for encrypting Web traffic as there are Pokemon characters—or something like that. A few days ago, Google (GOOG) became the latest organization to announce its own OpenSSL spin, which it’s calling BoringSSL.
Rob Clark, the developer employed by Red Hat who has near single-handedly been developing Freedreno as a reverse-engineered, open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware, made a big discovery. Rob was playing around with the Amazon Fire TV that boasts a Qualcomm SoC and runs on the Qualcomm proprietary graphics driver when discovering a “high risk” security issue.
Sometimes it feels like the whole world went and got crazy. It’s true, with every passing day, all types of newfangled gadgets, doodads and wild ideas are released. Google is at the forefront, with Google Glass, self-driving cars and Nest internet-connected thermostats. Truth be told, I’m hardly a Luddite, but I am wary of having a computer and camera strapped to my head or having my home connected to the internet.
The Internet-of-Things is a thing. If you haven’t heard about it yet, get ready because we’re in the early stages of an explosion of technology that will connect, monitor, and in some cases share almost every aspect of our lives. Fortinet conducted a survey of consumers to find out what people think about the security and privacy concerns of the Internet-of-Things.
“The Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bullshit.” – Polish Foreign Minister Radoslav Sikorski, secretly taped in early 2014. Discuss. Use only one side of the paper.
The publication of Radoslav Sikorski’s comments in the Polish weekly magazine Wprost will not help his bid to become the European Union’s foreign policy chief, but there are senior foreign policy officials elsewhere who might be tempted to make similar remarks (though perhaps not in alcohol-fuelled conversations in well-known restaurants where they might be overheard). And there are those in Washington who are saying the same thing.
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Despite the general US obsession with the “terrorist threat”, Obama may actually realise how little the outcome of the current turmoil in Iraq really matters to American security, and Iraq’s oil, post-fracking, is not even a consideration any more. No core American national interests here. So the US cavalry will not be riding over the hill to the rescue.
A secret government memo was released Monday that reveals that the Obama administration used the war against al-Qaida to justify the use of drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas.
This morning, a federal appeals court released a government memorandum, dated July 16, 2010, authorizing both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen.
The publication of the Office of Legal Counsel memo comes, as the court noted, after a lengthy delay. The ACLU (along with the New York Times) has been fighting for this memo since we first asked for it in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in October 2011.
Today’s release by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is an important victory for transparency. But while the memo advances the public record in significant ways, it still does not answer many key questions about the government’s claimed authority to kill U.S. citizens outside of active battlefields. Here are several important takeaways from today’s release.
The 41-page memo — whose contents had previously been summarized and released piecemeal — was heavily redacted for national security reasons, with several entire pages and other passages whited out.
The Obama administration justified using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas by citing the war against al-Qaida and by saying a surprise attack against an American in a foreign land would not violate the laws of war, according to a previously secret government memorandum.
Alternatively, Barron suggests, a government gets to use force if doing so is part of a war. This, of course, ignores the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact and the illegality of wars, as well as the novelty of claiming that a war exists everywhere on earth forever and ever. (None of Barron’s arguments justifies governmental murder on US soil any less than off US soil.)
In essence, Barron seems to argue, the people who wrote the laws were thinking about private citizens and terrorists, not the government (which, somehow, cannot be a terrorist), and therefore it’s OK for the government to violate the laws.
Then there’s the problem of Congressional authorization of war, or lack thereof, which Barron gets around by pretending that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was as broad as the White House pretends rather than worded to allow targeting only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
“I believe every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them, and the public release of this memo is a positive step toward reducing the secrecy that surrounds this question,” Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement. “However, there are many important questions that this memo does not address.”
In May of 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder published a letter in response to requests from Senator Patrick Leahey for more information on the justification of targeted killings, as it applies to American Citizens. Holder wrote that Americans could be targeted “in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qa’ida or its associated forces, and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, in the following circumstances: (1) the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is not feasible; and (3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
Below that, the memo cites Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) v. Government of Israel, a 2006 Israeli Supreme Court decision that ruled that the targeted assassinations of hundreds of Palestinians since the start of the second intifada were legal and did not violate international law.
According to many strategic experts and journalists like Seymour Hersh, the ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (who was released from a US captivity in 2007 or 2009 is a CIA asset), are basically covert operations of US-Saudi intelligence agencies. If true, once again we see the evidence of CIA-Mossad creating terror organisations to achieve their strategic objectives, which would prove that the US and its allies deploy terror to attain their strategic objectives.
Ahmed Chalabi rolled into a displaced persons camp in northern Iraq on Saturday with his entourage, and held an impromptu press conference that looked very much like a campaign stop.
The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”
Syrian rebel groups are recruiting 15-year-old children to battle against the government forces after promising them a free education, says the Human Rights Watch report, released on June, 23. Worse still, those groups are strongly backed by the US and Israel, US political commentator told Radio VR.
To this administration, transparency comes in the form of deleted pages. But too much of America’s legal excuse for killing an American citizen remains classified
Instead, the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories — some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law — that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.
The first 11 pages of the 41-page document were redacted. The Justice Department’s justification for a CIA strike of al-Awlaki was also heavily redacted.
Sitting in front of screens pressing kill buttons drone pilots often don’t have enough knowledge about what is going on in the area they target and what they are doing to the people in that zone. This removes an important moral barrier making killing as easy as in a computer game. As technology rapidly develops, new drones are getting better surveillance cameras and operators have opportunity to watch their targets better. This restores the crucial moral constraint to a certain extent. At the same time technology development is fraught with another danger which is higher automation of many killer robots including UAVs, says Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor of philosophy at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
A wave of air strikes by the Pakistani military in the country’s tribal northwest has killed at least 291 people, including a minimum 16 civilians, over the past six months, a Bureau investigation has found.
The first purchase orders have been made for the Skunk Riot Control Copter, a terrifying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with paintballs, pepper spray and blinding flashlights.
Ciesielka said, “We expect the capability of this drone detection system to evolve over time, like any technology. We at DDC need testers to provide valid feedback. All technology has to start somewhere.
It is unseemly that the quiet passing of John Hadden – an American who tried to avert Israel’s 1967 attack on Egypt, and then keep it from escalating – is so utterly overshadowed by laudatory obituaries for the Israeli he exposed looting weapons-grade nuclear material from Pennsylvania.
It’s embarrassing to admit when obvious click-bait headlines work like a charm, but when BuzzFeed ran the headline, “Is This The Craziest Rant A Fox News Host Has Ever Done?” it proved hard to resist. After all, we’ve seen some pretty crazy rants over the years.
There’s a certain rhythm to politics, an element of predictability that is as reliable as the tides, or a finely made Swiss timepiece. Among these imperturbable political rhythms is the hackery of Ed Klein: Whenever Hillary Clinton is in the news, it’s guaranteed that Klein will pop up with a salacious and poorly sourced book attacking the former first lady, and that it will get a lot of attention from conservatives who should know better than to trust Klein but don’t actually care.
That’s in contrast to the relatively stable competition of the last 20 years, when Democrats have won four of six presidential elections and Republicans won House majorities in eight of 10 congressional contests, always by less than landslide margins. The parties’ stands on issues have remained familiar from one cycle to the next.
Advocates of a noninterventionist foreign policy and the restoration of civil liberties in America haven’t had a reason to be optimistic in the past decade or so – but that is rapidly changing.
The problem might be how “well-briefed” David Gregory is. Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program; there are some allegations that the country may have done some research that was geared towards eventual weapons development, but those allegations remain just that–allegations.
A few days ago, Hillary Clinton was interviewed on Fox News by Greta Van Susteren and Bret Baier. Many viewers were expecting a half hour of painful questions and accusations. After all, Van Susteren is the Fox News host who slammed comedian Jon Stewart, grilled congressional candidate Mike Dickinson, and came head to head with fellow Fox News anchor Erick Erickson.
During an interview this afternoon on the NSA revelations leaked by Edward Snowden last year, Shepard Smith and Glenn Greenwald got into a tense exchange over how Fox News’ coverage of President Obama impacts U.S. soldiers.
“Do you spend any time worrying that people might have died in this?” Smith asked Greenwald.
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the story of whistleblower Edward Snowden in a new book called No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State. Greenwald is also the author of How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. He is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. And, since he began breaking the stories of the NSA’s mass surveillance he has taken on a new role as a founding editor of the new media outlet, The Intercept.
Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyers on Tuesday filed a court petition to withdraw an arrest warrant for the WikiLeaks founder who has spent two years at Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden.
The Union of Journalists in Kazakhstan (KZO) has awarded a top prize to Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, for his oustanding efforts in investigative journalism.
I thought of that when I saw the new issue of Time magazine (6/30/14), which featured a short item on Kevin McCarthy, the new majority leader in Congress. As such, he is someone who certainly will be wielding enormous political power.
The federal judge who halted the state investigation, Rudolph Randa, wrote an opinion so detached from First Amendment precedent, Wisconsin law, and the facts of the case that many legal experts believe that it will be reversed by the Seventh Circuit appellate court reviewing it. (Plus, Randa’s May 6 ruling was a preliminary ruling, not a final decision.) Other legal experts think Randa should not even be involved in the case, given that he is a regular attendee at “judicial junkets” funded by the Bradley and Koch foundations, which are closely tied to Walker and the group that filed the federal lawsuit, Wisconsin Club for Growth.
“A solid majority of American adults say that social media have no influence at all on their purchasing decisions — suggesting that the advertising may be reaching smaller segments of the market, or that the influence on consumers is indirect or goes unnoticed,” Gallup concluded. The company said people are more likely to consult in-store displays, television commercials, mail catalogs and magazines than a brand’s Facebook or Twitter account when making a purchasing decision.
Russia has asked Twitter to block access to a dozen accounts it deems “extremist”, the head of the country’s telecoms watchdog said, as Moscow seeks greater control over internet sites based beyond its borders.
Law enforcement agencies are generally pretty happy with their automatic license plate readers. It allows them to harvest millions of plate/location records without having to exit their vehicles, much less slow them down. It also allows them to spring from their cruisers with guns out and force non-car thieves into submissive positions while they perform the sort of due diligence that should have been completed long before the cops/guns exited their respective holders.
As a result of an Open Rights Group campaign, over 1300 customers have written to their internet service providers (ISPs) to ask why they are still retaining their web, email, SMS and phone data.
On the contrary, GMail is a bit easier because I already use my aliases everywhere so I just need to open a Kolab account and update my forwarding rules. However we’re all Gmail users now.
John Schindler—a former NSA counterintelligence officer and “secrecy expert” who made a name for himself in Conservative circles by trashing Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Glenn Greenwald—has deleted his Twitter and has been put on leave from his teaching post at Naval War College after a rather indecent communique went public on Twitter this weekend, reports Adam Weinstein at Gawker.
The support of both Democrats and Republicans to an amendment that blocks warrantless searches of email and phone calls bodes well that Congress will rein in government spying on citizens, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told The Enquirer on Monday.
Glenn Greenwald is set to disclose new documents revealing which kinds of citizens are targeted by National Security Agency surveillance, he said Monday.
Poland’s beleaguered government is scrambling to limit fallout from a high-profile eavesdropping scandal after its foreign minister was allegedly caught on tape slamming Warsaw’s alliance with the United States as “worthless”.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk struck a defiant note after reports of the secret recording.
“The Polish government will not be dictated to by people who illegally planted these bugs… whether by ill-will, naivety, greed or to serve political interests,” he told journalists on Monday.
Cirrus Insight, an app for integrating Salesforce with Gmail and Google Apps, announced today the launch of email tracking for Gmail.
Cirrus Insight email tracking allows users to receive real-time notifications when someone opens an email; view the time/date, location, and device on which email opens occurred; and log email tracking-information to the activity history in Salesforce.
Your online identity and activity is vulnerable to prying eyes and while these anti-snooping devices attempt to protect you, your actions and choices will finally determine the level of your online privacy
We already wrote about how Reps. Goodlatte and Ruppersberger misrepresented the milestone amendment put forth by Reps. Massie, Lofgren and Sensenbrenner to defund the NSA’s backdoor searches and mandates to put (different kinds of) backdoors in technology. However, we’d heard that the House leadership was so desperate to block the amendment that they put a totally misleading description on it — and it’s true…
The United States still lacks adequate legal protection for such whistleblowers as Edward Snowden, one year after he sought asylum in Russia, a lawyer for the pressure group Human Rights Watch said.
“It is particularly ironic that of all the issues raised by the Snowden revelations, the one that gets the least attention and effort seems to be protection of national security and intelligence sector whistleblowers like Mr Snowden himself,” Dinah PoKempner told RIA Novosti.
There are times, albeit rare, when a gridlocked U.S. House of Representatives does something meaningful. On Thursday, the House passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that zeroes out funding for (some) National Security Agency mischief.
[...]
Only two members of Washington’s Congressional delegation, Reps. Doc Hastings and Dave Reichert, voted no. Rep. Suzan DelBene, an amendment co-sponsor, wrote in a tweet, “Good news in the fight to rein in the #NSA. Last night the House passed a measure to cut funding for NSA ‘backdoors.’”
Up to $1 million, monthly. That’s the consulting fee former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander charges banks interested in his advice on cyber security. A small price to pay for the expertise of a guy who has arguably done more than anyone to undermine cyber security in the United States. Said Alexander, who retired from the NSA back in March amid fallout over the agency’s controversial surveillance practices, “It would be devastating if one of our major banks was hit, because they’re so interconnected.”
Three Senators suggest President Obama could end the phone and internet dragnet today. Update: Time to cash in for General Keith “Haystack” Alexander, chief Panopticon ideologue. Recently he pitched his wares to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. His asking price for advice is $600,000 a month (down from a million). No doubt he regrets the problems he’s caused for U.S. tech firms, but on a personal level, the future could not be brighter.
A measure adopted by the House to bar the National Security Agency from meddling with encryption standards was inserted into a defense appropriations bill and approved on a voice vote.
In the latest gaffe to demonstrate the privacy perils of anonymized data, New York City officials have inadvertently revealed the detailed comings and goings of individual taxi drivers over more than 173 million trips.
The dreadful violence and destruction the West has inflicted and promoted in recent years in its efforts to gain control of the mineral resources of the Middle East continues to play out. Those who see communities with which they identify abroad engaged in military conflict will always produce a small number of people going to join the fight. This is in no sense unusual, and in no sense a threat to ordinary citizens in the UK. The link to terrorism here is entirely a fiction. The unfortunate thing is that the mainstream media allows no outlet for people to mock its false assertions and point out its sinister agenda.
Reflecting on mass incarceration in the United States, which he has experienced firsthand during his time in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution of Loretto, Pennsylvania, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou advocates for prison sentencing reform in his latest letter from jail.
Firedoglake has been publishing “Letters from Loretto” by Kiriakou, who was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the George W. Bush administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013, and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.
The release of a long-delayed, $40 million Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s “rendition, detention and interrogation” program during the George W. Bush administration is pending final approval from the Obama White House, Politico reported.
The Obama administration is inching toward declassification of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s controversial interrogation techniques.
The Central Intelligence Agency has finished redacting sensitive information from a 500-page summary of the 6,800-page report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to make public in April, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an interview Monday night.
Slightly more than three months after the police shooting of homeless camper James Boyd catapulted Albuquerque into the international spotlight, activists returned to the streets to advance their movement against police brutality.
On a blistering Summer Solstice Day, whose blazing mid-day sky was oddly crested by a half-moon, more than 200 people marched up Central Avenue near the University of New Mexico chanting “Justice Now” and “They say justified, we say homicide!”
Based on the most recent report issued by federal monitor Robert Warshaw, the Oakland Police Department will most likely require months of additional monitoring by the court — after eleven years of failure to comply with the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA). No other city in the United States has required this length of time to bring its police department into compliance with a federal consent decree.
We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”
Nominations are now open for EFF’s 23rd Annual Pioneer Awards, to be presented this fall in San Francisco. EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Nominations are open until midnight on Wednesday, July 2. Nominate the next Pioneer Award winner today!
The “Open Wireless Movement” was devised years ago by the EFF, Free Press, Mozilla and others to advocate for the sharing of broadband via publicly-accessible Wi-Fi hotspots. At the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth conference, the group says they’re going to unveil new “Open Wireless Router” firmware that simplifies the process of safely and securely offering free Wi-Fi without hindering your own network.
The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.
As well as all the varied developments I discussed in the previous TTIP update, plenty has been happening recently in the hotly-contested area of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has published another of its informative reviews of developments in the ISDS field [.pdf]. This edition is particularly welcome since it focuses on the interaction between the EU and US.
Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new domains to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. TorrentFreak was able to confirm that several popular torrent site proxies were added over the past weekend. However, the blocked domains have been quickly replaced by new ones, continuing the cat-and-mouse game that never seems to end.
Think it’s fine use downloaded images in your own website, poster or publication? You could be breaking copyright law… We show you how to use images legally and find free images that are available for commercial use.
These will, of course, run some */Linux operating system. At the rate the government replaces PCs this changeover could take years or, if they accelerate the change, just a year or two. I expect countries like China and India have the will and ability to make such changes. This is a clever move because the savings on hardware could more or less pay for the cost of changing software. The move to */Linux accelerates.
Thinkpad X60 is old, Core Duo@1.8GHz, 2GB RAM notebook. But it is still pretty usable desktop machine, as long as Gnome2 is used, number of Chromium tabs does not grow “unreasonable”, and development is not attempted there. But eats a bit too much power.
OLPC 1.75 is ARM v7@0.8GHz, .5GB RAM. According to my tests, it should be equivalent to Core Solo@0.43GHz. Would that make an usable desktop?
Besides the Nouveau driver performance being faster thanks to experimental re-clocking when using the Linux 3.16 kernel, there are also performance improvements to note with some generations of AMD graphics processors.
The changes found within Linux 3.16 to benefit the Radeon DRM graphics performance are the GPU VM optimizations and large PTE support. Separate from this performance-related work for this kernel-side open-source AMD update is also HDMI deep color support, HDMI audio clean-ups, and other bug-fixes.
The start of the Gallium3D “mega drivers” patches by Emil Velikov are starting to land in Mesa. First up, the patches to consolidate the Gallium3D VDPAU and XvMC support into single libraries for supporting multiple drivers.
This weekend I ran some quick and dirty link-time optimization (LTO) benchmarks from a GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot from earlier this month. Here’s the results.
Calibre 1.41, an eBook reader, editor, and library management software, has been released and comes with a few very interesting features, including a new tool for setting the metadata.
Calibre is a software that serves many purposes and can be used as an eBook conversion tool, eBook reader, eBook editor, and much more. One of the most important functions of the application is metadata management, which is crucial when dealing with eBooks.
It’s easier than ever to get your own SIPs account, whether you’re making it through Ekiga, a third-party site or even setting it up yourself on a home server. Jitsi is the app that gets the very most out of whatever you set up, even if you don’t plan to use SIPs. Thanks to its ability to connect to other chat services, it becomes an all-in-one chat and IM client for however you want to contact people.
The sheer wealth of settings available in Jitsi is also astonishing, allowing you to tweak specific timeout, port and other connection settings you may never actually need to change. The rest of the clients did not offer settings nearly this deep, and the codecs available were definitely a plus.
We need to talk. If you’re a software designer or a programmer of some merit, we really need to have a quick discussion about your application.
Over the past year and a half or so, I’ve been scraping the landscape for text-based programs and trying them out for fun. It’s one part hobby, one part attempt to build something like a directory of available software, and one part pruning away the things that don’t work at this point in history.
Opera web browser hasn’t been updated for Linux since version 12.16 (about a year ago) – until today, when the Opera desktop team announced that they released Opera 24 for Linux on the Developer stream…
I just noticed Warsow 1.51 was released earlier this month and this open-source first person shooter has some decent changes for being a release coming not too long after the introduction of Warsow 1.5.
Those familiar with running development versions of KDE software are familiar with the idea of having to sometimes remove their whole development install directory and “start all over” in order to resolve some types of build errors.
I have completed the MPRIS specifications Tracklist interface for PMC. Now other applications can view and control the current playlist in PMC over DBus. This was a part of my GSoC project. This interface will allow me to send commands to PMC, asking it to play a particular song in the playlist. After some changes to the Simon MPRIS plug-in, a user will be able to play a song in the current playlist by naming it. As the Simon plug-in is itself based on MPRIS specifications, it will be able to interact with any media player following the MPRIS specs.
The Long Awaited update to the KDE Edition is now over, Stability, Speed and Beauty is what drives this edition. This Edition is a special one for me because I worked on most of it while being extremely sick to the point where I could not walk, with nothing but a bed, laptop and time on my hands I went to work on this baby and this is the result.
The Netrunner Team today released Netrunner 14 Frontier – 32bit and 64bit versions. The release follows Kubuntus support cycle, giving it a full 5 year support life via the backport repos.
Manjaro 0.8.10 has received its Update-Pack 1, getting regular kernel updates and latest upstream packages. This update adds some new Gnome3 packages, latest linux kernels, drivers and many updated applications needed for performing your tasks.
According to the official announcement available in the Manjaro blog, KF5 got updated to 4.100 version, the latest mesa 10.2.1 with a better working mhwd is included and the following kernels are supported.
Canonical’s Orange Box, the portable server cluster that the company intends to use to showcase OpenStack, MAAS, Juju and other aspects of the Ubuntu Linux-based cloud, is out. Here’s what it’s all about.
For starters, it’s important to understand what the Orange Box is not: A revenue-generating hardware product from Canonical. The company has given no indication so far that it plans to sell these devices on a large scale—although if you truly want you can buy one, for the equivalent of around $12,900, from TranquilPC Limited, the company that has the contract for manufacturing them.
“Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE,” said the leader of the Kubuntu project, Jonathan Riddell.
Many users have raised this issue in the last few weeks and the elementary OS developers were forced to abandon the Isis codename in order to make sure that people don’t make any connections.
“elementary obviously has no ties to the militant group known as ISIS – and we don’t think people will get us confused – but we want to both recognize the ongoing turmoil and choose a less controversial name. Freya is a Norse goddess of love and beauty. As we push our design forward, a goddess associated with beauty makes a lot of sense. And evoking the powerful emotion of love is always a good thing!” said the devs on their Google+ account.
The PiTFT is one of our favourite little things for the Raspberry Pi, making it much more portable than it naturally is and opening it up to many more cool projects than you could do before. The one thing it did lack was proper, modern touch screen controls such as swiping and gesture but this has now been added thanks to Xstroke.
Late last month, the Debian project voted to adopt a community code of conduct, a set of guidelines for acceptable participation in its official communication channels. Members agreed to abide by the following principles:
Be respectful
Assume good faith
Be collaborative
Try to be concise
Be open
Coraline Ehmke has developed apps for the web for 20 years. In that time, she’s learned a lot about open source culture and what makes a community of contributors tick. At the Great Wide Open conference this year, Coraline gave a talk about diversity in open source.
Providing a common gateway for web services, caching web requests or providing anonymity are some of the ways organizations use proxy servers. Commercial proxy products, especially cloud offerings, are plentiful, but we wondered if open source or free products could provide enterprise-grade proxy services.
Not long after it was revealed that Mozilla was working on adding support for Google’s Chromecast in their mobile iterations of the Firefox browser, it appears that they are also creating a device of their own, with functions similar to the Chromecast. The device, which was created by an unknown hardware manufacturer, looks similar to a Chromecast dongle and runs Firefox OS, according to tweets from Christian Heilmann, a “Mozilla Developer Evangelist“. He describes the device as a “fully open TV casting prototype”, which is pretty much the Chromecast, but more open.
This week Open Source Bridge will kick off in Portland and I’m extremely excited that Mozilla will once again be sponsoring this wonderful event. This will also mark my second year attending.
Mozilla cites two major advantages of using WebIDE as compared with developing apps for competing platforms. In-browser development tools are already familiar to the enormous number of Web developers that exist, so using them for application development minimizes the number of new tools and new skills that must be learned.
Second, they’re extremely lightweight as development tools go. The substantial size of downloading tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio, in addition to the cost of developer licenses on other platforms, can limit their appeal and usability, especially in emerging markets. Putting the tools into the browser means that Mozilla’s reach is near universal.
An open-source OpenStack effort, known as Ironic, is a key enabler for Rackspace’s new OnMetal offering, which also supports the Docker container model.
I’ve been doing some work with Eclipse Orion, a web-centric IDE with some interesting attributes, so I was interested to see news of forthcoming language support enhancements coming in Orion 6.0. Lots of interesting bits like syntax highlighting that brings in Arduino files, new documentation generators, the ability to use all the tooling while the JavaScript is embedded in HTML, better tunable JavaScript validation with new rules and so on… worth checking out.
AN Adelaide man who had his gun licence photo taken with a colander on his head says it is significant to his religion — the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and he should not have had to undertake a psychological test.
The Australian Finance Review has just published a new story that suggests that the NSA may have hardware level backdoors built into current generation AMD and Intel processors. Leading security expert Steve Blank says that he first caught on to the practice when he noticed that the NSA had access to Microsoft emails before they were encrypted. He says that he would be extremely surprised if the NSA did not have access to a processor microcode level backdoor on every PC in America.
Russian news outlet Kommersant has reported that the nation’s government wants to ditch Intel and AMD processors in favour of a locally-developed ARM effort.
The outlet’s report suggests three state-owned Russian companies are banding together to develop to be called “Baikal” that will use ARM’s 64-bit kernel Cortex A-57 as its base design, offer at least eight cores, be built with a 28nm process and run at 2GHz or more in PCs or servers.
Reuters, the international news agency, was reportedly been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army – a hacking group who support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attack news organizations.
In a recitation of death and destruction, a federal prosecutor on Tuesday chronicled for a jury the alleged conduct of four Blackwater security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 18 others in downtown Baghdad nearly seven years ago.
In opening statements at the trial of the four guards, Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Patrick Martin said some of the victims were “simply trying to get out” of the way of gunfire from Blackwater guards. “Fourteen died, 18 injured. For what?” he said.
In a review of a new book by a journalist who claims George Bush lied to the country in the run up to the Iraq war, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier insists that Obama has been just as bad as Bush with his constant stream of lies to the country.
Shortly after the day’s final bell rang and hundreds of youngsters ran outside Lickdale Elementary School with their book bags and lunchboxes, a military drone fell from the sky.
Drones are often called unmanned aircraft. But there is a lot of human drama when they crash. Drone pilots and other crew members swear, scream and yell at their remote-control video screens when the aircraft fly out of control. Those moments are often captured by audio recorders in ground control stations.
The Israeli military struck Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights overnight Sunday in retaliation for an attack earlier in the day that killed an Israeli teen and injured three other people.
Fighter jets fired missiles at nine targets on the Syrian side of the border, including military command posts and firing positions. An artillery unit that uses high-precision Tamuz missiles was also employed in the strike, the military said in a statement. It confirmed direct hits.
For the first time in nearly six months, U.S. drone strikes hit Pakistan’s tribal region three times in less than a week, killing at least 20 militants with suspected ties to the Haqqani network.
The hiatus was the longest pause in the controversial CIA program since 2006, and the drones’ sudden return begs the questions: Why now? And is this the beginning of a renewed drone campaign in Pakistan?
With ‘official’ America debating how to respond to what at present appears to be a Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Iraq the question both within and outside of the US is: why do America and the Americans have any say in the matter? The last quarter century of US engagement in Iraq has been a series of military and geopolitical blunders with catastrophic consequences across the Middle East. The answer of course, as it was with the mis-sold invasions of 1990 and 2003, is Operation Iraqi Liberation, oil. The dim hubris of Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld / Rice that broke ‘Iraq’ into sectarian factions has been met by leading Democrats with claims that the war was ‘mismanaged’ and that Iraq remains of some vaguely specified ‘vital interest.’ The moral, ethical and societal sickness that has US President Obama now sending murder robots (drones) and additional troops to force the will of ‘official’ Washington onto what remains of the national government of Iraq misses that it was this very same will that caused the social / political catastrophe now claimed to be in need of rectification.
Shaw argues that evidence available, evidence gone missing and discrepancies simply don’t add up to the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that day.
Speaking to the BBC on Friday , former top CIA official, Graham Fuller, admitted that he wrote a reference letter for the Gülen movement leader, Fethullah Gülen, after the FBI resisted granting him permanent residency status between 2006 to 2010.
The former top official and Middle East expert, yet claimed that there was no relation between the Gülen movement and CIA, during the BBC interview on his newly released book “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council, currently sitting in Geneva, has heard testimony from leaders of the Venezuela protest movement and from the survivor of the car crash that killed Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá.
The hearings on human rights in Venezuela and Cuba, was organized by a coalition of NGO’s as an official event inside the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 17.
A high Israeli official was quoted recently saying it was Iran’s influence that is most dangerous in the region, not that of ISIS. Of course, that should tell us a great deal. In this part of the world, Israel’s views count for far more than those of all the other countries put together, at least, so far as the United States’ government is concerned, the ridiculous lopsidedness in that reflecting the best Congress campaign funding can buy.
Five months ago, a Kurdish intelligence “asset” walked into a base and said he had information to hand over.
The capture by jihadists the month before of two Sunni cities in western Iraq was just the beginning, he said. There would soon be a major onslaught on Sunni territories.
A new report says the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants were trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Jordan more than two years ago.
Indeed, Mafia Dons have learned the hard way after RICO not to give clear cut instructions to their operatives. Obama, our Capo Di Tutti Capi, has learned his lesson well. He lets his capos — heads of the IRS, DOJ, CIA, know how to proceed with vague injunctions that set the tone.
Timelapse: All spills of crude oil crude bitumen and synthetic crude in Alberta each year from 1975-2012. Each dot is one spill; dot size does not indicate spill size. Source: Energy Resources Conservation Board
Alberta’s had an average of two crude oil spills a day, every day for the past 37 years.
That makes 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of just about any other substance you can think of putting in a pipeline – from salt water to liquid petroleum.
An estimated 50,000 people marched through London, including supporters of Stop the War, CND and other peace groups who called for warfare spending to be cut and not welfare services.
Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.
She has no idea who Lionel Messi is and her home country isn’t even playing, but Pakistani mother-of-five Gulshan Bibi can’t wait for the World Cup – because she helped make the balls.
The NY Times, in It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave, explores the trend of increasing numbers of young people continuing to live with their parents after college.
The article notes that one in five people in their 20s and early 30s currently lives with parents, and 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from parents. In the prior generation, only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.
The common explanation for the change is that young people had the misfortune of growing up during several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends.
Today, almost 45 percent of 25-year-olds, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000, and more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, causing them to make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
The level of political support in Sweden for blocking, for blocking outside the rule of law and for the export of the filtering and blocking services of the Swedish internet filtering company NetClean is quite extraordinary.
Dropcam, a San Francisco based home surveillance company has on their official blog post revealed that they have been acquired by Nest. Nest, a Google owned company, confirmed on their blog the acquisition and also the fact that this acquisition will not change anything for either of the companies’ immediate future, as both Nest products as well as the Dropcam products will be available to customers without any change. The deal went down for $555 million.
A watchdog group this week called on Congress to investigate federal record-keeping practices to determine why the government has repeatedly lost e-mails that could shed light on alleged wrongdoing.
European officials have often acted as though excessive government surveillance was solely an American problem. The recent release of a legal statement from a senior British counterterrorism official, Charles Farr, shows that the United States government is certainly not alone in justifying such practices.
Yesterday, Reps Reps. Ron Desantis (R-Fla.) and Cedric Richmond (D-La.) became the 217th and 218th members of the House to sign on to the Email Privacy Act. More than half of the 435 members of the House of Representatives now formally support updating the outdated law governing the privacy of our electronic communications and requiring police to get a warrant before they read our emails, look at our online photo albums, or view our texts. Among those 218 members who have endorsed reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) are 136 Republicans – more than half of the members of the majority party.
Being as these folks stand up OpenStack, I also took the time to find out what it’s like to work with the community and whether it’s really as much of a pain to work with as everyone claims.
With the revelations of Edward Snowden, Beijing has fittingly dismissed the nuanced American distinction. Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has infiltrated into Huawei Technologies, a hi-tech Chinese multinational company. A recent Foreign Policy article confirmed that an elite NSA ultra-secret China hacking group “successfully penetrated” Chinese computers and its telecommunication industry for the past 15 years.
Take for example a situation happening across the United States, but most recently exemplified in a records request in Florida. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request with a police department in Sarasota, Fla., for information on a surveillance tool called “Stingray,” which is used by law enforcement agencies across the country to mass collect data.
“We’re working on that story now,” said Greenwald, who grew up in New York and lives in Rio de Janeiro with his longtime partner, David Miranda. “It’s highly likely it will be out before the end of the month. It will be reporting on the people the NSA is targeting domestically.”
Join the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) at the main entrance to NSA Menwith Hill, HG1 4QZ, on Friday 4 July from 5pm to 9pm for the annual “Independence FROM America” demonstration.
The results of a Stuff Ipsos poll released last week shows 71.6 per cent of Kiwis believe United States spy agencies are gathering data on New Zealanders and 61.8 per cent of those people do not support the US being able to do so.
Millennials are criticized for broadcasting too many intimate details of our everyday lives online. We readily publish what we had for lunch, when we went to the gym, relationship status updates, and more. Things more senior generations might deem “TMI” are standard online chatter for us; however, there is a method to the madness. Global connectivity has enabled us to open new lines of communication with people across town, across the country, and across the world. We see value in being able to speak freely, giving us access to new ideas and cultures through comparing the human experience, hemisphere to hemisphere.
The U.S. Department of Defense is immersed in studies about…people like you. The Pentagon wants to know why folks who don’t themselves engage in violence to overthrow the prevailing order become, what the military calls, “supporters of political violence.” And by that they mean, everyone who opposes U.S military policy in the world, or the repressive policies of U.S. allies and proxies, or who opposes the racially repressive U.S. criminal justice system, or who wants to push the One Percent off their economic and political pedestals so they can’t lord it over the rest of us. (I’m sure you recognize yourself somewhere in that list.)
Apple is going to implement random MAC addresses technology in its iOS8 devices, an anonymity-granting technique which late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz was accused of using to carry out his infamous MIT hack.
Swartz, who faced criminal prosecution on charges of mass downloading academic documents and articles, was also accused of using MAC (Media Access Control) spoofing address technology to gain access to MIT’s subscription database.
In a Capitol Hill hearing room two summers ago, privacy activist Christopher Soghoian organized a stunning demonstration of some new police surveillance technology. A small group of congressional staffers were handed “clean” cellphones and invited to start calling each other while, off to the side, a Berkeley communications researcher named Kurtis Heimerl turned on his gear. After a few minutes, Soghoian told the staffers to hang up—and then Heimerl played back their conversations. Not only that, the two men told the staffers, the digital eavesdropping equipment was capable of sucking all the data from their phones—emails, contact files, music, videos—whatever was on them.
Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.
A year has passed since the American former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden began revealing the massive scope of Internet surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.
His disclosures have elicited public outrage and sharp rebukes from close U.S. allies like Germany, upending rosy assumptions about how free and secure the Internet and telecommunications networks really are.
Single-handedly Snowden has changed how people regard their phones, tablets and laptops, and sparked a public debate about the protection of personal data.
The National Security Agency’s (NSA) reach of spying on worldwide communications is even broader than previously reported, according to new information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In addition to working with allied spy agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the NSA has partnered with other, unnamed foreign governments to access enormous volumes of emails, phone calls and Internet data.
A poll about attitudes to Westminster on the influential parenting website Mumsnet has revealed startling levels of disillusionment with a male-dominated political system
On June 12, Brazilian police fired tear gas on a group of 50 unarmed marchers blocking a highway leading to the World Cup arena in São Paulo. On June 15 in Rio de Janeiro another 200 marchers faced floods of tear gas and stun grenades in their approach to Maracana stadium. Armed with an arsenal of less lethal weapons and employing tactics imported from U.S. SWAT teams in the early 2000s, police clad in riot gear are deploying forceful tactics, wielding batons and releasing chemical agents at close range. In Brazil, this style of protest policing is not only a common form of political control, but also a booming business.
The cost for this year, $454.1 million to operate, staff and build at the prison complex, comes from a report by the Defense Department’s Office of the Comptroller.
No way, no how will President Obama send a terrorist to Guantanamo Bay. But how about a few weeks on a Navy warship to chat with U.S. interrogators without a Miranda warning? Welcome aboard the President’s floating not-so-secret prison.
When I saw the Washington Post’s banner headline, “U.S. sees risk in Iraq airstrikes,” I thought, “doesn’t that say it all.” The Post apparently didn’t deem it newsworthy to publish a story headlined: “Iraqis see risk in U.S. airstrikes.” Then, in an accompanying article, authors Gregg Jaffe and Kevin Maurer observed nonchalantly that “Iraq and the Iraqi people remain something of an abstraction,” a point that drove me to distraction.
Pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. A representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new “effective” government. On Thursday, The New York Times revealed the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace al-Maliki. Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. The INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers and journalists. We are joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine.
The Interview, a new action comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, has elicited choice comments from North Korea for showing the “desperation” of American society. Due out in October, the film tells the tale of two US journalists who are given the opportunity to interview North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.
Russia’s Baikal processor will be built around an ARM Cortex A57, which ties into Vladimir Putin’s goal, established in 2010, to move all government computers over to Linux – another move that’s easy to understand given the OS’ open-source and modular nature.
The Asus C200 Chromebook is a 2.5 pound laptop that offers up to 12 hours of battery life and sells for just $249. It’s not the fastest notebook around, doesn’t have the best screen, and some folks might find Google’s Chrome OS operating system limiting. But there’s a lot to like about this little laptop… especially given the low price.
The Yocto project provides a set of tools to build custom distribution images from scratch. When using Yocto, the image, and all the tooling used to build the image, is built from recipes. These recipes are parsed using the bitbake command. The recipes have dependencies, just as ordinary packages in a classical distro. By pointing to an image recipe, a dependency tree will be constructed and a large number of packages will be downloaded, built and then assembled into a single image.
Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.16-rc2 on Saturday night rather than a conventional Sunday afternoon release due to obligations he has this week, but regardless, there’s still many changes to find with this weekly kernel update.
It’s a day early, but tomorrow ends up being inconvenient for me due
to being on the road most of the day, so here you are. These days most
people send me their pull requests and patches during the week, so
it’s not like I expect that a Sunday release would have made much of a
difference. And it’s also not like I didn’t have enough changes for
making a rc2 release.
Anyway, enough excuses. 3.16-rc2 is out, and contains the usual
assortment of fixes all over the map. The most unusual part at this
point is how the sparc changes stand out (at almost 40% of the patch
by bulk), but they are basically all just sparse warning cleanups.
Similarly, some Nouveau drm changes standing out size-wise, but again
those are largely due to small firmware fixes resulting in big
generated changes. The actual real changes are fairly small.
Ignoring those two unusually large changes (in lines), everything else
looks fairly normal. There are driver changes, some tooling updates
(particularly perf), and various other arch updates (arm, s390,
unicore32, x86..). And just misc random stuff all over the place -
rtmutex, btrfs, yadda yadda.
The shortlog is not tiny, but small enough to include here, so you can
see the details there if you care.
In trying to reduce tearing and match the behavior of the Intel and Radeon drivers, the Nouveau X.Org driver will now sync buffer-swaps to vblanks by default.
Support for running Wayland’s Weston compositor directly off the DRM kernel driver for the NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC found within the Jetson TK1 development board has been proposed for mainline Weston.
One of the first desktop “docks” is now available for Wayland!
Announced yesterday was that Cairo-Dock has been ported to Wayland. There’s now basic support for using the popular open-source dock on Weston 1.5 with various desklets.
When Eric Anholt announced last week he was developing a Broadcom VC4 DRM plus OpenGL driver he said originally he plans to develop the user-space GL driver as a Gallium3D driver but might later turn it into a classic Mesa driver.
Our latest Debian GNU/Linux benchmarks following the recent GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux comparison are benchmarks of Debian GNU/Linux in its latest testing form for 8.0 “Jessie” compared to a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS plus with an assortment of updates.
Back in 2012 with the NVIDIA 310 Linux driver series a threaded OpenGL optimization was added to the proprietary graphics driver. When this driver premiered we tested NVIDIA’s Linux threaded OpenGL optimizations to mixed results. We’re back now re-testing the OpenGL threaded optimizations to see if it makes any more of a difference now with modern Linux games and OpenGL workloads while using the latest 337.25 Linux driver.
After having some interesting discussions last week around KVM and Xen performance improvements over the past years, I decided to do a little research on my own. The last complete set of benchmarks I could find were from the Phoronix Haswell tests in 2013. There were some other benchmarks from 2011 but those were hotly debated due to the Xen patches headed into kernel 3.0.
The popular Vim editor provides users with a vast set of features from the get-go, and you can further enhance its capabilities via plugins. If you’re a programmer, check out the following plugins, which can help you do things such as check syntax errors from within the code, browse the source code, and switch to the header file corresponding to the current file.
The Linux terminal can be a complex beast, and it would be handy to have something like Siri to help make things easier. Sure, there’s often no need to go into the terminal for regular users, but there are some advantages to using the terminal over the graphical user interface. You can do a lot of things with the terminal that aren’t as easy to do in graphical user interfaces – besides, there’s just this odd nerdy pleasure in doing as much as possible from a command line interface.
Snappy is a minimal application that does one thing — plays videos. Snappy is a super-minimal video player with a neat on-screen display, and that’s about it, here is no other interface in the application. Snappy has no library feature that keeps all your videos, no list of previously played videos, no menus, not even a open video dialog — to play a video, you either tell a video to open in snappy via your file browser or drag and drop a video file to the snappy window. Snappy is also built on the GStreamer framework, so it will support any files that you have GStreamer plugins for.
Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer exceptional gaming capabilities, and have contributed to the trend of astonishing leaps in graphics fidelity. There is not a year that has gone by without a game being released that makes significant advances in technical graphics wizardry. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.
Scott Ludwig of Valve shared some details this weekend about a new release of the Steam Runtime SDK they’re working towards to improve the Linux gaming experience.
If you love slow-paced but nail-biting turn-based strategy, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a brilliant buy. It brings tactical battles, base management, alien technology research and soldier levelling together in one glorious package that will challenge your brain rather than your reflexes. If you see it on sale, snap it up, you won’t regret it. Also, it’s now available for SteamOS and Linux – which is ace.
Unlike a lot of studies before, for the first time, we did not get enough participants. In the mobile broadband study only 22 users participated (Wireless: 113, Wired: 96), while more than 29 answers would have been required for stable results in this study. Furthermore, we do have problems to understand the results and transform them into the desired structure for the UI. But take a look yourself:
The Randa meetings provide an excellent opportunity for KDE developers to come across for a week long hack session to fix bugs in various KDE components while collaborating on new features.
Icon sets for Linux, especially for the KDE’s Plasma desktop, have usually been scarce, with not so many themes being complete nor good looking. Oxygen icon set looks and feels outdated, and Faenza and Kfaenza mods from different people over the past years gradually morphed into frankenstein projects. There have been attempts at completing icon sets that would give your desktop some crispness and freshness, but many of them, despite being well designed and though out, lack many commonly used app icons, or monochrome tray icons, or, well, take your pick, you probably went through the same experience as I did.
One of the things I’ve been asked recently quite often is about where’s the information regaring the needed port to KF5. I’ll use this blog post as reference.
As an pronunciation trainer, Artikulate does not only need sound output, but also sound input. For sound output the (Linux) world is kind of simple and it only costs some lines of code to integrate Phonon or a similar framework into your application. For sound input it is trickier, especially if you do not want to work with a C-style API (when coding a C++/Qt application, C-style API feels very strange). The solution to this problem is QtGStreamer, which provides Qt-style C++ bindings for GStreamer, and hence access to the currently best multimedia framework.
Current versions of Qt5 with Wayland support don’t support minimizing/hiding windows. However, patches have now been merged into Qt Wayland for addressing this shortcoming.
First, torrents aren’t available, since 1. that requires dedicated tracker software, which isn’t needed since 2. KDE doesn’t distribute many large files.
While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released!
Mageia 4.1, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been release and is now available for download.
The submission phase for the supplemental wallpaper for Fedora 21 is now half over. Some already asked me for the status and most wanted also to see what is submitted. But we decided not to show them until after the voting, to avoid that people vote only for people they know instead of the quality of the submission.
Inside the Orange Box, you’ll find ten Intel micro-servers. Each is powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs. Every one of these mini-servers has four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The first micro-server also includes a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital hard drive. These are all connected in a cluster with a D-Link Gigabit switch.
Last week Eric Anholt left Intel’s Linux graphics driver team to go work for Broadcom developing a VC4 DRM/KMS and Gallium3D driver for the GPU that supports the Raspberry Pi.
Telecom service providers are being asked in multiple ways to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to supporting open source software and technology in the move to virtualization.
The most obvious move those willing to embrace openness will make is joining the new open source project — called Open Platform for NFV, or OPN — that a number of telecom operators associated with the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group are setting up with the Linux Foundation , already home to OpenDaylight . (See Is Open Source the New De Facto Standard?)
Mozilla took the world by surprised when it announced that it was developing a Firefox operating system that would be used for mobile phones, especially in developing markets. Now, there are already a few devices out there, but it seems that this isn’t the last step for the company whose name is still associated with the famous web browsers.
Haven given that warning, I still think there’s good value in project statistics. They say something about trajectory, and when used in conjunction with solid knowledge of why the numbers are what they are, they can tell a good bit about comparative success. And they can be inspiring. “Look what we’ve done” you can say to your community, as you provide them with the raw data about what they’ve created. They can also say something about the relative participation in a project, as with Chuck Dubuque’s look at how to gauge the contributions of the various corporate contributors to OpenStack.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. In general, it is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operating system for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public, private and hybrid clouds.
I could not disagree more with Dvorak. One of the things I always hated when I was in school was having to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on endlessly about a subject. It felt like it was taking forever for them to get to the point and present the information. Really, I remember doodling on my notebook while the teacher went on and on in what seemed like an endless monologue about whatever.
Maybe that was just my perception at the time (I graduated high school back in 1987), but I would much rather have had faster access to all of the course information rather than waiting for the teacher to regurgitate it verbally to me. Oral communication in person is such a slow and ponderous way to transfer information compared to what you can do with today’s computers and tablets.
While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount. How do they reconcile their desire to share data, allowing their analyses and conclusions to be verified, with the need to protect participant privacy? It’s a dilemma we’ve talked about before on the blog (see: Open Data and IRBs, Privacy and Open Data). A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data.
The first RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
The GCC steering committee has ruled on allowing a foreign library for compute offloading into the GNU Compiler Collection.
The first library in question is the poorly named “liboffload”, which handles offloading work to Intel’s high-end Xeon Phi compute cards. Permission was needed from the GCC steering committee for introducing a foreign library plus that there’s some GPLv2.1 header files and new sources.
It is striking that, despite talking a lot about freedom, and often being interested in the question of who controls power, these five criteria might as well be (Athenian) Greek to most free software communities and participants- the question of liberty begins and ends with source code, and has nothing to say about organizational structure and decision-making – critical questions serious philosophers always address.
Our licensing, of course, means that in theory points #4 and #5 are satisfied, but saying “you can submit a patch” is, for most people, roughly as satisfying as saying “you could buy a TV ad” to an American voter concerned about the impact of wealth on our elections. Yes, we all have the theoretical option to buy a TV ad/edit our code, but for most voters/users of software that option will always remain theoretical. We’re probably even further from satisfying #1, #2, and #3 in most projects, though one could see the Ada Initiative and GNOME OPW as attempts to deal with some aspects of #1, #3, and #4
To this extent, the argument between LLVM and GCC is a retread of the historic differences between GNU/Linux and the BSDs, between ‘open source’ and free software. Open source developers allow the code to be reused in any context, free or proprietary. Free software is restrictive in that it insists that the code, and any modifications to the code, must remain free in perpetuity. Advocates of free software would argue that the integrity of copyleft licensing has been instrumental in the spread of GCC, and has taken Linux and free software into places it would not otherwise have reached, and that free software cannot be bought or corrupted by commercial or corporate interests. Open source advocates argue that open source is more free because the user has no restrictions and can do what he or she likes, including developing closed source versions of the code.
If the Narendra Modi government has its way, India is all set to see a perceptible change in primary health facilities across the country. According to Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Dr Harsh Vardhan, the health ministry aims to provide 50 essential generic medicines from “birth to death” to all Indian citizens.
In an age of surveillance anxiety, the notion of leaving your Wi-Fi network open and unprotected seems dangerously naive. But one group of activists says it can help you open up your wireless internet and not only maintain your privacy, but actually increase it in the process.
The impact open source hardware has had in the past year has been momentous. Educators, students and hobbyists have all traditionally been big proponents of open-source hardware, but in the last 12 months we finally saw large companies and professional engineers begin to openly embrace the open source movement as well.
PHP 5.6 is on track for its official release this summer as a major update to PHP5 while those looking to do some pre-production testing, RC1 is now available.
Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.
The concept is interesting. Distros do a lot of similar things as does Sourceforge, GitHub and Distrowatch. A site specializing in distributing release-announcements could have a niche. On the one hand, with the millions of projects that might use the service, the site might be too busy to be useful. On the other hand, a good search engine might make the site scale well. Perhaps Google could provide the searching function.
Finally receiving some mainline treatment within Mesa this Sunday is the start of Chris Forbes’ long work-in-progress patches concerning ARB_fragment_layer_viewport.
Today is the Midsummer Solstice, which has been celebrated as a holy day by most religions throughout human history. and is also recognized by science as one of the four special days in the solar year.
Kopimism is one of Sweden’s newest religions. On or about the winter solstice of 2011, the Swedish authority Kammarkollegiet — blessed be its name! — officially recognized by Kopimism as a religion, just like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and others.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom expanded its ban on the teaching of creationism from all state schools, to all state schools as well as semi-private Free Schools and Academies.
Suspicion increased when Dr Shakeel Afridi was revealed to have been running a fake hepatitis vaccination programme for the CIA to help in its search for Osama bin Laden. Now with deaths that can be linked to a vaccine, and that too a vaccine purchased from India, our public health goals will be that much harder to achieve. Those responsible for the deaths should of course be held responsible but it will now become very difficult to contain the damage they have caused.
A decade after it was declared operational for bogus political reasons – “you just needed to build them” – the $40 billion Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, or GMD, “cannot be relied on,” says a blistering report from the L.A. Times. It has an “abysmal” record: It has failed more tests than it has passed, has “performed less well than people had hoped,” has been hyped by U.S. officials who claimed it was more reliable than it was, has failed tests far less stringent than real-life scenarios would be, and over time has continued to perform worse, not better, despite years of tinkering, failing five of its last eight tests. It was also designed for a threat that likely doesn’t exist, or in the immortal words of Charles Pierce, “not to defend ourselves against missiles but, rather, as a platform for international dick-waving.” Oh yes, and members of Congress – the guys who battled over how much to cut food stamps – want a bunch more.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently stated that air strikes and drones should be used once again on Iraq to stem recent gains by extremists in that country. Mr. Blair is oblivious of the responsibility he shares with former U.S. president George W. Bush on account of one of the most serious breaches of international law in recent times. The prosecution of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, along the lines of similar trials conducted in Argentina, Chile and Peru, is the only fitting response to such careless remarks.
All able-bodied South Korean men must serve about two years in the military under a conscription system aimed at countering aggression from North Korea.
In 1981, my first professor in political science, the late Dr. Charles Benjamin, explained that roll-back-the-clock was the plan of the new Ronald Reagan administration in terms of American foreign policy. We had just come out of the Carter era–the only time that USA presidential leadership had sincerely tried to put the CIA and NSA leadership in their societal places (subservient to the executive branch and constitution) and had unveiled a practicing Human-Rights policy that would support popular people’s rebellions against dictators around the globe. During the Carter term, from Central America to the Middle East, the USA foreign policy had allowed people’s movements to have their day in the sun.
The former vice president got his comeuppance on Fox News last Wednesday, producing a minor news story.
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Ira to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.” She referred specifically the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator’s name (“Reagan, um, Megyn”) before declaring, “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record.” (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”
In other words, the unfortunately mistaken but universal belief in Saddam’s WMD preceded the Bush-Cheney administration, was part of its heritage but in no way its invention. Everybody was honestly mistaken. Thus he utterly rejects personal responsibility for crediting, promoting it, and using it to justify a war he badly wanted.
“Do you think Dick Cheney is a credible critic of this president?” host David Gregory asked Paul, quoting from Cheney’s op-ed in which Cheney wrote, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Two types of drones — the MQ-1C Gray Eagle and the RQ-7 Shadow — began flying in tandem with the Apaches. The drones’ cameras and sensors transmit the intelligence to the Apache crew — showing it what lies over the hill so the Apaches don’t have to expose themselves to find a target to attack or don’t fly into an ambush.
New Zealand has no issue with US drones striking terrorists in Iraq, PM John Key told TV1′s Q+A this morning.
“They sometimes go wrong and that’s a great tragedy.
“On balance of benefit, are they more often right than they’re wrong? I think the answer is ‘yes’,” he said following a meeting with US President Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that the United States is “prepared to take targeted and precise military action” in Iraq if the situation on the ground requires it. The president added that if he decides to take military action in Iraq, he would consult with Congress and world leaders.
In response to consolidated lawsuits filed by the ACLU and The New York Times, the Second Circuit recently ordered the Obama administration to disclose (with redactions) one of the legal memos authorizing the government’s premeditated killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American citizen. The government has challenged certain aspects of the court’s decision, apparently with some degree of success (more on that below), and it has managed to defer the release of the memo by two months. To its credit, though, the court appears unwilling to allow the government to delay the release of the memo indefinitely. If the court holds to a plan it set forth ten days ago, it will publish the memo itself this coming week.
Communities Digital News published a report outlining strong circumstantial evidence that arms transferred from the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi before the attack on September 11, 2012, ended up in Syria and are now being used against the Iraq government. Media reports and Pentagon / State Department statements have confirmed that U.S. weapons are being deployed by ISIS in Iraq.
More disturbing information is emerging to bookend these revelations. The United States probably trained elements of the ISIS militia, which has accounted for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Syria and now in Iraq.
hen again one only has to remember the MSM basically cheering on the the preemptive illegal invasion and all the breathless bullshit emanating from “embedded” journalists to see how effing useless they are.
The Sunday Mirror columnist and former Deputy Prime Minister says it’s time to learn from the past and leave Iraq and its neighbours to sort out this mess
Treating “the US troop surge worked” argument as a fact, as Engel is doing, is very dangerous–since it logically suggests that it is only the presence of US troops that can keep Iraq safe. That is a recipe for a never-ending war.
When it comes to US foreign policy and warmaking in the Middle East, you’re not supposed to talk about oil. To suggest it plays a serious role in US decision-making is to invite taunting about conspiracy theories.
It was the bolded text that was of biggest interest because as we noted the next day, when discussing the next steps for ISIS, we said that “One wonders how long until the mercenary force finds its latest major backer, because for all the western, US-led intervention, both Russia and China are oddly missing from the scene. We expect that to change soon.”
Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? How many times does the Beltway hawk caucus get to be wrong before we recognize that maybe, just maybe, its members don’t know what they’re talking about?
“Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war,” wrote Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. For many people in Brazil, a war has indeed broken out surrounding the current World Cup. Poor communities have been displaced by stadiums and related infrastructure for the event, the high level of security has increased police violence, and the enormous economic costs of the World Cup are seen by many as a blow against the rights of the country’s most impoverished people. As a result of these controversies, the international sports event has been met with wide-spread protests.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, felt that despite being a small nation, Ecuador can pursue the cessation of US mass espionage against its citizens, according to an interview published here today.
The Australian publisher and journalist considered that Ecuador can pass laws to mandate that companies providing services within the country use audited industrial standard encryption by default.
In an interview with the El Telegrafo, Assange said the best model for small nations like Ecuador is the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which aimed to make Iceland into a competitive jurisdiction among the market of jurisdictions for companies wishing to provide internet services.
WikiLeaks has been rather quiet recently — probably something to do with Julian Assange being stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the last two years. But today, we saw a flash of the old, dangerous WikiLeaks, with its publication of a major leak concerning the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). Although Techdirt wrote about this in April, for many this is the first time they have heard about this secretive deal, which has probably come as something of a shock given the global scale of its ambitions and its likely impact.
Prime minister Tony Abbott is holding secret trade negotiations to fundamentally deregulate Australia’s banking and finance sector, according to WikiLeaks documents.
The Australian publisher and journalist, best known as the editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, recently revealed in a reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), that he has long supported bitcoin.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia was mounting a sophisticated “disinformation campaign” aimed at undermining attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas
Several people have been detained at an anti-monarchy protest near Madrid’s heavily guarded central square following the coronation of Felipe VI as Spain’s new king.
It seems the BBC are capable of tracking down a single Scot in Brazil who cheered a goal against England but fail to notice 50,000 demonstrating on their doorstep.
The city of Miami on Friday filed a lawsuit in a federal court against JPMorgan Chase & Co., accusing the banking giant of a pattern of discriminatory loan practices “since at least 2004″ which sparked foreclosures and violated the U.S. Fair Housing Act.
“JPMorgan has engaged in a continuous pattern and practice of mortgage discrimination in Miami since at least 2004 by imposing different terms or conditions on a discriminatory and legally prohibited basis,” Bloomberg reports lawyers for Miami as saying in the complaint.
Tens of thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday afternoon in protest at austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. The demonstrators gathered before the Houses of Parliament, where they were addressed by speakers, including comedians Russell Brand and Mark Steel.
A few months back the filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin got some bad news. The PBS funding that they had counted on to complete their documentary on campaign financing was being withdrawn. This setback came not long after PBS took the unusual step of warning David Koch (of right-wing billionaire donors “the Koch Brothers” fame) that he had been negatively portrayed in another of the networks documentaries, and giving them a chance to respond.
So why no mention of the suspect’s stated motive now? Fox News has aired more than 2,000 segments on the Benghazi attacks. Like other right-wing media with the Benghazi bug, Fox News claims that the White House deceived the public by not immediately branding the incident an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attack, but instead claimed that it was a spontaneous reaction to the notorious internet video. The motive for the deception, goes the theory, was the White House’s desire not to remind voters that Al-Qaeda was still active two months before a US presidential elections (e.g., Special Report, 5/14/13.)
Indeed, the conspiracy-mongering got so out of control at one point that the Republicans, with Fox News at their backs, attempted to turn a State Department email mentioning that the anti-Muslim Internet video had caused incidents at a number of US embassies into a smoking gun–evidence, they said, that State Department was trying to repeat inaccurate talking points to be used on Sunday morning chat shows (e.g., Kelly File, 5/1/14). They were ultimately unsuccessful, as more level-headed media corrected the record (e.g., Slate, 4/30/14).
Apple co-founder, nerd legend, and all-round Good Guy Steve Wozniak has recorded an excellent video explaining why he’s supporting Larry Lessig’s Mayday.US super PAC, which is raising $5M to elect lawmakers who’ll promise to vote to abolish super PACs and effect major campaign finance reform.
This is what happened when a friend of Vox Political, going by the monicker Sick Britain, contacted the BBC to ask why there has been no coverage of today’s (June 21) anti-austerity demonstration in London, which was attended by more than 50,000 people.
The Bill of Rights and other provisions of our Constitution have been gone anyway, what with presidents starting wars all over the world without even a nod to Congress and the National Security Administration recording everything from whom we call to who calls us to our facial images. The spooks can find us whenever they want.
A new poll suggests Canadians are giving a thumbs down to the Conservative government’s cyberbullying legislation, at least when asked about elements of Bill C-13 that have nothing to do with cyberbullying.
The poll by Forum Research, conducted June 13-14 and surveying 1,433 Canadians via interactive voice response, showed more than two-thirds of Canadians disapproved of a stipulation in the controversial bill that would allow authorities to access personal data without a warrant.
Since then, the company says it has signed up 200,000 users – and it just launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo because, co-founder Andy Yen says, “that is the best way to get financing and also keep ProtonMail independent.”
That’s the monthly fee that former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander charges banks for advice. The four-star general, who once oversaw U.S. digital defenses, has joined a growing field of cyberconsultants, and the audience is receptive. Under pressure from regulators, lawmakers and their customers, financial services firms are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into protecting themselves from digital assaults.
Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.
Things got heated Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” after Glenn Greenwald called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America founder Paul Rieckhoff’s questioning of Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia “total bulls—-.”
After last year Germany’s Der Spiegel published a 48-page catalog of gadgets used by the NSA back in 2008, a group of hackers led by security researcher Dean Pierce decided to make an attempt to reconstruct these NSA spying gadgets using open-source hardware.
We’ve heard variations on the phrase “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the government for quite some time. It appears this may be true, at least if you are the government.
In the case of Stingray, a cell phone spying device used against Americans, the government does have something to hide and they fear the release of more information. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment weeps quietly in the corner.
Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.
General Motors wants to make it easier for Chinese customers to curse out the moron who cut them off or get the digits of the attractive driver one car over at the stop light. So it’s developed an app called DiDi Plate that lets Android users text the owner of a car by simply scanning its license plate.
Two Green Party politicians have criticised police chiefs who recorded their political activities on a secret database that tracks ‘domestic extremists’
As The Zhivago Affair reveals, Feltrinelli was not the novel’s only publisher: The CIA played a central role in promoting and disseminating Pasternak’s novel. “The CIA, as it happened, loved literature,” Finn and Couvee write, and the agency was involved in the shipment of some one million books behind the Iron Curtain, including Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nabokov’s Pnin. It became an urgent American agenda to place Doctor Zhivago in the hands of Russian readers. At a 1958 exposition in Brussels, attended by many Soviet visitors, the Vatican pavilion gave out free copies of Zhivago. In the words of a CIA memo, “this book has great propaganda value.”
Activist Margaretta D’Arcy made a strong presentation to an Oireachtas committee on the use of Irish airspace and Shannon Airport by, in particular, the US Military and CIA.
POLICE are investigating evidence that a CIA jet landed in Glasgow after carrying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a secret torture prison in Poland.
And the Sunday Mail can reveal that elite detectives are also probing five other stopovers in Scotland, which researchers suspect were part of CIA “rendition circuits” to move terror suspects between secret jails and torture sites.
Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has called on the UK Government to restrict the use by the US of Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory, for renditions.
To make matters worse, agencies can’t deal with the explosion in electronic information. The CIA is believed to generate 1 petabyte of classified records every 18 months, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets of documents.
25-year-old Emma Czornobaj stopped her car on the left lane of a highway near Montreal in 2010 after spotting a group of stray ducklings on the road. A motorcyclist and his daughter were killed after slamming into her car.
Even if hackers like Mr. Swartz are still a problem for us to reconcile in real life, maybe it is in the movies, with their capacity to empathize with the outré, their ability to present difficult, morally prismatic antiheroes, that we can properly come to terms with them. Especially now, in a world so vividly shaped by complex agents of change like Mr. Assange and Edward J. Snowden, we may need movies to help us comprehend our shades of gray.
Many news articles have reported record deportations under Obama, while his anti-immigration critics have argued that a sensitivity to novelties in classification expose a president lax on border enforcement. Adjusting for all this, it appears that the truth is somewhere in the middle: Overall, the Obama administration has conducted deportation policies qualitatively similar to the last administration’s. Whether one concludes a slight decline or increase, the more important fact is that there has been no radical shift since he took office, and certainly not one toward liberalization. Obama’s proposal for reform last year was in fact quite reminiscent of Bush’s plan. Although conservatives tended to find Bush too liberal on immigration, a June 2007 poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans favored their president on these policies, down from 61 percent just a few months before.
Several people were injured by rubber bullets and teargas canisters in Tuesday’s dawn attack by police on a tent community occupying a historic wharf known as Cais José Estelita.
It seems as though we may never know how many elected politicians have been monitored by the police’s ‘domestic extremism’ unit.
And the reason? Police say that they have not counted how many there are.
In response to a freedom of information request from the Guardian, Scotland Yard said that the national ‘domestic extremism’ unit “has not conducted any research to count how many elected politicians are currently recorded in any way in its files.”
Clashes in São Paulo ongoing, activists erected barricades and police have begun trying to disperse them with gas bombs. Protestors trashed a high-class car dealership and a bank on their way to the barricades, the cops could not keep up.
At least 5 people were arrested by the Spanish police for displaying flags for the Republic during the crowning ceremony of an imposed king aimed to reboot the fading support for the monarchy.
Since 2008, it is legal to carry flags in support of the republic in Spain, but police arrested old people, young people, parents in front of their kids, intimidated and abused dozens for speaking against the king on the streets, or for wearing anti-monarchy signs. The ones who shouted ”¡Viva la República!” (Long live the Republic), during the ceremony, were arrested on the spot, officials said that it was for the crime of “opposing resistance to the authorities“.
Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) accused California of sterilizing over 140 female inmates between 2006 and 2010 without required state approvals.
One doctor, James Heinrich, was responsible for the two-thirds of the tubal ligation referrals during that period from the biggest offender, Valley State prison.
Asked by CIR about his startling record, Heinrich justified the money spent sterilizing inmates by claiming it was minimal “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.” He has since been barred from future prison work.
Conventional wisdom dictates that to maintain your security and privacy, you should encrypt your Wi-Fi network. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that partially opening up your home Wi-Fi network could actually enhance your privacy, and is working on a tool to make it easier to do so.
Since the text itself is pretty dry, WikiLeaks has asked one of the world’s top experts on these trade agreements, Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland, New Zealand, to provide a commentary. I strongly recommend reading her analysis, since it explains what all those innocuous-sounding phrases really mean. Here is her summary of what the new leak tells us…
After several years of development, Kim Dotcom’s much-anticipated music streaming platform Baboom is gearing up for its public release. Baboom aims to disrupt the music industry by closing the bridge between artists and fans. This includes a higher revenue share for artists and free music streaming in a lossless format for fans.
The EU Commission will next week announce new strategies for dealing with online piracy and counterfeiting. These non-legislative measures will include an EU action plan aimed at fighting IP infringement, plus a strategy to protect and enforce IP rights in third countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aim is to “follow the money”.
A new survey of young children and adults has found consensus on what should be charged for content online. In both groups, 49% said that people should be able to download content they want for free, with a quarter of 16-24 year olds stating that file-sharing was the only way they could afford to obtain it.
Posted in Patents at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex
Summary: Vested interests in the patents industry make the USPTO an inherent enemy of public interests
THE USPTO clearly got out of control. Watch this article and another one titled “Software patents – new USPTO pilot program to expedite examination”. This was reported shortly before the SCOTUS rules against the excess of software patents. The former head of the USPTO was a big proponent of software patents and it’s not surprising; the USPTO just seeks to increase its power by patenting everything under the Sun. After a coup by corporations like IBM (which put their mole there) it seems like there’s no going back to sanity unless the whole institution gets rebooted or de-funded/dismantled. The Obama Administration made things worse because almost no patent application gets rejected anymore. They pretend it’s indicative of greater innovation.
Patent offices lobbying for more power and wider scope of patents is not just a problem in the US, but like most things, it’s far bigger in the US and there is huge trans-Pacific/Atlantic lobbying trying to have every other system assimilated to US law. Watch what’s going on in India, which keeps fighting against crazy patent monopolies from the West. India has fought hard against software patents despite pressure from some Indian patent lawyers who of course wanted these. It was the same in New Zealand, where the lawyers are now whining that they don’t get much business. To quote a new article: “A review of the numbers of local patent filings made in New Zealand and who was making those applications revealed the rather startling statistic that a large proportion of local patent filings were not made through specialist IP firms, instead they appeared to be self filed.”
Wherever we go in the world there is a war waged by parasitic patent lawyers who try to tax innovation while promising to ban competition or tax the competition (they get commissions on it all). In the patent system itself there is a big desire to always patent more and more things (unlike in courts), so there too there is a conflict of interest and we must stop it. Eternal warfare is market stability to arms companies and maximal patenting/litigation is market stability to law firms. We should tackle both problems similarly and mercilessly. It’s not going to be easy. █
Summary: Apple continues to misuse patents as a tool of competitive advantage, relying in part on a biased US corporations-run system (USPTO and ITC) or courts (CAFC)
AS WE SHOWED earlier this month, the US patent office has been exceptionally friendly towards Apple, not the Korean giant, Samsung. The USPTO (and by extension ITC) is one of those pseudo-public institutions that are run by US corporations, not impartial actors. Those are are friendly towards Apple have financial reasons to be like that.
It was very recently reported that Apple patents ideas that relate to stuff which already exists from Samsung but not from Apple. Since the patent system checks what’s already filed rather than what exists in the world/market, this type of abuse is allowed. Apple is basically allowed to patent what the rivals have (and have not patented), then copy the rivals and block their products (e.g. ITC embargo on imports). Watch this ITC war that Apple started. It’s failing badly, but it is still unjust. “Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.,” says this report, “on Friday agreed to drop their appeals of a patent-infringement case at the US International Trade Commission (ITC) that resulted in an import ban on some older model Samsung phones. Samsung has been seeking to overturn the ban, while Apple was trying to revive other patent claims it had lost. The import ban will remain in effect, according to a filing with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Last month both companies blamed each other for their inability to reach a global settlement. Appeals of district court cases between Apple and Samsung are still pending.”
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a corrupt sham. It should cease to have any impact on law and it is highly predicable (barely surprising) that it let Apple make all this mess. As one respectable site put it, Apple’s patent wars may in fact be “a Marketing Strategy”, pretending that Apple invented everything despite its founder’s admission that it copies a lot from other companies. To quote the analysis: “The latest battle in the three-year long Apple-Samsung patent saga concluded few weeks ago. In contrast to previous litigation between the two tech-giants—which revolved on the overall look of the phones—this case focused around autocomplete, tap-from-search and slide-to-unlock software. Despite the technical nature of these innovations, there are a few broad managerial lessons that have emerged from this prominent patent case.”
Further down it says: “The Apple-Samsung patent war illustrates how patent litigation has impacts that go far beyond stopping a specific firm from copying a particular technology. This narrow view overlooks the effect it has on brands, and on other competitors not named in the suits. In considering their own IP strategy and in responding to litigation, managers can benefit from thinking more broadly about patent wars and recognizing their multiple effects.”
Apple is a shameful embargo company that copies others, then tries to ban them. Apple relies on an inherently corrupt and biased legal system in the US. Those who have not yet chosen to boycott Apple should think about what Apple does to innovation and fair competition. Remember that all those devices that Apple fights against are based on Linux. █
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Patent lawyers fight to maintain artificial barriers
Summary: Systematic distraction or obfuscation of the SCOTUS ruling, which basically rendered a lot of software patents utterly useless in every court in the United States and abroad/at the border (ITC)
WE SAW THIS after the Bilski case. We saw it many times after that. Lawyers try to shape the truth based on their own preferences. That’s what they do for a living. We must counter them before they successfully change the nature of this whole debate.
Various articles that we see coming from patent lawyers (and patent-centric publications) are an absolute disgrace, but this is precisely what we predicted would happen. Revisionism as such typically becomes necessary when there’s a decision impacting their business. They turn their back on truth and start spinning, or lying by omission.
Remember that lawyers are good liars (or truth twisters), they are not necessarily judges, although judges too have their faults and occasional corruption. Their goal is not justice. They need to just lie on behalf of people (clients), or twist the facts not for the purpose of justice but for winning a case. That’s their occupation by definition and the SCOTUS decision is seen as a threat to some of them.
The corporate media’s coverage [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] was mostly OK (sticking to the facts rather than twisting them), but there’s already spin from patent lawyers, such as this article by James M. Singer from Fox Rothschild LLP. Its headline states “Supreme Court Delivers Blow To ‘Abstract’ Software Patents, While Stating That Software Still Can Be Patent-Eligible” (the latter part conveys bias).
Watch how Microsoft booster Richard Waters twists the facts, by going with the deceiving headline “Software patents survive US Supreme Court test”. This lousy journalist is a longtime Microsoft spinner (who told lies) and he has just told readers the very opposite of what happened. Richard Waters makes the Financial Times look no better than Fox ‘news’ (AP and CNN did get it right this time).
The SCOTUS decision would do more to help than all those so-called ‘reforms’ that achieve nothing serious, except perhaps the claim that something has been done (a distraction).
Another lawyer, Matt Levy , continues to divert attention to patent trolls. To quote his latest analysis: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court released its final patent opinion of the term, Alice v. CLS Bank. This case should help clarify the patent eligibility of software, and improve patent quality, but we’re still going to need patent reform legislation to really fix the problems in the patent system that are exploited by patent trolls.”
Nonsense. As many trolls use software patents, it is scope we should be striving to change. Some very large trolls like Microsoft would not be impeded by a reform that deals with small “trolls”. Patent Progress, the site of Levy, always focuses only on trolls; perhaps his goal is not to get rid of software patents but to merely change the landscape of litigation. Here he is speaking about trolls, including Intellectual Ventures, conveniently failing to mention the company behind it or that company’s record of racketeering with patents. “And earlier this week,” said this one post. “Matt Levy explained why the demand letter bills are insufficient to fix the patent troll problem.”
Matt Levy should be doing more to tackle software patents. The same goes for Steph from this trolls-focused site which asks: “You know what the biggest problem with patent trolls is? Oh sure, it’s that they cost companies buckets of money and stifle innovation by shutting down start ups. Those are bad, of course, but the real tragedy here is that they make people like Chris Hulls call someone a “piece of shit” and then look stupid in the process.”
The focus on trolls is the reason we stopped covering patent issues for nearly a year. Here we have an important decision regarding software patents, but people who claim to be pursuing “patent progress” carry on talking about trolls, as if they simply fail to see the broader issue and the ultimate solution to spurious litigation. █
Posted in Fraud, Microsoft at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Canada among the countries where Microsoft or its partners are caught bribing officials in exchange for pricey deals and lock-in
TECHRIGHTS has been writing a great deal about Quebec because Microsoft corruption seemed quite common there. Here aresomememorableexamples. The latest example was reported by a Microsoft site, which said: “Both face charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and breach of trust.”
The Public Security Ministry is involved, too. “No doubt they came bundled with M$’s favourite OS,” writes Pogson (Canadian blogger), “and an ubiquitous office suite… The contract was for $3.3million CAD and the kickback was $400K CAD. I wonder what M$’s share was. They must have had a ton of software on those computers to justify such a large kickback. Do you think the item would be covered by “promotion” or “cost of sales”?”
Microsoft bribing government officials is not news (even direct bribes). There are some ongoing investigations in numerous countries. Catching the involved people red-handed is important because Microsoft likes to deny charges based on uncertainty or settlements. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
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