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06.15.14

Links 15/6/2014: News Catchup, Build-up for Another Iraq Invasion

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • p2p Video Chat
  • Open source electronics project: Oscilloscope

    A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.

  • What Got You Involved in Open Source?

    If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox risks user backlash by adding search box to new tab page

        Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.

      • Firefox OS Apps run on Android
      • You can run Firefox OS Apps on Android

        FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.

      • Mozilla begins repackaging Firefox OS apps for Android

        Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.

        Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.

        “As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.

      • Mozilla and Spreadtrum get closer to $25 Firefox OS smartphone

        The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.

      • Firefox 30 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Firefox 30 Officially Released

        Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.

      • Firefox Runs On 64-bit ARM (AArch64)

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Is the government doing enough for computing?

      Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 Now Available

      The third BETA 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.

      This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

      The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • International team of scientists open sources search for malaria cure

      In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.

    • 4 ways to make open science easier

      When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.

    • Digital archaeology and open source

      As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.

    • Science

      • What makes this journal the most open?

        F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:

      • Respected journal makes transition to open science
      • Scientists manage research with open source Zotero

        References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.

      • Using OpenStack for scientific research

        As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2014
    • Scientific Graphing in Python

      In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.

    • CMake 3.0 Released

Leftovers

  • IRS tells Congress it has lost trove of emails by central figure in tea party investigation

    This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

  • Masters of Love

    Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

  • Cameron: ‘Stop being bashful about Britishness’

    People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.

    Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.

    He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: UK to step up collaboration with US over nuclear warheads

      Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent

    • Scottish independence: nuclear free promise for constitution

      The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.

    • Tony Blair: west must intervene in Iraq

      Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.

      The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.

      Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.

    • Tony Blair: ‘We didn’t cause Iraq crisis’
    • Iran sends troops into Iraq to aid fight against Isis militants

      Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad

    • Convicted Soldier Warns Of ‘Lies’ About Iraq
    • Chelsea Manning says U.S. public lied to about Iraq from the start
    • Manning says U.S. public lied to about Iraq from the start
    • Manning says US lied about Iraq
    • Analysts: Misguided US invasion spawned crisis in Iraq
    • NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion

      All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.

    • US sends aircraft carrier to Persian Gulf as Obama considers air strikes in Iraq
    • The new left-right alliance in the US

      Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.

    • Mikdad: West’s Policies Uncovered During Crisis in Syria

      He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.

    • ‘Pattern of Life,’ a tale of modern warfare

      Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.

      “For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”

    • U.S. drone attacks shrouded in secrecy, possible illegalities
    • Choice between parties is already quite clear

      One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…

    • The Milk Carton GuyThe Milk Carton Guy

      Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners

    • US does more harm than good with military intervention on foreign soil
    • What made CIA resume drone attacks?

      These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.

    • U.S. drone attacks shrouded in secrecy, possible illegalities

      What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.

    • The Fog Machine of War

      The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom

    • Protesters throw stones, firecrackers, Molotov cocktail at Russian embassy in Kiev

      Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.

    • Two Occupations Ending in Hopeless Disasters

      The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.

    • The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth

      An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.

    • US should stay out of Iraq, that war was a lie and repeating it would be a crime

      Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.

      Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.

      Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.

    • THE IRAQ MESS: PLACE BLAME WHERE IT IS DESERVED
    • Dear Tony Blair, thanks for everything, hope you enjoy the oil, Love – Iraq

      According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.

    • Inspector General Reveals Staggering Waste in Afghan War

      A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.

    • Deadly Fiasco

      The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.

    • Facebook, YouTube, Twitter Blocked in Iraq Amid Crisis

      As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.

    • Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube blocked in Iraq
    • Drone strikes kill three suspected militants in Yemen

      Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.

    • Drone kill communications net illustrated

      Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.

      The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.

      British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.

    • Issues of drone warfare get a female pilot’s human face

      Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.

    • Debate: Is Human Rights Watch Too Close to US Government to Criticize Its Foreign Policy?

      Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.

    • Bush makes birthday parachute jump

      Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.

    • When Johnny Comes Marching Home

      Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.

    • Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick want evidence their son Chris Harvard had become a jihadist in Yemen

      Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.

    • Pakistan denies ‘express approval’ for drone hits

      Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.

      Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.

      Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.

    • Drone strikes revival

      The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.

    • What made CIA resume drone attacks?

      At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.

    • Resumption of drone strikes raises questions

      After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.

    • Anonymous Pakistani Government Officials Suggest Drone Strikes to Intensify in Coming Days
    • Back to Iraq? No Troops, But Obama Ponders ‘Other Options’
    • Lack of intelligence: What CIA chief said is ‘never going to happen’ is happening in Iraq and Syria

      When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.

    • Wilson explores CIA and Ukraine

      “Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”

    • Why the CIA presence on Twitter is a really bad idea

      The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.

    • Wikileaks Had A Great Response To The CIA Joining Twitter
    • Dr. Zhivago’s CIA Connection and the Pope

      What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?

    • Why foreign-funded NGOs need to be monitored

      Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.

    • Neocons Double-Down on Iraq/Syria

      America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

    • US counter-terrorism abroad: Fighting terrorism or encouraging it?

      The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • “Siggi Hacker” Charged With Multiple Fraud And Theft Counts

      Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.

      DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.

    • Peru: WikiLeaks cables shed light on US massacre role

      The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.

      Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.

      Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.

      Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.

      The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.

    • “Getting Away with Murder”: Immunity of US Intelligence from Criminal Prosecution

      The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.

    • Wikileaks Says Ukraine’s Poroshenko ‘Was US Informant’

      Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.

    • Wikileaks exposes dark sides of Ukraine’s Poroshenko, Tymoshenko

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Koch Brothers Unveil New Strategy at Big Donor Retreat

      In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.

    • Virunga is saved but Africa’s wildlife is being encircled sliver by sliver

      Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn

  • Finance

    • Lord Lucan was ‘smuggled out of Britain by ex-MI5 agent and hidden in Greek monastery’

      Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.

      The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.

      Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.

    • The emergence of the neoliberal containment state in Canada | Part I

      The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.

    • Detroit’s Sad Decline Is Shown In These Shocking Transformation Photos

      It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…

    • Yo Walmart, Go Subsidize Yourself

      Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!

      HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.

    • Richard Rockefeller Dies in Plane Crash

      Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.

    • About $18 million worth of Bitcoins going up for auction later in June

      The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.

    • US government selling nearly $18 million in bitcoin seized from Silk Road

      Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.

    • 10 Photos of Amazon Chiefs’ Clash With Brazilian Police at World Cup Protests

      According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • When Is Terrorism Not Terrorism?

      ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.

    • Plagiarism: Why It Matters

      When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.

    • How Finance Controls the White House

      Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

  • Censorship

    • Twitter Has Suspended An ISIS Account That Live-Tweeted Its Advance In Iraq

      Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.

    • Police block publication of human rights newsletter, accuse group of trying to oust government

      Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.

      Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.

    • A Tribe Called Red Accused Of Racism Over ‘Caucasians’ T-Shirt

      A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.

    • Steve Coogan joins Index on Censorship as patron

      Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.

      “We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.

      “Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”

      Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”

    • Global media body condemns soft censorship by governments

      A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.

    • Behind the Great Firewall: What it’s really like to log on from China

      Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Disbelief as FBI frames up St. Petersburg Florida man

      The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.

    • U.S. government lies as Sami Osmakac trial begins

      The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.

    • Terrorism trial in Tampa coming to a close

      Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”

    • A Party At The Last Magazine: An Exclusive Excerpt From Michael Hastings’ New Novel

      Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.

      Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.

    • Brazilian police fire tear gas at World Cup protesters
    • Ben Dangl: Capitalism’s Bullets in Latin America

      The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”

      Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.

    • Activists Poured Concrete All Over Some ‘Anti-Homeless’ Spikes This Morning

      The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.

    • Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

      Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements

    • U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t.

      U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.

    • Did US Send CIA Rendition Jet To Europe In The Hope Of Grabbing Snowden?

      The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.

    • CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

      As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.

    • Instagrams from Auschwitz

      Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?

    • America is Rapidly Being Transformed into a “Controlled” State

      While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.

      It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.

      First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.

    • Gov’t must give up 5 secret surveillance docs for court to review, judge orders

      In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.

    • Senate’s Latest NDAA Draft Further Tramples Americans’ Rights

      Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.

    • Massachusetts Town Nullifies NDAA Indefinite Detention
    • NDAA, Barring The US From Indefinitely Detaining, Assassinating US Citizens
    • Black Man Driving Wife to Work Accused of Being Illegal Cab Driver: Lawsuit

      After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.

    • The Tyranny of the Taxi Medallions

      The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.

      During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.

    • The Forgotten Fight Against Fascism

      Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.

    • Defence officials prepare to fight the poor, activists and minorities (and commies)

      The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • 2nd Cir. Affirms That Creation of Full-Text Searchable Database of Works Is Fair Use

        The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.

      • MPAA’s Chris Dodd Praises Pirate Site Blockades

        This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?

      • Copyright Troll Accuses Critic of Leading “Psychopathic” Hate Group

        Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.

      • Porn studio attacks blogger for leading a “fanatical Internet hate group”

        With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.

      • Police & FACT Claim Big Successes in UK Anti-Piracy Drive

        City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.

06.13.14

Links 13/6/2014: Docker Hype, Manjaro 0.8.10

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Extremadura health care has switched to open source

      The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organisations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organisations have migrated to a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

  • Licensing

    • Zimbra moves to OSI-approved licensing for Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition

      Unified collaboration software vendor Zimbra announced the release of a beta version of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 to the open source community under the GNU Public License V2 license. Calling it a “commitment to community-powered open source innovation,” company officials say the move is part of an overall plan to distribute future versions of the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition under Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Stop the EMA Backsliding on Open Clinical Data [Updated]

      Back in April, I noted that we had potentially a big win in the form of the opening up of drug safety data in the light of recent scandals that have seen big pharma companies hiding adverse effects of their products, often with fatal results. As I warned, we weren’t there yet, since the drug companies really don’t want their dirty washing for all to see, and they have been lobbying extremely hard to water down the provisions.

    • The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

      One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman’s GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption — things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That’s what Ecuador’s FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. “FLOK” is derived from “free”, “libre” and “open knowledge”; here’s how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:

      The FLOK Society bills its mission as “designing a world for the commons.” The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; “arts and meaning-making activities”; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.

Leftovers

  • Trojan horse: never mind schools, what about the parents?

    Bad things have been happening in some Birmingham schools: children have been taught things that are hard to reconcile with the broader culture and values of the country in which they live and which provides them with that education. That’s the consensus at Westminster, and Politicians will spend the day arguing about who is to blame, how this happened and how it can be stopped from happening again. Was it Michael Gove? Or Ofsted? Or Birmingham council? Or the governors? Or a whole political class that tacitly endorses a doctrine of multiculturalism, while turning a blind eye to its more troubling consequences? Everyone will have their preferred mixture of answers, so I don’t intend to offer you mine here. Instead, there’s one group that’s curiously absent from the conversation here: parents.

  • Best Reporters On The Supreme Court Forced To Grovel Before Competitors To Prove They’re Worthy Of A Press Pass

    Back in April, we wrote about the travesty of the very best reporters on everything Supreme Court related, SCOTUSblog, still not having a press pass to the Supreme Court. The issue is somewhat complicated, in part because of the seriously arcane credentialing process involved. Basically, the Supreme Court looks kindly on reporters who already are credentialed by the Senate. But the Senate credentialing process involves the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” who get to decide who else to let in. The committee, basically, are journalists who have already been let into the club deciding who else can join them. When you set up a guild that lets you exclude innovative and disruptive players, guess what happens?

  • App Store and iTunes Store Currently Down for Some Users

    Issues seem to have begun this morning, as several users noted an inability to download the Skype app following its release. Some users attempting to download the app received a message indicating the app was no longer available for download.

  • Science

    • No, A ‘Supercomputer’ Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better

      So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do. First, here’s the press release from the University of Reading,

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding And Rejecting Science

      This report, co-published by DPA and MAPS, illustrates a decades-long pattern of behavior that demonstrates the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) inability to exercise its responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner or to act in accord with the scientific evidence. The report’s case studies reveal a number of DEA practices that maintain the existing, scientifically unsupported drug scheduling system and obstruct research that might alter current drug schedules. In addition to marijuana, the report also examines the DEA’s speed in moving to ban MDMA, synthetic cannabinoids, and synthetic stimulants. In contrast to the DEA’s failure to act in a timely fashion when confronted with evidence for scheduling certain drugs less severely, the agency has shown repeatedly that it can move quickly when it wants to prohibit a substance. The report recommends that responsibility for determining drug classifications and other health determinations should be completely removed from the DEA and transferred to another agency, perhaps even a non-governmental entity such as the National Academy of Sciences. The report also recommends the DEA should be ordered to end the federal government’s unjustifiable monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for federally approved research. No other drug is available from only a single governmental source for research purposes.

    • Pesticide and GMO Companies Spend Big in Hawai’i

      Hawai’i has become “ground zero” in the controversy over genetically modified (GMO) crops and pesticides. With the seed crop industry (including conventional as well as GMO crops) reaping $146.3 million a year in sales resulting from its activities in Hawai’i, the out-of-state pesticide and GMO firms Syngenta, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Chemical, BASF, and Bayer CropScience have brought substantial sums of corporate cash into the state’s relatively small political arena.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Exclusive: How FBI Informant Sabu Helped Anonymous Hack Brazil

      In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.

    • How an FBI informant orchestrated the Stratfor hack

      Sitting inside a medium-security federal prison in Kentucky, Jeremy Hammond looks defiant and frustrated.

    • The Blair Legacy

      It is now extremely difficult for the media to pretend that everything is OK in Iraq, bar the odd car bomb. The AL-Maliki regime has been in the remarkable position of being both pro-Iranian and supported by the West with masses of military hardware – substantial quantities of which is now in the hands of ISIS. I don’t expect Al-Maliki to fall soon, but his area of control is decreasing by the hour. Whether the Al-Maliki regime has been any less vicious than that of Saddam Hussein is arguable. Certainly there has been a great deal less social freedom in Iraq.

    • Iraq Is a Place Where Americans Suffered

      Raddatz went on to talk about ab out how more than 200 Americans had “given their lives to secure this city,” and that Mosul “is just the latest city to spiral out of control after the US pulled out”–which might suggest that Iraqi cities were in fine shape when they were occupied by US troops.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • BP Rejected by Supreme Court on Gulf Payments Reprieve

      BP Plc (BP/) must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in claims after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt disputed payments stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

      In a one-sentence order issued today, the justices said they wouldn’t put a hold on lower court rulings that require the oil company to begin making the payments, part of a $9.2 billion accord.

    • A Federal Response to Navy SEAL’s ‘Threat Assessment’ of Keystone XL

      Last week we reported on a former Navy SEAL chief named David Cooper who was hired by the nonprofit group NextGen Climate to determine how vulnerable the controversial final leg of the Keystone pipeline network might be to terrorism. In a 14-page report, Cooper determined that it would be “easy to execute a catastrophic attack” on the fourth segment of the pipeline system, based on a mock attack he carried out on the completed Keystone I, or Gulf Coast Pipeline, which came online in January. He went on to describe multiple scenarios for spills ranging from 1.02 to 7.24 million gallons of diluted bitumen, the viscous, toxic, low quality oil derived from Alberta’s tar sands.

  • Finance

    • Higher Coffee Prices Kick in at the Supermarket

      The moment to hoard cheap coffee beans has passed. The price of coffee futures peaked in April, and those higher commodity costs are now trickling down to grocery stores. J.M. Smucker (SJM) on Tuesday announced that it has increased the price of its packaged coffee, including the country’s best-selling brand, Folgers, as well as packaged Dunkin’ Donuts beans, by an average 9 percent.

    • GoDaddy files for $100m IPO

      According to its filing with the SEC, the web-hosting company had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013

    • Joe Klein on the Itchy Grievances of Minority Groups

      Or consult the 2012 State of Working America report from the Economic Policy Institute, which features a number of distressing statistics on black unemployment (consistently about twice as high for blacks as for whites, though it would be hard to say that there are “plenty” of jobs for anyone, with overall unemployment at 6.9 percent) and racial disparities in median family income.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Eastenders Threat to Scots

      The Guardian has just published its eighth article in three days pushing Gordon Brown’s views on independence. This one warns Scots they would not be able to watch the BBC after independence.

    • Was John Doe Raid Led by Republicans?

      The description of alleged “raids” of private homes in Wisconsin’s John Doe criminal dark money investigation has captured the imagination of Republicans across the country as supposed evidence of the investigation’s political motivations.

  • Privacy

    • Court: Warrantless Cell Location Tracking Is Unconstitutional

      A federal appeals court has for the first time said law enforcement can’t snoop on phone location records without a warrant

    • RT Interview — the anniversary of Edward Snowden

      Here is an inter­view I did on 5th June, the anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s dis­clos­ures about the global sur­veil­lance infra­struc­ture that is being built.

    • The Government Can No Longer Track Your Cell Phone Without a Warrant

      The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we’ve seen in a while.

    • US pushing local cops to stay mum on surveillance

      US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology

    • 12 Hidden Tricks Advertisers Use to Sell You Stuff

      Marc Andrews wrote Hidden Persuasion to highlight the various methods advertisers use to lure us in. Here the World Wildlife Fund uses anthropomorphism to establish an emotional connection with users. The lion is experiencing secondary emotions (shame, disbelief), which are thought to be distinctly human. This make us feel closer to the animal, thus more likely to donate.

    • James Clapper Admits What Everyone’s Been Saying For Months: Snowden Didn’t Take 1.7 Million Documents

      You know, you’d think that the “intelligence community” would be a bit more intelligent. As we’ve discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of “harm” concerning Ed Snowden’s actions were based on the faulty assumption that he “took” (and revealed) every document he ever “touched” while at NSA — somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.

    • The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible
    • Facebook to add advertising to Instagram in Canada

      Facebook Inc.’s photo-sharing application Instagram will add advertising in Canada, the U.K. and Australia later this year.

    • Dropping Docs On Darknets: How People Got Caught

      Most of you have probably used Tor before, but I2P may be unfamiliar. Both are anonymization networks that allow people to obfuscate where their traffic is coming from, and also host services (web sites for example) without it being tied back to them. This talk will give an overview of both, but will focus on real world stories of how people were deanonymized. Example cases like Eldo Kim & the Harvard Bomb Threat, Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu)/Jeremy Hammond (sup_g) & LulzSec, Freedom Hosting & Eric Eoin Marques and finally Ross William Ulbricht/“Dread Pirate Roberts” of the SilkRoad, will be used to explain how people have been caught and how it could have been avoided.

    • Ars tests Internet surveillance—by spying on an NPR reporter

      On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.

      This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?

      [...]

      The experiment unfolded in two phases. In the first, we simply observed Henn’s normal Internet traffic. In the second, Henn, Porcello, and I stopped the broad surveillance of Henn and turned our tools on specific traffic created by leading Web applications and services. Here’s what we found.

  • Civil Rights

    • US bars British environmentalist on allegations it admits are unfounded

      The Telegraph has obtained documents that raise questions on US treatment of John Stewart, a key campaigner against Heathrow’s third runway, who the US said had threatened Barak Obama

    • UK Plans To Bring In Life Sentences For ‘Serious Cyberattacks’

      Much of this is the kind of activity carried out in the form of attacks sponsored by governments outside the UK — or, as in the case of the NSA, directly by those governments. Despite the recent grandstanding by the US when it filed criminal charges against members of the Chinese military whom it accuses of espionage, there is little hope of ever persuading the main players to hand over their citizens for trial, so the new UK law will be largely ineffectual against the most serious threats.

    • Boris Johnson to buy three water cannon for Metropolitan police

      London mayor justifies the speed of the £218,000 purchase by saying the machines are needed in case of disorder this summer

    • News from Caroline Pidgeon: “Mayor’s obsession with changing the culture of British policing beggars belief”
    • Taxi drivers to bring London to a standstill over Uber app

      Up to 12,000 black-cab drivers expected to block traffic in central London with cabbies in Europe staging similar protests

      [...]

      The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes on Wednesday, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan and Lisbon join their London colleagues in demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood.

      Uber is one of a wave of new apps, which also include Hailo and Kabbee, that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. The services are particularly popular with private-hire drivers, who now have an advantage over licensed drivers.

    • My view on today’s taxi protests and what it means for the sharing economy
    • Israeli Abuse of Palestinian Children

      This is a heartrending documentary from Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. The terrible fate of the Palestinians at the hands of a world which has accepted the ludicrous claim to a religious Israeli right to their land is incomprehensible in a rational world. The brutality of Israeli soldiers, motivated by views of racial and religious superiority, towards children is sickening.

    • Crossfire Clueless on Israeli Occupation

      There is just one problem with demanding an apology over this: The West Bank is currently under Israeli occupation. This was true whenever Clinton made her first visit. So the CNN host is demanding to know whether Clinton will apologize for saying something perfectly accurate.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Netflix refuses to comply with Verizon’s “cease and desist” demands

      Netflix will keep telling customers that ISPs are to blame for bad video.

    • Cable companies duped community groups into fighting net neutrality

      Last week, it transpired that the big cable companies were bankrolling fake consumer groups like Broadband for America and The American Consumer Institute. These “independent consumer advocacy groups” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, and instead represent the interests of its benefactors, in the fight against net neutrality. If that wasn’t bad enough, VICE is now reporting that several of the real community groups (oh, and an Ohio bed-and-breakfast) that were signed up as supporters of Broadband for America were either duped into joining, or were signed up to the cause without their consent or knowledge.

    • Comcast is turning your Xfinity router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot [Updated]

      Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Revenue Drops to Record Low

        The RIAA’s latest tax filings reveal that the anti-piracy group’s revenue has hit a record low as membership dues from record labels continue to decline. But despite the downward trend RIAA CEO Cary Sherman received nearly $500,000 in bonuses in addition to his million dollar salary.

      • Megaupload Cases Put on Hold, But Asset Freezing Still an Option

        A United States District Court Judge has just granted Kim Dotcom’s request to put the MPAA and RIAA civil actions against him on hold . The reprieve, which will last seven weeks, expressly allows the entertainment companies the freedom to freeze Dotcom’s assets anywhere in the world if that is deemed necessary.

      • Why the Mana-Internet alliance is a potential game breaker

        His real “crime” as far as the Hollywood moguls are concerned is for doing something he hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime for – establishing Megaupload Ltd. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “Megaupload was a file hosting and sharing online service in which users could share links to files for viewing or editing….. The company was successful. However, millions of people from across the globe used Megaupload to store and access copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. Eventually it had over 150 employees, US$175 million revenues, and 50 million daily visitors. At its peak Megaupload was estimated to be the 13th most popular site on the internet and responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.”

      • Another Fair Use Victory for Book Scanning in HathiTrust

        Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, and the district court opinion in the HathiTrust case itself.

      • Rise Up Against Govt Anti-Piracy Plans, ISP Urges

        An ISP that won a prolonged legal battle against a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group has rejected plans to introduce three strikes and site blocking. Today, ISP iiNet is also urging citizens to pressure the government and fight back against the “foreign interests” attempting to dictate Australian policy.

      • “You could be liable for $150k in penalties—settle instead for $20 per song”

        Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to “six strikes.”

      • Google Joins New Coalition to Stop Ad Revenue to Pirate Sites

        An announcement later this week will confirm Google as a member of a new coalition to cut off “pirate” sites from their ad revenue. Following similar initiatives in the U.S. and UK, a Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will signal a creation of a central body to tackle the piracy issue.

      • MPAA: Consumer Right to Resell Online Videos Would Kill Innovation

        The MPAA is concerned that innovation in the film industry will be ruined if consumers get the right to resell movies and other media purchased online. Responding to discussions in a congressional hearing this week, the MPAA warns that this move would limit consumer choices and kill innovation.

06.12.14

Links 12/6/2014: Linux 3.15, New RHEL

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux hiring frenzy: Why open source devs are being bombarded with offers to jump ship

    Nine out of ten (87 percent) of hiring managers in Europe have “hiring Linux talent” on their list of priorities and almost half (48 percent) say they are looking to hire people with Linux skills within the next six months.

    But while they either need or want to hire more people with Linux skills, the data from the Linux Foundation suggests that this is easier said than done. Almost all — 93 percent — of the managers surveyed said they were having difficulty finding IT professionals with the Linux skills required and a quarter (25 percent) said they have “delayed projects as a result”.

  • Shortage of Linux professionals causes European skills crisis

  • Desktop

    • Chrome OS Features to Look for in Current Chromebook Crop

      With Father’s Day right around the corner, some dads out there might be requesting a new Chromebook. Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, have quietly become quite popular among notebook buyers. As of this writing, Chromebooks are among the top 20 most popular computers available on Amazon, and sales continue to grow steadily. Although the devices got off to a slow start, Google has found a way to attract customers. With that in mind it might be a good time to revisit Chromebooks’ operating system, Chrome OS, and talk about key features that make the Chromebook so attractive. While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively. This eWEEK slide show will cover the factors that made this platform appealing to notebook PC users.

  • Server

    • How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user?

      Cloud computing has really become the buzz term for any online service. Your web browser is a client connecting to a server or clusters of servers hosted anywhere in the world. The point is that you don’t care. You don’t need to know.

      Generally speaking I have barely touched the surface. We all use the cloud everyday and most of us don’t even think about it.

      How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user? It turns out quite a bit.

      Is the cloud a good or bad thing? Neither. Each service has to be judged on it’s own merits.

      The term “The Cloud” is just something marketing people and the technical press get excited about. Anyone remember when they kept using the term “Web 2.0″?

    • Mesosphere Raises $10.5 Million to Create Massive Linux Clusters

      Thanks to the advent of multicore processors, the average data center these days has access to a massive amount of compute capacity. Tapping into it efficiently, though, is another thing altogether.

    • Mesosphere Closes $10.5M Series A Financing

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.15 Kernel Released

      The official release announcement from Linus Torvalds has yet to come down the pipe, but today’s 3.15 final release was expected. For those not up to date on our Linux 3.15 kernel coverage, there’s been dozens of articles in recent weeks about this latest major kernel update. A summary of this new kernel’s top features can be found via the aptly named The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel article. There’s a lot of great stuff in this new kernel release for everyone!

    • Linux 3.15 .. and continuation of merge window
    • Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 3.15 Stable
    • The 3.15 kernel is out
    • Linux Kernel 3.14.6 Is Now the Most Advanced Version

      Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).

      The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support in existence already, but you can never know.

    • Linux 3.15 Speeds Up Suspend/Resume Performance

      The suspend and resume code impacts users who run Linux on laptop computers where there is a need to suspend disk and operating system operations when a device is closed and then start up again when the device is opened. Williams noted that his code contribution was inspired by an analysis and proposal from Intel developer Todd Brandt. Brandt’s proposal specifically dealt with a suspend/resume speed improvement, enabling a rapid wakeup from a device’s suspend state

    • MIPS For Linux 3.16 Gets Big Changes

      The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.

      First up, with the MIPS changes comes initial support for the Octeon 3. The Octeon 3 is Cavium’s new multi-core processor line-up announced at the end of 2013. The OCTEON III is MIPS64-based and optimized for Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The Octeon III claims up to 120GHz of 64-bit processing and is aimed for high-performance computing environments.

    • Stable kernels 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92

      Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92. As usual, each contains fixes all over the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.

    • F2FS Gets Enhanced For The Linux 3.16 Kernel

      Samsung has sent in their F2FS pull request for the Linux 3.16 to provide a number of enhancements for the Flash Friendly File-System.

      Improvements for the F2FS file-system with the Linux 3.16 kernel include enhanced wait_on_page_writeback, support for SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, readahead flow enhancements, enhanced I/O flushes, support for fiemap, support for trace-maps, support for large volumes over two Terabytes, and a number of bug-fixes and clean-ups.

    • Torvalds hits ‘Go’ button for Linux 3.15
    • The Companies That Support Linux: Rackspace

      Rackspace has lately been in the news for its stock market gains and a potential acquisition. But over the past 16 years the company has become well known, first as a web hosting provider built on Linux and open source, and later as a pioneer of the open source cloud and founder of the OpenStack cloud platform.

      In May, Rackspace became a Xen Project member and was one of three companies to join the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with CoreOS and Cumulus Networks.

      “Many of the applications and infrastructure that we need to run for internal use or for customers run best on Linux,” said Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace, via email. “This includes all the popular language frameworks and open virtualization platforms such as Xen, LXC, KVM, Docker, etc.”

      In this Q&A, Voccio discusses the role of Rackspace in the cloud, how the company uses Linux, why they joined the Linux Foundation, as well as current trends and future technologies in the data center.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Docker libcontainer unities Linux container powers

      What makes this important, even vital, news to the larger world of system administrators, datacenter managers, and cloud architects, is that Google, Red Hat, and Parallels are now helping build the program. Indeed, they will work with Docker as core maintainers of the code. Canonical’s Ubuntu container engineers will also be working on it.

    • IT’S HERE: DOCKER 1.0
    • Docker 1.0 Officially Released
    • Docker 1.0 brings container technology to the enterprise

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The Witcher 3 Announced for SteamOS, Studio Takes It Back

        The CD Projekt Red studio has announced that the upcoming The Witcher 3 action RPG is also arriving on SteamOS, which means that it will feature Linux support.

        The interesting fact about this announcement is that the studio has yet to make a formal statement, and they chose a more indirect way to tell Linux users that they will be able to play the game. If you happened to open Steam today, you might have noticed that The Witcher 3 game also said that is coming to SteamOS.

      • Steam for Linux Officially Gets Virtual Reality Support

        The Steam developers usually release quite few intermediary Steam versions, between major stable updates. This is one of the most interesting Beta updates so far in this cycle and the VR support that was just introduced will certainly make it into the next version.

        It looks like virtual reality is the next-gen feature that will be pursued by all the major gaming companies. Oculus is already having an impact on the industry, Sony is working on their own version, and Valve will most likely present their own solution soon enough. With all these advancements made with VR, it’s good to see that Linux is on the forefront.

      • Superb Interstellar Marines Tactical FPS Arrives on Steam for Linu

        Interstellar Marines, a tactical FPS developed and published by Zero Point Software, has just received Linux support with the latest patch.

        Interstellar Marines is a very promising first-person shooter and its developers said that they took inspiration from Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game has been built mainly as a multiplayer experience, but a limited single-player is also available.

        The latest update for the Interstellar Marines also brought support for the Linux platform and it looks like this title aims to be one of the best-looking on the open source platform…

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 Released

        The third beta is out today ahead of the final release expected in July. This third beta brings many bug-fixes and other minor enhancements to ease in porting of software to this next-generation KDE stack.

      • KDE 4.13.2 Desktop Update Released

        The latest monthly point release update to KDE 4.13 is now available.

        KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.

      • PLASMA ACTIVE ON QT5/KF5: WALLPAPERS AND ACTIVITIES CONFIGURATION

        Hello, This is my second report for my GSoC. This week i was working on the Wallpapers and the Activities Configuration. While there was the support for changing the wallpapers the UI was more focused on a desktop rather than a touch device, which wasn’t exactly what we needed for Plasma Active. So the new UI looks like the old one (Plasma Active 1), and the only small change is that we don’t show the wallpaper name.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME MUSIC 3.13.2 RELEASED!

        The player bar now uses all horizontal space available, which I based on new mockups for playback buffer by Jakub Steiner (except that it still has the repeat/shuffle menu). With this, the song title and album song has more space, and it will no longer just show an ellipsis when the window is small.

        Updating of views is further refined, so it will not interfere when in selection mode. Tooltips were added to the buttons. Right-clicking songs inside albums in Albums view now starts selection mode. Albums list in Artists view are now insensitive when in selection mode.

      • Trevilla Theme Is One of the Best Flat Themes for Ubuntu and Linux Mint

        The Trevilla theme pack is made for people who like to have a flat desktop and it comes with clean headers and buttons that are very good for a minimalistic experience.

        The Trevilla designers are not the only ones using this flat look for themes. In fact, more and more distros come with flat desktops and it looks like these types of decorations are not going anywhere…

      • GNOME Board of Directors Elections 2014 – Preliminary Results

        The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:

        Sriram Ramkrishna
        Ekaterina Gerasimova
        Karen Sandler
        Tobias Mueller
        Andrea Veri
        Marina Zhurakhinskaya
        Jeff Fortin

      • Quick Look: Ubuntu GNOME 14.04

        Ubuntu GNOME is a popular spin of Ubuntu that uses the GNOME desktop instead of Unity. Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 has been updated to include GNOME 3.10, and GNOME Classic. This release also includes some gorgeous new backgrounds that will spruce up you Ubuntu GNOME desktop. And since it’s a long term support release you will be able to run it for the next few years with the maximum amount of stability and polish.

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1-3 Reverts a Couple of Packages to Older Versions

      The GParted Life project undergoes dormant periods and hardly are any updates released, but now it looks like two versions have arrived inside a week.

      “The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2014/Jun/09),” reads the official announcement.

    • New Releases

      • OpenELEC 4.0.4 Now Out, Is Based on XBMC 13.1 “Gotham”

        The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.

        “This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).

      • Liberada version final de wifislax-4.9
      • Tango Studio 2.2 Is a Distro for Musicians and Professional Studios

        The Linux platform is home to quite a few operating systems dedicated to sound, video, and graphics editing. Some are better than others, but they all try to do the same thing and get some free tools in the hand of the people who need them the most.

        The advantage of Tango Studio is that you don’t need to configure almost anything in the operating system and most of the tools just work, without any extra input from the user. It’s a very helpful OS, especially for the people who just want to work and not tinker with a Linux distribution…

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro 0.8.9 Receives Fresh Update Pack with New AMD Driver and More

        “We prepared mhwd to support newer proprietary drivers. MHWD 0.3.901 reflect these changes. Blueman got updatedto support the latest bluez 5.19. We kept Wayland 1.4.0, as any higher version breaks bluetooth support. We have to deal with that later. Beside some libreoffice language acks,python updates, a newer Cinnamon we pushed also regular upstream updates to this update-pack,” said the developers in the official announcement.

    • Red Hat Family

      • New RHEL 7 Linux Stresses Apps, Scaling
      • Red Hat’s CEO Sees Open Source Cloud Domination

        Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the business opportunity of a generation in what he calls a computing paradigm shift from client server to cloud architectures. “In those paradigm shifts, generally new winners emerge,” says Whitehurst and he intends to make sure Red Hat is one of those winners. His logic is sound and simple: disruptive technologies like the cloud that arise every couple decades level the playing field between large, established firms and smaller, innovative challengers since everyone, from corporate behemoth to a couple guys in a garage, starts from the same spot and must play by the same unfamiliar and changeable rules. With the cloud “there’s less of an installed based and an opportunity for new winners to be chosen,” Whitehurst adds. His mission is “to see that open source is the default choice for next generation architecture” and that Red Hat is the preferred choice, particularly for enterprise IT, of open source providers.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Announcement Likely Tomorrow

        Red Hat was just sending out press invites this afternoon for a virtual event tomorrow regarding “an exciting product” that will be announced.

        Registration for the online event happening tomorrow (10 June) at 11AM EST can be found at RedHat.com. The site says it’s about, “redefining the enterprise OS.”

      • Fedora

        • Tools for Diagramming in Fedora

          If you’re a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the ‘Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®’ department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you…

    • Debian Family

      • Elive 2.2.6 Beta Is an Interesting Blend of Debian and Enlightenment

        Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has advanced to version 2.2.6 Beta and is available for download.

      • Fast-boot, open spec COM includes FPGA

        Technologic is sampling a fast-booting “TS-4740″ COM that runs Debian on a 1GHz, ARM9 PXA168 SoC and offers a 25K-LUTs Spartan-5 FPGA and gigabit Ethernet.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Unity 8 Desktop Preview Image Available For Ubuntu 14.10

            A session happened this morning about the Unity8 Desktop Preview Image as a way for early adopters and developers to try out the Unity 8 and Mir stack ported to the desktop on the Ubuntu 14.10 base, while the official Ubuntu 14.10 release image will still be using Unity 7 with the X.Org Server. Those interested in learning more about this image and the plans can find the details via summit.ubuntu.com with the Google Hangout Video plus notes.

          • Intel Core i7 4790K: Devil’s Canyon Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

            The Core i7 4790K has an 88 Watt TDP over 84 Watts on the Core i7 4770K but aside from the higher clock frequencies and thermal/power improvements, the i7-4790K shares much in common with the i7-4770K when it comes to being a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, 22nm manufacturing, DDR3-1600MHz memory support, and sports HD Graphics 4600. Like the i7-4770K, the HD Graphics 4600 top out at 1.25GHz. Pricing on the Intel Core i7 4790K is currently about $340 USD from major Internet retailers.

          • 14 Apps To Boost Ubuntu

            Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 Release Candidate 1

              At Bodhi we work firmly on a “its ready when its ready schedule” as opposed to sticking to our set release goals and churning out something we are not happy with. Better late than never as the saying goes! Just ten days after the targeted release date I am happy to share our first Release Candidate for Bodhi Linux’s third major release…

            • Review: Pinguy OS 14.04 LTS “Papercut”

              This was originally supposed to be a comparison test against Antergos, which is another distribution that ships GNOME 3/Shell and aims for new users to Linux. Unfortunately, Antergos refused to boot. Therefore, what is left is a typical review of Pinguy OS, albeit with some more critical remarks than usual about how well it really caters to newbies (left over from when this article was a comparison test). Follow the jump to see what it is like…

            • Linux Mint 17 KDE RC “Qiana” Available for Download, Is Based on KDE 4.13.0

              This current version of Linux Mint 17 KDE “Qiana” comes with KDE 4.13.0, which is the latest version available right now. The rest of the packages are in place and, if you ever opened a KDE-powered distro, then you won’t be surprised by anything.

              Just like the other flavors that have been released so far, this one is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will benefit from an extended support period, after it becomes stable, of course. The Linux mint developers announced a while ago that they intended to only base their distros on LTS versions of Ubuntu…

            • Meet Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’

              If the end of XP demonstrated anything, it’s that disruption ensues when an OS reaches end of life. Linux users have long had LTS releases to stave off some of that, but the new Linux Mint 17 offers even more stability. Not only will it be supported until 2019, but it’s also built on a base that was made to last.

            • Linux Mint 17 OEM images released to manufacturers

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny open-source module aims to make IoT apps easy

      WeIO is sampling a tiny open source board, running OpenWRT Linux on an Atheros/MIPS module, that enables IoT applications controlled entirely via HTML5 code.

      Billed as “The Web of Things for Creators,” the fully open source, GPL3-licensed WeIO module is notable for its HTML5 programming interface and Python-based Tornado web server. Together, these let you connect and control objects from any device using only a web browser, says Paris-based WeIO. Designed for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, WeIO lets developers easily connect objects so they communicate with each other, or hook up to Internet services like social networks, says the company.

    • Wireless speakers run Linux, control IoT stuff

      Musaic is prepping an OpenWRT Linux and AllJoyn AllPlay-enabled wireless speaker and Internet radio that doubles as a home automation hub.

      U.K.-based Musaic ended its Kickstarter round in April, surpassing its goal of raising 60,000 U.K. Pounds, and promising products by September starting at 160 Pounds (about $269). Recently, the Musaic system was selected along with four other finalists by the John Lewis JLAB technology incubator program, which starts today. Commercial sales will open in the fall.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • OnePlus One Review: The CyanogenMod Powered Smartphone That Outclasses The Android Competition

          OnePlus has managed to create a bit of a buzz around their latest smartphone. Called ‘One’ (but I’ll go with the OnePlus One for most of this review to avoid the confusion with HTC) this is a handset that goes out of its way to be attractive. The styling is simple but functional, the specs are close to the top of the range in the world of Android, and the price is stunning. It’s not a typo, it actually starts at £229 in the UK ($299 in the US) for the 16 GB model.

        • Galaxy S5 vs. Nexus 5 vs. iPhone 5s

          When a buyer goes to purchase a new smartphone, he or she is often confronted with a tough choice. With so many flagship smartphones in the market today, which ones to choose from? There’s the Galaxy S5, which is a widely popular phone from Samsung and then there’s the iPhone 5s, which comes from the world’s most valuable tech company. And, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, Google offers its own flagship device known as Nexus 5.

          While the three smartphones mentioned above are wildly popular, users have a tough time investing their hard-earned cash into. That’s why, we’ve written this article to help you buy the best phone amongst the big 3. So, without further ado, here’s a quick comparison between the Galaxy S5, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s.

        • Turning a smartphone into a PC in a pocket: Q&A with Analogix

          Q: Where and why is SlimPort being implemented?

          A: SlimPort was first implemented in the Google Nexus 4 back in 2012 and has continued to be used in a number of high-end tablets and smartphones from Fujitsu, Asustek, LG, and ZTE, as well as finding its way into Chromebooks from brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), among others. The key is that the technology enables more features and can reduce costs. For example, users want to have the ability to take mobile audio and video and get it up on a big screen. Previously, the ability to get the video off of a tablet/smartphone was typically done by running it through a micro-HDMI port. Using SlimPort allowed the OEMs to drop the micro-HDMI port and simply run everything through the five-pin micro-USB port that is needed for charging. SlimPort simply takes control of the connector when a SlimPort dongle is plugged in, and while the devices are connected, SlimPort enables the display to also charge the mobile device. In 2013, support for Full HD was added but we really expect the technology to take off this year with SlimPort Pro.

        • CyanogenMod 11.0 M7 Released

          Release day is here again, with CM 11.0 M7 hitting the download servers. Last week’s post included the highlights from the changelog, but we’ll it again for those of you who prefer tl;dr.

Free Software/Open Source

  • VLC reveals it is working on Chromecast support for iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac

    Most everyone, at least the tech-savvy who read this, are familiar with VLC Player — the Video LAN Client. It’s a jack-of-all trades media player, that is capable of handling pretty much any format you can throw at it, no matter how obscure it may be.

  • VLC announces iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac support for Google Chromecast
  • OPENDAYLIGHT DEVELOPER SPOTLIGHT: LUIS GOMEZ

    Luis Gomez is Principal Software Test Engineer at Brocade and currently coordinates the Integration Group at OpenDaylight. Prior to this, Luis worked many years at Ericsson in end-to-end solution integration and verification for radio, fixed, core and transport functions…

  • Open Source Persistence: Resistance Is Futile

    One problem is that the GitHub generation does not seem to care as much about code vetting as did coders in earlier years. In the time span from 2007 to 2010, open source became very popular. Enterprises tried to manage it, according to MongoDB’s Assay.

    “My sense is that developers do not really look at licenses any more. They are not even looking at which license is applied and does it comply. I think these are issues that attorneys look at, though. I do not think the developers are thinking a lot about the licenses anymore,” he said.

  • DARPA gamifies open-source software testing

    Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.

    It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Reports Cites Google Surpassing Microsoft in Browser Market Share

        ADI technology analyst Tyler White speculated that two underlying market forces are boosting Google’s numbers. “First, device defaults matter,” White said. “Internet Explorer leverages its Windows OS dominance to gain share as the default Web browser for the majority of people online. Today mobile OS is more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS.”

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 30 Binaries Now Available

        The Firefox 30 release announcement is imminent with the source and binaries for the upcoming browser update now being available.

        For those interested, Mozilla Firefox 30.0 can be obtained from the Mozilla FTP server while we’re still waiting for the official release announcement, which is likely coming in the day ahead.

  • Education

    • 16 FOSSisms all educators should know

      Ellis, who co-coordinated POSSE with Drexel professor Greg Hislop, told a crowd of nearly 20 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country that embedding their computer science students in open source communities could facilitate a kind of engagement traditional classroom experiences just can’t offer. But, she said, students and professors alike should be prepared for a bit of culture shock if they aren’t prepared to embrace the open source way.

      So Ellis derived 16 maxims from free and open source culture—what she calls “FOSSisms”—to explain how open source values might transform computer science education.

  • BSD

    • DragonFly 3.8 Finally Brings USB 3.0 Support

      DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.

      DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.

      “DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Voice of the Masses: Free Software vs open source – what do you use?

      RMS argues that “open source” misses the point, but a counter argument is that the name “Free Software” can sound like “free as in beer” – like malware-ridden Windows freeware. So we want to hear from you: which term do you use? Is it really important to you? Do you think RMS should have chosen a better word than “Free” originally, such as “Libre”?

    • ble http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2014-06/msg00006.html

      As anticipated, 3.15 was released upstream earlier today, and the scripts I updated yesterday have now done their job: 3.15-gnu sources are now available at http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ and shortly on mirrors too.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Australian government will go Drupal

      Tender documents issued this morning have confirmed that the Australian government will push ahead with seeking to build a whole-of-government content management system based on the open source Drupal platform.

      The Department of Finance has made an approach to market seeking request for proposals for ‘GovCMS’, which the RFP states will be based on Drupal and delivered via a public cloud service.

    • Here’s What’s Missing from the ‘Technology Manifesto’

      Although it’s good to see open standards in there, it’s disappointing that the Policy Exchange did not go further and call for open source, which is the most effective way of implementing those open standards. Simply mandating open standards allows lock-in through inertia – the argument being that the re-training costs etc. etc. make moving to new implementations of open standards too expensive. That’s a ridiculous way of looking at things, because it pretty much ensures that the status quo is maintained. What the Manifesto should have called for was a default use of open source software throughout government, unless there are compelling and clearly-articulable reasons not to take that route.

  • Licensing

    • Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement

      For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I’ve written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA’s aren’t necessary, and on Conservancy’s typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.

      In the most general sense, a CLA is a formal legal contract between a contributor to a FLOSS project and the “project” itself0. Ostensibly, this agreement seeks to assure the project, and/or its governing legal entity, has the appropriate permissions to incorporate contributed patches, changes, and/or improvements to the software and then distribute the resulting larger work.

Leftovers

06.08.14

Links 8/6/2014: Valve Funds Mesa Development, SQLite 3.8.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Diving into FOSS

        Before sometime I got in touch with KDE community and was overwhelmed by it. Then I became a member of this community and started exploring about open source environment. The most fascinating thing about KDE community members is how committed they are to open source technology. Through IRC I would be able to contact with genius coders all over the globe. It’s been quite a time that I am using open source software. It is very much important to aware people about open source. We can have access to all robust and efficient soft wares for free. After being a part of KDE it interested me to use open source systems and I am really enjoying this.

      • Plasma Active on Qt5/KF5: Wallpapers and Activities Configuration
      • The future of activity switching

        The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.

      • Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on Arch User Repository

        As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.

        Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories

        So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.

      • GSoC 2014: KDE Games

        I am Anuj Pahuja(alasin), a Computer Science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, India. It is my first GSoC and I can’t thank KDE Community enough for accepting me as a student.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Get Your Ubuntu to Look like Mac OS X with a Simple Theme

        Most of the themes that can pull this Mac OS X transformation work on desktop environments like GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and so on, but not all of them work in Unity. The designer of this particular version made it compatible with GTK 3.10 and it works in Ubuntu as well.

        “The goal is to keep it as close as possible to ambiance on the code base with the same look as the original cupertino. If that isn’t possible for an element I will prefer the look of cupertino,” said the designer on gnome-look.org.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Release Announcement: LinuxBBQ “Cream”
      • GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1 Gets New Debian Base Update

        GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, has been released and is now available for download.

      • Robolinux 7.5.3 OS Wants to Keep You Safe from NSA

        Robolinux 7.5.3 is a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian, and its developer thinks that it can be the solution for people who look to protect their privacy.

        If you remember from previous releases of Robolinux, the developer of this particular distribution came up with a working idea on how to move people from the Windows platform to Linux without them having to give up their favorite applications.

      • SparkyLinux 3.4 LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt Distros Are Based on Debian Jessie

        SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt desktops is now available for download.

        The SparkyLinux 3.34 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie” and is not all that different from the previous versions in the series, at least not in this particular aspect.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva Lx 2014 review

        OpenMandriva Lx 2014 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux. It is one of the distributions that rose out of the ashes of Mandriva Linux; the other being Mageia, and, to some extent, ROSA Desktop.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Apple Copies Ubuntu, Pimping Scientific, and 500 Steam Games
      • The ultimate Scientific Linux pimping guide

        Several weeks back, we reviewed Scientific Linux 6.5, a rather spartan incarnation of the legendary RHEL 6, which might be considered too boring and outdated for modern home use. Well, not so. Once long ago, I showed you how to transform CentOS into a home use beast.

        Today, we will do it again, with the most comprehensive guide on Scientific Linux pimping ever made on Planet Earth. Here, you get a bit of everything, and then so. Best of all? This guide is also relevant for CentOS and even Fedora, so make sure you keep it close to your heart. Let’s go.

      • Fedora

        • Public Fedora Board Meeting — Monday June 9th 2014

          Matthew Miller just announced that fortnightly public Fedora Board meetings are starting up again. The first meeting will be on Monday the 9th of June at 17:00 UTC time. (Matthew notes in the email to fedora-announce that the command date -d ’2014-06-09 17:00 UTC’ is an easy way to convert this into the timezone on your Fedora machine.)

        • More fedora.next branding ideas

          We previously posted about some of the logo design ideas that Máirín Duffy was working on for the 3 products of fedora.next (Cloud, Server, and Workstation). Since that post, Máirín has also posted a bunch of other iterations, and I also entered the fray with a few ideas of my own. Now, Máirín has done another round of design ideas. Check them out, and join the discussion over on her blog.

    • Debian Family

      • Elive 2.2.6 beta released

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Apple introduces Unity Scopes-like search and no one cries foul

            This week, Apple announced the new OS X Yosemite, and Linux users across the Linux-verse stood up and proclaimed “Oooo, I’d like to lay my hands on the lily-livered swab is writ that forgery!” Why so up in arms? Because Apple has done what Apple does — riff on features from other platforms and claim they’ve recreated a wheel that will make your life far easier. What did they do this time? Let’s chat.

            One of the big features of OS X Yosemite is included in the Spotlight tool. For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the OS X search tool that, up until Yosemite, searched the local drive. As of Yosemite, anyone who has touched the Ubuntu Unity Dash will notice something very similar to Scopes.

            [...]

            When Ubuntu released Unity Scopes, a very large and very vocal group from the Linux community cried foul, that Scopes was an invasion of privacy, was insecure, and would probably steal their identity…

            …maybe not that last bit. But there was plenty of backlash from the community (many of whom didn’t even use Ubuntu).

            How will the Apple community react when they start using the Scopes-like feature in Yosemite? They’ll love it. They’ll realize how convenient it is to be able to, from one location, search their local drive, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and countless other sources.

          • Ubuntu 14.04 – There has never been a better time to switch to Linux

            You would think that writing about the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 would be easy but it is hard to write about one of the biggest Linux distributions without repeating everyone else’s sentiments or covering the same ground that was covered with Ubuntu 13.10.

            With that in mind please don’t be disappointed that much of what I will be writing here has been written before.

            There is nothing revolutionary about Ubuntu 14.04, especially if you have already tried Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04. The improvements to Ubuntu have been slow and steady.

          • Meizu Will Present A Meizu MX3 Phone Running Ubuntu Touch, At The Mobile Asia Expo 2014

            Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2014) in Barcelona, Canonical has announced the first two phone manufacturers that will create Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones: Meizu and Bq.

          • More OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Found, Ubuntu OSes Get Patched

          • Flavours and Variants

            • An Ubuntu MATE Desktop Spin Might Still Materialize

              There’s been much talk in the past about creating a spin/derivative of Ubuntu Linux using the MATE Desktop Environment fork of GNOME2. While no spin materialized for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, talk of developing a new spin is again happening.

            • Ubuntu Might Get An Official Ubuntu MATE Flavor Soon
            • Linux Mint 17 Qiana MATE : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17 Qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.

              Linux Mint usually comes with four desktop editions: Cinnamon Desktop Environment, MATE Desktop Environment, KDE and XFCE, although currently, only Cinnamon and MATE editions are available, XFCE and KDE edition should arrive shortly.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Your Android phone, now with NSA-grade security

        NSA-grade security is now coming to an Android device near you.

      • Tizen-powered Samsung Z smartphone with open source mobile OS

        The Samsung Z looks and feels very much like Samsung’s Android smartphones. There’s the tiles section at the top of the home screen, with some app icons at the botton, and there’s the pull-down notifications and settings tray at the very top. You also get the hardware Back and Menu buttons, in addition to the main Home button. The Settings app looks almost identical to Samsung’s Android version.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Solutions

    LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing directory services. It runs on a layer above the TCP/IP stack incorporating simplified encoding methods, and offers a convenient way to connect to, search, and modify Internet directories, specifically X.500-based directory services. It is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol. LDAP utilizes a client-server model.

  • Nine Advantages of Open Source Software

    While it initially seemed revolutionary, open source software is actually rooted in traditional IT processes. Technology, after all, has always been about collaboration and continuous improvement. (In the early days of the ARPANET, for example, researchers established a “request for comments” procedure to improve the project.) Of course, there have been trepidations raised about open source. But the always-active open source communities are more than happy to address any concerns. As a result, more than one-half of the software acquired over the next several years will be open source, according to industry research.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • SQLite 3.8.5 Arrives with New Features

      SQLite 3.8.5, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine, has been released with an impressive list of changes and improvements.

      Most of the SQLite releases are maintenance ones, but from time to time the developers make some important changes. The current update features a few new options, so an update is recommended.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3 Beta 2 Is Now Available

      One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.

      FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.

      FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNUstep’s position on Swift

      I wanted to make this post to make it clear to the community regarding GNUstep’s position on the new Swift language. If the language is released as open source then GNUstep will fully support it. If it is, however, not released as open source then we will either take steps to create an implementation ourselves or provide any assistance needed to a group of people other than ourselves who are willing to take that on.

    • We’re glad you liked Email Self-Defense. Let’s take it even farther.

      Yesterday was a big day for defending our freedom and privacy on the Internet. The FSF and its supporters joined the ranks of thousands for Reset the Net, the biggest-ever day of action against bulk surveillance.

    • Theming and Style in GNUstep

      Not only the pixmaps and colours can be changed, also the style of the interface. This include the menu style (vertical, in-window or Mac OS style), the scrollbar position (right or left), the behaviour of contextual menus, popup list and pulldown list (so these can have similar behaviour of the gtk components). The Silver theme include an style that let users run GNUstep’s apps on, for example, Gnome without problems.

    • GNU remotecontrol: Newsletter – June 2014

      GNU remotecontrol relies on OS file access restrictions, Apache authentication, MySQL authentication, and SSL encryption to secure your data. Talk to us you want to find out how you can further strengthen the security of your system, or you have suggestions for improving the security of our current system architecture.

    • GNU Nettle 3.0 Cryptographics Library Released

      The developers behind the Nettle project are out with a new major update to their dual-licensed GPLv2 and LGPLv3+ cryptographics library.

Leftovers

06.07.14

Links 7/6/2014: ‘Linux is Everywhere’, Valve Games Milestone (500)

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux is Everywhere….So where do we go from here?

    We all know that Linux has changed the world….in small ways and large One of the ways it’s changed the world is by changing the way work gets done in corporations, big and small, around the world. As with the computer itself, the effects of ever-advancing Linux seem evolutionary and “slow & steady” from day to day. But in the 20 years since its introduction, the impact Linux has made in macro is truly staggering!

    Today everything from cars and jets to every supercomputer and most servers in datacenters have Linux somewhere…doing something important. Linux is, indeed everywhere! How’d that happen? And more importantly, what will happen next?

  • Why (Linux-)devs use Macbooks

    And I think that’s why many people prefer OS-X over Windows or Ubuntu/Fedora. For everyday tasks as email, picture stuff, booking flights, doing taxes etc. OS-X definitely offers a good solution. And being UNIX-y enough to be used in a Linux delpoyment context, you get a good compromise.

  • Desktop

    • Chromebooks Can Finally Play Movies and Shows Offline

      When Google launched Chrome OS, it touted it as a nearly entirely cloud-centric operating system. In fact, it wasn’t designed to store data or applications locally at all, or do anything local, really.

      Since then, Google has wisely hedged that bet, and it is doing so in a big way as it finally gives Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies and TV offline. Google announced offline viewing last month and new Chromebooks are indeed pulling the feat off via a new app for Chrome OS.

  • Server

    • Oracle, Extreme Join OpenDaylight SDN Group

      Oracle and Extreme Networks are the latest companies to join the vendor-driven OpenDaylight Project, which is developing an open-source platform for software-defined network and network-functions virtualization.

      Also joining the group June 5 was supply-chain services firm Flextronics, bringing the total number of members in the consortium to 39. The numbers have more than doubled since April 2013, when Cisco Systems, IBM and 16 others announced the formation of OpenDaylight.

    • Why are Linux professionals in such high demand?

      There’s no doubt that Linux professionals are in high demand. But how much are they getting paid? I took a peek at the average Linux salaries page on SimplyHired and it was quite interesting to see how much various Linux jobs paid. See for yourself in the image below. You can also compare Linux salaries on that page, and you can search SimplyHired for Linux jobs in your area.

    • OpenDaylight SDN Grows to 39 Members with Oracle

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.16 Handles 64-bit ARM EFI Stub Support

      The “ARM64″ pull request pertaining to EFI was sent on Thursday. This newest 64-bit ARM EFI patch-set enables EFI stub support similar to the x86 EFI stub support. The Linux EFI stub kernel support on (U)EFI systems to let the firmware function as the bootloader and to boot directly into the kernel without having to deal with a separate bootloader such as GRUB2 or Gummiboot.

    • Sound Support Gets Updated For The Next Kernel Release

      Most of the sound driver updates for Linux 3.16 revolve around ASOC (ALSA System-on-Chip) changes but there’s also a number of other noteworthy commits. HD Audio changes include Tegra HDMI support, a ThinkPad T440 dock fix, Realtek codec updates for several chips, Firewire audio support improvements, and various other changes.

    • Many ACPI & Power Management Changes Head Into Linux 3.16

      Rafael Wysocki has sent in his ACPI and power management pull that will target the next Linux kernel release cycle.

    • Understanding Intel’s RAPL Driver On Linux

      For many months now Intel has been working on RAPL support within the Linux kernel as part of their power-capping framework as a power feature for Intel hardware on Linux.

    • Trying Out kGraft Live Kernel Patching On Ubuntu Linux

      Graft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.

      Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.

    • Linux Kernel 3.10.41 LTS Is Available for Download

      The amount of changes and enhancements for this branch of the Linux kernel is rather large and the developers have added numerous drivers and other improvements. This is an LTS release and it’s likely that it will be updated for a long time.

      “I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.41 kernel. All users of the 3.10 kernel series must upgrade.”

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Calligra-powered Okular plugin for ODT, DOC & DOCX

        You might know that Okular has a plugin system, for adding support for more document formats. And you might know that Calligra since years also provides a plugin to Okular, which adds support to view slides from files in the OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) format. And not only for the ODP format: by simply using the Calligra import filters for PPT and PPTX you can also view the slides locked away in those formats.

      • Preview GCompris Qt 0.11

        Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.

      • Political Map for Marble

        I am glad that I accomplished my first task to integrate political map with marble.

      • KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 Gets More Improvements

        A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Popular Faience GTK / GNOME Shell Themes Updated For GNOME 3.10 [Ubuntu 14.04 PPA]

        A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.

      • GNOME: Notify me

        Over the past several GNOME releases, we have been aiming to stabilise GNOME Shell as much as possible. We have been largely successful in this: the last major UI change was in 3.10, when we introduced the combined system status area, and the main improvements in the recent 3.12 release were for performance and bug fixing. This is a good thing. At the same time, there is one area where a number of us still feel that bigger changes are needed. This is notifications, particularly the Message Tray.

        In this post, I’m going to present a new set of designs for notifications and the Message Tray, which we’re hoping to implement for the next GNOME release. As ever, these aren’t set in stone and are in a state of evolution. The aim of publicising the designs is to get feedback so we can improve them.

  • Distributions

    • RoboLinux Smooths the Linux Migration Path

      RoboLinux is a robust Linux desktop solution for a home office, as well as for SOHO and enterprise users looking for a well-protected migration path away from other operating systems. Its modified traditional desktop design and built-in virtual machine packages for running windows XP and Windows 7 from within the Linux desktop make it an easy and reliable option.

    • Kali, Makulu, and Robo Linuxes

      In today’s Linux news, LinuxInsider has a review of RoboLinux saying it “smooths the Linux migration path.” Makulu Linux 6.1 is said to be “big, beautiful, and fun.” A new flaw has been patched and Shawn Powers discusses the new Linux professional.

    • New Releases

      • Black Lab Linux 5.0.1 released

        Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0.1. With this release we bring some much needed overhaul and advancements to our Linux desktop to make it the most stable, and easiest to use yet.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Valve improved X-Box gamepad driver for Fedora

          I’ve added to the Steam package repository for Fedora an alternative kernel module for xpad, the X-Box gamepad driver. This variant contains patches created by Valve to improve the driver and its behaviour.

          The module is available in both akmod (RPMFusion) and dkms package formats.

          This made my 3rd party X-Box controller work without any issue in Steam games and in the Big Picture Mode interface!

        • The new (potential) notification system for Fedora

          This new design allows for a greater amount of detail when glancing at your notifications, rather than just an icon, and the number of unread notifications. The upstream developers seem to be targeting getting this new design implemented for GNOME 3.14, so hopefully we should see this in Fedora 21 Workstation.

        • The new Fedora Project Leader is…

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-based NAS hosts private clouds and VMs

      Qnap unveiled a Linux-based, SOHO-focused “TS-X51 Turbo NAS” device with 2-8 HDD bays, plus private cloud sharing, video transcoding, and virtualization.

    • Wireshark support for AllJoyn: What it means for Internet of Everything developers

      The AllJoyn open source project is the core interoperability framework hosted by the AllSeen Alliance and works on Linux, Android, iOS and many other operating systems and platforms. This ability to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of the OS or manufacturer will enable a simple, seamless and universal experience for consumers and businesses.

    • Arynga and Mentor Graphics Showcase Over-The-Air Updates for Linux-Based…
    • Introducing the Linux Development Module for Rockwell Automation Processors
    • More APUs For Embedded And Mobile Devices
    • World’s first emotional robot runs Linux

      SoftBank and Aldeberan have teamed up on a Linux-based, $1,930 personal robot named Pepper that can read emotions and respond autonomously.

      As we gradually approach the “singularity” when robots overtake human intelligence, we often comfort ourselves in believing robots will never duplicate our often troublesome capacity for emotion. Yet such James Kirkian sentiments may prove suspect as roboticists make robots more sensitive to emotions while using emotional expression to communicate.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung and Barnes & Noble are making a Nook together

          Samsung and Barnes & Noble announced on Thursday a co-branded device called the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, a 7-inch reading-focused tablet designed to compete with the Kindle Fire HDX and the Nexus 7. It’s the first sign of life in some time for the Nook brand, the lineup of ebook readers and tablets that have been consistently great but never popular enough to unseat Amazon as king of the reading device. Now, however, with the combined retail and marketing weight of Samsung and Barnes & Noble, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook may have the might to find a place once again. (And there’s only the slightest irony in the fact that Microsoft owns part of the Nook brand, meaning it now owns yet another Android device.)

        • Linux Video of the Week: Meet the First Tizen Smartphone, Samsung Z

          At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Meta blogging

    Some time ago, I read Jos’ “meta” blog post. Jos argues that contributors to free software projects should blog more regularly. In my own “meta blog” post, I will confirm everything that Jos writes and share a few of my own thoughts on why blogging is important for everyone who is part of a free software community.

  • PicasaWeb integration: Add the Miner (Update 1
  • Contributing to OSS

    Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).

  • LinkedIn upgrades its search engine and ditches an array of open source extensions

    LinkedIn has overhauled its search engine infrastructure in favor of a new system dubbed Galene, a homegrown engine designed to improve search results and problems with maintenance, the company plans to announce Thursday.

  • An open-source robotics OS is moving from the lab to farms and even into space

    They’re routine activities for people, but this was a Willow Garage PR2 alpha robot. By navigating through eight doors and using nine outlets, it notched an important milestone—using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to accomplish its complex mission.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Mirantis offers Icehouse-based OpenStack 5.0

      Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I’ve spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.

    • Hadoop Drives Storage Costs Down, Needs Friendly Front Ends

      The Hadoop Summit went on this week in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, sponsored by Hortonworks and Yahoo. There were some interesting keynotes, including one from Microsoft on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” and Red Hat officials delved into “Enterprise Hadoop and the open hybrid Cloud.” At the Summit, it was clear that Hadoop has become a true open source success story. It’s also driving down enterprise storage costs.

    • Exploring OpenStack cloud case studies

      During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.

    • MapR, Syncsort Partner on Big Data ETL Hadoop Solution
    • Exploring OpenStack cloud case studies

      During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.

    • The challenges for enterprises going open source

      With Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of HP Helion, there are questions lingering about how the company can compete in the public cloud market, while using OpenStack as a way to get into the enterprise.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.3 Beta 2 Is Now Available for Testing

      The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new build in the LibreOffice 4.3 Beta branch, bringing even more changes than the latest update in the series. It looks like 4.3 will be quite interesting, but it’s going to take a while until it’s released.

  • Education

    • RASPBERRY PI IN SCHOOLS

      Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 10.0.2 Receives GNOME 3 and Cinnamon Updates

      According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.

      “In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reset the Net with our email self-defense guide

      One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA’s massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA’s job a little harder. We’re releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.

    • Join the FSF and allies: strengthen the Tor anti-surveillance network

      Today we’re joining our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in kicking off the Tor Challenge, an effort to strengthen the global Tor network that protects Internet traffic from surveillance.

      Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. Tor relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Weatherman’s best friend: How Australia used open source for its supercomputing network

      How did Australia scale up to cope with all of its public research agencies at the same time? FutureGov spoke with Allan Williams, Associate Director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to find out how they did this.

    • Help Labour Get Its Digital Policy Right This Time

      Long-time readers of this column may remember the great Digital Economy Bill saga back in 2010, which culminated in one of the most disgusting episodes in recent Parliamentary history, with the Bill being approved by a near-empty House of Commons in the dying hours of the last government, and with no substantive debate whatsoever. The result was an appalling piece of legislation, whose putrefying corpse is still polluting the UK’s digital landscape, acting as an ever-present reminder of just how badly the Labour treated the online world when it was in power.

      Labour is now out of power, and trying to get back into power. I leave readers to decide for themselves whether it would be better or worse than the present incumbents. Instead, I want to concentrate on two initiatives that the Labour Party is taking to help it come up with some decent policies for the digital world.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Natron 0.92 released with new roto and keying nodes

      The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.

    • Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformance Tests

      The adopter program lets potential adoptees run the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance test for possible certification as their driver’s implementation being conformant to the official specification. The ES 3.1 test is obviously built atop the existing OpenGL ES 3.0 test.

Leftovers

  • Tetris at 30: a history of the world’s most successful game
  • Tetris at 30: An Interview with the Historic Puzzle Game’s Creator

  • Hardware

    • Unboxing the Intel NUC at Tizen Developer Conference 2014

      This is a quick unboxing video of the Intel NUC device that was given out to attendees of the Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and represents reference hardware that developers can use Tizen Common to test and develop their applications with.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Deep Interest of the Deep State

      The language is the language of intelligence service tasking memoranda, which Obama is consciously or unconsciously reproducing.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something

      I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.

      Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fox News Enlists Fossil Fuel Industry To Smear EPA Carbon Pollution Standards

      Fox News hosts or guests cited a discredited report by the Chamber of Commerce seven times, even though it studied a scenario far stricter than the actual rule from the EPA. According to the executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries.”

  • Finance

    • Writing Unions Out of the Story on Fighting Poverty

      The New York Times (6/4/14) took a look at one of the economic puzzles of the last few decades: If growth has been strong, why aren’t we seeing a greater reduction in poverty? Interestingly, the research the Times is relying on offers some explanations–ones the paper doesn’t see fit to mention.

    • USA Today and Wal-Mart Poop

      It’s not often that anti-corporate activists are heard from in the corporate media. Do they really need to be called “party poopers”?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Guardian Installed SecureDrop Outside The UK, Due To Legal Threats

      In other words, the Guardian, a UK newspaper, is admitting that it simply doesn’t feel safe locating its SecureDrop implementation inside the UK. For people who believe in press freedom in the UK, this is a pretty scary statement — just the latest in the past few years that have really called into question the UK’s support for a free and open press.

  • Privacy

    • The Year of Edward Snowden

      A year ago I stumbled across a story about a wor­ry­ing new sur­veil­lance pro­gramme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was iden­ti­fied as the source of the dis­clos­ure, I was awe­struck by the bravery of this unknown person.

    • The Best Ways to Better Protect Your Online Privacy
    • Edward Snowden and Reset the Net: Eight ways to take back your online privacy
    • Snowden: one year on and still no action by the British government

      It’s a year since The Guardian published the first of many news stories about the scale of GCHQ and the NSA’s intrusion into our private lives. Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the stories had global implications, exposing the insecurity of the Internet, straining relationships between the US and its allies and raising questions about who has control over the agencies that purport to protect our freedoms.

      And as my conversation in Germany showed, surveillance has damaged global freedom of expression, affecting the way we think when we use the Internet. There have been other consequences to free speech in the UK as well. We have fallen five places in the Freedom House world ranking of countries’ press freedom. This was as a result of legal threats made by the Government against The Guardian, the destruction of hard drives in the newspaper’s offices and the detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.

    • Why should I care about privacy, when I have nothing to hide?

      We get this a lot. There are a million answers (our favorite short one is “Nothing to hide? Really?”) but here’s something thoughtful and comprehensive to share with a friend the next time it comes up. The short version? None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things (starting with our own lives first) that privacy gives us.

      Imagine a world where you were constantly being judged by everyone around you, suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything you did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules. In that kind of world, social and economic progress grinds to a halt, because everyone’s afraid to rock the boat!

    • Email encryption using an email self-defense guide from the FSF
    • FSF publishes email encryption guide to mark Snowden anniversary

      The Free Software Foundation has released a guide to encrypting email to mark one year since the disclosures of NSA blanket surveillance by analyst Edward Snowden.

      The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.

    • In Some Countries, Big Brother Listens In Without Telling Mobile Operators

      Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless operator outside China, says governments in some countries have installed permanent listening “pipes” into mobile networks, allowing authorities to monitor all communications and data without alerting or getting cooperation from network operators.

    • Vodafone reveals secret wires allowing direct-access government spying

      Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.

    • Vodafone Reveals Government Agencies Have Direct Access To Its Network Around The World, No Warrants Required

      One of the important results of Snowden’s leaks over the last year is that the companies involved are not only becoming more open about how their services have been used by the NSA and GCHQ to spy on people,

    • Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance

      Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a ‘nightmare scenario’

    • Google’s End-to-End is Unacceptable

      2) As if #1 wasn’t bad enough, Google has chosen to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Namely, the long-standing, mature, fully-debugged gpg2 open source OpenPGP standard codebase is being rejected out of hand, again because they want to do things ‘their’ way by creating a duplicate, immature, bug-laden codebase port of gpg2 as an incomplete subset into slow, interpretive Javascript. That’s right. Javascript. gpg2 is fully compiled C/C++ code.

    • U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU

      A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.

  • Civil Rights

06.05.14

Links 5/6/2014: Alpine Linux 3.0.0, More OpenSSL Bugs Fixed

Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The sought after Linux professional

    There’s no such thing as “just a Linux sysadmin,” which is what makes Linux professionals so incredibly valuable. We’ve all been hearing that the demand for Linux professionals is “at its highest ever!!!” for years. In recent years, though, it hasn’t just been Linux nuts like me saying it. You may reference the 2014 Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and assume they’re biased, but a quick search over at Monster.com shows that the demand for Linux professionals is a real thing.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.16: New Synaptics Driver, Improved Sony DualShock 4 Driver

      The HID/input pull request for the Linux 3.16 merge window has been sent in with some useful additions.

      First up for the HID Linux 3.16 pull is an RMI driver, which is for supporting Synaptics RMI4 devices over USB or I2C. The RMI driver right now uses its own RMI4 implementation but will ultimately become a transport driver for the RMI4 library once it’s been merged upstream. This driver was developed by Synaptics along with Red Hat and other independent kernel contributors.

    • Linux Kernel 3.12.21 LTS Officially Released

      After a period when Linux kernel updates were smaller than usual, the developers have started once again to send patches and fixes, even for slightly older kernels, like 3.12.x. This is the most advanced Long Term Support kernel version and it’s expected to see more changes than the rest of them.

    • KVM Gets Improved For S390, POWER & MIPS

      The KVM virtualization update for Linux 3.16 brings improvements mostly for less common CPU architectures. With the Linux 3.17 kernel should come more interesting work for x86 fans but KVM on IA64 is likely to get the boot.

      Paolo Bonzini sent in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes this morning for the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request brings a lot of changes for IBM’s S390 architecture with regard to optimizations, support for migration, GDB support, and other improvements. Within the ARM space the only noteworthy change was support for the PSCI 0.2 hyper-call interface.

    • Linux Foundation Releases Program for LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America
    • The Linux Kernel: An Explanation In Layman’s Terms

      There are so many Linux distributions out in the wild, but there is only one de facto thing that they have in common: the Linux kernel. But while it’s often talked about, a lot of people don’t really know exactly what it does.

      Let’s take a look at what the Linux kernel really does and why it’s needed, with as few geeky terms as possible.

    • From pre-history to beyond the global thermonuclear war

      This is a short and vague glimpse to the interfaces that the Linux kernel offers to user space for display and graphics management, from the history to what is hot and new, to what might perhaps be coming after. The topic came current for me when I started preparing Weston for global thermonuclear war.

    • Linux GPU Drivers Prepare For Global Thermo-Nuclear War

    • Graphics Stack

      • Nouveau On Linux 3.16 Will Allow You To Try Re-Clocking

        The Nouveau DRM graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA support hasn’t seen any fundamental re-clocking support breakthroughs for the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel but the support can be easily enabled for select GeForce GPU models.

      • Radeon H.264 VCE Video Encoding With OpenMAX Lands In Mesa

        In continuation of the Phoronix article from a few days ago about AMD Adds Gallium3D H.264 Profile Encoding Support, that work has now landed within Mesa’s Git code-base.

      • KMSCUBE Now Runs On NVIDIA’s Jetson TK1
      • X.Org Server “Strawberry Shortcake” Released

        X.Org Server 1.16 is expected to be officially released in early July. This major X.Org Server update clears over one thousand compiler warnings, lands in-server GLAMOR support and many GLAMOR-related improvements, works better without root privileges, improves Ultra HD 4K monitor support, and has many other changes.

      • Open-Source NVIDIA Changes Are Exciting For Linux 3.16

        Besides being able to try out re-clocking with Linux 3.16, there’s also several other changes lined up for this next kernel release cycle when it comes to the Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA graphics support.

        Here’s the key changes currently living within the Nouveau DRM repository that should be pulled into DRM-next and land within the Linux 3.16 merge window:

    • Benchmarks

      • The Performance-Per-Watt, Efficiency Of Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Open-Source Drivers

        To complement the initial results yesterday of trying 60+ graphics cards on the open-source Linux GPU drivers — with today being the ten year birthday of Phoronix — here’s the second round of our mass open-source graphics driver testing. While in Wednesday’s article were the raw OpenGL results for the wide-range of graphics processors on the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau articles, in today’s article are complementary results providing a brief look at the system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, CPU usage, and GPU thermal information when testing the hardware in the same configuration.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment 0.19 Now In Alpha With Better Wayland Support

      Enlightenment 0.19 Alpha was just tagged as the very latest desktop / window manager work that includes improved Wayland support for E19.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • AstroWeather – a GNOME Shell extension for astronomical weather forecasts

        In the time off over Christmas and the New Year I decided to investigate & learn about the creation of GNOME Shell extensions. As an amateur astronomer, I have an interest in knowing what the “seeing conditions” will be like in the forthcoming nights. There are a number of different websites which provide forecasts, as well as apps for Android and iPhone. I use the Android AstroPanel application quite frequently, but most of the day I’m sitting in front of my laptop and would rather have the data presented there, alongside the regular weather forecast, rather than on my phone. So after finding that extensions are quite simple to create, I decided to create an extension for displaying an astronomical weather forecast for GNOME Shell.

      • From GNOME 3 to GNOME Classic in 3 extensions, or why GNOME Classic has become redundant

        GNOME Classic is a GNOME 3 desktop designed to offer the look-and-feel of a GNOME 2/MATE desktop, that is, of a traditional or classic GNOME desktop.

        It’s for people who are not fond of the default GNOME Shell. It comes with every installation of GNOME 3, offered as an option in the login screen’s Session menu.

      • GNOME 3.14 to Replace Message Tray with Better Notification System

        GNOME developers are making some very important changes that will come into effect with the release of the 3.14 branch, and it looks like the notification system will also get an overhaul.

        The current notification system that is being used in GNOME is not all that bad, but it could be better. In fact, there are quite a few extensions that change the way notifications are handled in GNOME, so it stands to reason that the developers can make some improvements.

      • GNOME 3.14 to Finally Get an Improved Icon Theme

        The GNOME developers have finally decided that the time to upgrade the icon theme has arrived, and it looks like the 3.14 release will see some changes in this department.

        One of the first things a user sees when starting a distribution powered by GNOME is the icon set used. You would imagine that developers paid more attention to something that is responsible with first impressions, but you would be wrong.

  • Distributions

    • Build your own distro part two

      Canonical provides a minimal Ubuntu install CD. It’s smaller than the regular installation ISO and it installs a minimal version of the distribution. At its most basic, it gives the user a command line, network connectivity and not much else. From this bare-bones beginning, it’s possible to selectively add components while leaving out most of the cruft that tends to come with a standard distribution.

    • Kali Linux Improves Penetration Testing

      There are a lot of tools and applications available to security researchers to conduct penetration testing. Many of those tools run on the open-source Linux operating system, though not every distribution is properly configured to be a proper platform for security research. That’s where the Kali Linux distribution comes into play as an optimized Linux distribution built for security researchers. The Kali Linux 1.0.7 distribution was officially released on May 27, providing users with a number of new features. Kali Linux was originally known as Backtrack Linux, before being renamed and rebuilt in March 2013. One of the primary new features in Version 1.0.7 is the introduction of encrypted USB persistence for Live images. With that feature, Kali Linux can be installed onto a USB storage key, with user storage that can be updated and fully encrypted. One of the key benefits of Kali Linux is that it assembles in one place many tools that security researchers need. Tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, Web applications, password attacks, stress testing and even hardware hacking are all included. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features of the Kali Linux 1.0.7 release.

    • New Releases

      • Backup and Recovery OS Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-17 Now Available for Download

        The Clonezilla team released a new development version for their Linux distro with just a small update for the Debian base and a couple of changes.

        “The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 2, 2014,” reads the official announcement.

      • Alpine Linux 3.0.0 Is an OS for Terminal Aficionados
      • Alpine 3.0.0 released

        We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.0.0, the first release in v3.0 stable series.

        This is the first release with musl libc instead of uClibc and is not ABI compatible with earlier versions, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading. See http://alpinelinux.org/edge-musl on how to upgrade.

      • Hands-on with Makulu Linux 6.1 Xfce: Big, beautiful and fun

        This has been a rocky couple of weeks for the Makulu Linux distribution, but with the release this week of Makulu 6.1 Xfce, things are looking good again.

        With the initial 6.0 Xfce release they switched to the LMDE installer, and that seemed to lead to a plethora of problems. The lead developer, Jacque Raymer, spent what must surely have been a week in Hell fixing the problems, improving the integration of the Mint Installer with the Makulu distributions, and rewriting the post-installation setup scripts. The result of that massive effort is the Makulu Linux Xfce 6.1 release.

        The release announcement mentions some of the problems and explains some of the work that went into solving them. The release notes, which are actually the original 6.0 notes with some additional 6.1 information on the end, give a much more complete overview of the 6.x Xfce releases.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • New Sandboxing Features Come To Systemd

        Lennart Poettering has added two new service sandboxing features to systemd.

        For improving the security of Linux services, Lennart added ReadOnlySystem and ProtectedHome settings for services. ReadOnlySystem will mount /usr and /boot as read-only for the specific service. The ProtectedHome setting mounts /home and /run/user as read-only or replaces it with an empty, inaccessible directory.

      • BizCloud(R) Joins Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network
      • Cerner Enhances Critical Healthcare Application Hosting Services with Red Hat

        Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cerner Corporation, a global health care information technology company, has successfully leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enhance the stability and performance of its world-class application hosting services. Combined with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped Cerner meet the healthcare industry’s growing demand for IT solutions and services.

      • Fedora

        • Tracking your time and tasks on Fedora

          Being a research student is really tough. I mean tough! The most difficult part is keeping up the self discipline, day after day, week after week. As a research student, you make your own schedule, you even make your own syllabus pretty much. I handle the syllabus part just fine, but I struggle with maintaining a disciplined schedule. It takes a while to get into a stable rhythm where you work according to plan and remain focussed on the task at hand, for however long it takes. On the other hand, it’s really easy to upset said rhythm: a late night coding spree, a night out with friends, an unexpected task that makes you diverge from your plan for the day etc. are often sufficient to make me sleep late and mess up the next day. Self discipline requires commitment, and a lot of hard work. Luckily, I’m not alone in this struggle. Here’s a helpful post on improving self discipline: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/self-discipline/. Since I spend most of my day at a computer, I went around and looked for tools that would help me keep focussed on my work; keep me away from distractions (yes, Facebook is a distraction); and help me work according to the plans I make.

        • Core DNF Plugins 0.1.0 Released
        • Red Hat’s Fedora Linux Operating System Gains New Leader
        • Upcoming: OpenStack workshop at Fedora Flock conference, Prague (Aug 6-9, 2014) | Kashyap Chamarthy

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Pi-based private cloud storage device runs Linux

      A $149 “Sherlybox” NAS debuted on Kickstarter today, based on a Raspberry Pi core, and offering a secure VPN that creates an invite-only cloud service.

    • Learn about 20 Amazing Raspberry Pi projects on our new digital Pi project bookazine

      Over the past couple of years we’ve been able to bring our readers an amazing array of Raspberry Pi projects that we are genuinely proud of. From big projects such as building your own robot and quadcopters down to the little stuff like making melodies with Sonic Pi or making Pong.

    • Arynga and Mentor Graphics Showcase Over-The-Air Updates for Linux-Based Infotainment Systems at the 2014 Telematics Update Conference, Detroit

      Arynga, Inc. , an innovator and leader in the delivery of intelligent vehicle software management solutions, announced its recent partnership with the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics® , a leader in Linux-based infotainment, automotive software and network design. The two companies publicized this partnership today at the 2014 Telematics Update Conference in Detroit, where Mentor debuted the integration of CarSync™ , Arynga’s software update management platform, with the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) .

    • Enea AB: Expanded embedded Linux training portfolio from Enea

      Enea (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor for telecom infrastructure equipment, today announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation concerning embedded Linux training courses. Enea is one of four announced training partners to date, and can thereby offer Linux professionals the full range of Linux Foundation courses, in addition to its own training curriculum.

    • AMD G-Series processors get more security

      Embedded Linux development and commercial support for the AMD G-Series family is available through Mentor Embedded Linux and Sourcery CodeBench, as well as no-cost Mentor Embedded Linux Lite.

    • Presentation slides from seven talks at ELC 2014

      The talks cover a wide range of challenges and issues associated with porting Linux or Android to new embedded hardware platforms and SoCs. Topics include overviews of Buildroot, Yocto, and the Device Tree; discussions of issues such as SMP support and boot-time reduction; and an example of supporting a new ARM-based SoC from Allwinner.

    • 10 essential upgrades for your Raspberry Pi

      If you’re anything like us – and dear Lord we hope you are not – you sometimes sit staring at your Raspberry Pi, willing it to do more. Unfortunately our mental prowess is not powerful enough to materialise extra features or tweak the performance of the ARM chip, so we instead turned to the internet and looked for ways to upgrade our Pi.

      We came away with ten items that can help make your Raspberry Pi usage just that little bit better; from the simplest of USB cable switches to full-on touch screen LCD displays for the Pi. We then wrote a feature about it which you can read all about in the latest issue of Linux User & Developer.

    • Phones

      • In the Matrix of Mobile, Linux Is Zion

        In mobile we are losing the free world called the Web and the Net. How do we save it?

        Already most of us spend more time on mobile devices than we do on desktops and laptops, put together. We also can do a lot more stuff, in a lot more places, on mobile devices than on computers. There were more than a million iOS apps on the shelves of Apple’s store in October 2013, and I’m guessing there are at least that many Android apps on Google’s shelves by now.

        Meanwhile, app development on computers is slacking off—so is Web development, except as required to accessorize mobile apps. And on mobile devices, use of the Web is fading as well. According to Flurry Analytics, the Web’s share of mobile use dropped from 20% in 2013 to 14% in 2014. In “The Decline of the Mobile Web”, Chris Dixon writes.

      • Android TV Pegged for June Appearance

        Android TV “certainly shows Google’s character as an organization,” said Brett Sappington, director of research for Parks Associates. “I don’t know of any other organization that would take three tries to get it right. Google embraces risk more than other organizations do.” The challenge is getting the mix of user interaction and ease of use right, he added.

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung’s ‘OS of Everything’ Tizen still has little to offer

          The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen OS is here, even if it will likely be a long time before most of us can get our hands on it. But forget about phones – Tizen is also about cars, TVs, home automation, wearables, and more.

        • Developers get 100% Revenue and In App purchases Revenue share in the Tizen Store

          Hey developers, do you want another good reason to join the Tizen Store and sell your applications? During the Tizen Developer Conference the Tizen store has launched a great revenue share promotion in which you receive 100% of the sales revenue for applications and In App Purchase sold during the promotion period. You get all the money for a full year. Check below for additional information

Free Software/Open Source

  • Upstream serves up conversations with people who move open source forward

    Upstream is a new podcast featuring interviews and conversations with people who are moving open source forward. The podcast is produced by Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. In their first episode, Joe Brockmeier talks with Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch about her Sunday morning keynote at the Twelfth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 12x) in February this year. In Why Checking Your Privilege is Good For You, Leslie asks how we can use our level of privilege—whether in our field, in our community, or in our job—to help others, with lower levels of privilege in said field, community, or workplace, to get involved and succeed.

  • New OpenLMI Web Site
  • Red Hat Software Collections 1.1 Now Generally Available
  • Red alert for Linux programmers: Red Hat Software Collections 1.1 released
  • Red Hat Software Collections 1.1 Updates Tools, Language Support

    Red Hat has announced the general availability of Software Collections 1.1, their update of common web development tools, dynamic languages, and open-source databases. Red Hat Software Collections provide newer versions of these key open-source packages than what is offered by default in RHEL while being backed by three years of Red Hat support.

  • Are open-source projects the pathway to better security?

    A common challenge to the security of open-source software is the ability of teams to focus on writing and testing the code. Counter this with organizations that dedicate entire teams solely to testing and improving the quality of the product.

    As James pointed out in our discussion, the difference is often the passion. OSS projects appeal to the craft of solving a problem. It provides an opportunity to contribute, to collaborate, to improve.

  • OSSEC 2.8 has been released

    OSSEC is a cross-platform host intrusion detection system. Hence it’s also known as OSSEC HIDS. It is Free software released under the GNU General Public License, and features log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and real-time active responses. If you intend to run a server anywhere, this is one of the first applications you want to install on it.

    OSSEC is a much better security application than Fail2ban, another popular host intrusion prevention application. OSSEC offers a centralized management server with support for agent and agentless monitoring. A complete description of its features are available here.

  • Fujitsu Labs: Is Trend Open-Source or Cloud-Labor?

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Best Chrome Apps and Extensions for Developers

        Google Chrome, the world’s most loved web browser has come a long way. Once touted as a faster alternative to Firefox has turned itself into a significant player in the OS marketplace. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google has ensured that pretty much everything you do on your desktop can be done in your web browser. Taking this vision further, the search behemoth turned the web browser into a full-fledged operating system. Running on top of Linux, Google Chrome OS has become a crowd favorite. Its ability to sync seamlessly across all devices has made the initial naysayers give Chrome OS a second chance.

    • Mozilla

      • PlayCanvas takes its WebGL video game engine open source

        Video game creators will be pleased to hear that the WebGL PlayCanvas Engine has been open-sourced. Mozilla announced the move today on its developer blog and you can access the entire engine sourcebase right now over on GitHub.

      • Mozilla Open-Sources Their PlayCanvas Gaming Engine
      • Hack the web: No Flash

        I am a hipster Flash hater. I hated Flash before Steve Jobs told it was bad. I hate Flash before Adobe said there would be no Flash 7 for Linux. I don’t have Flash on my machine. I even coined “fc;dw”.

      • Mozilla Leads New Cyber Security Initiative, Complete with Funding

        Mozilla is starting a new research project targeted to usher in better security on the Internet. The Cyber Security Dephi initiative, announced in a blog post from advocacy director Dave Steer, will leverage resources from experts in academia and computer security companies to develop new online security strategies.

        The announcement comes alongside Mozilla’s Reset the Net initiative, which calls for a day of action to improve security against widespread surveillance.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

    • What the History of Photography Teaches the Cloud

      The founder of open-source Drupal content management system details how the 100-year evolution of photography can inform open-source development and the upcoming Drupal 8 release.
      It took more than 100 years of evolution for the modern photography industry to reach its current state, and there are lessons from that century that apply to the modern world of cloud and Web development too. That’s the message delivered by Dries Buytaert, founder of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS), during his keynote address at the Drupalcon conference June 3 in Austin, Texas.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3 Beta 1 Gets Support for Apple MacBook Products

      FreeBSD developers haven’t forgotten about the 9.x branch of their operating system, even if they have already released 10.0. This is a strange and not very common situation, where a development branch is actually lower in version than the latest stable.

      This only shows the commitment of the developers to the people who are still using 9.x and who want to continue employing it. This means that several updates are needed and 9.3 Beta 1 is quite a big release.

    • DragonFly 3.8 released

      Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download. (link goes to release versions of the packages.

    • DragonFlyBSD 3.8 Brings New USB Stack, Intel DRM Driver

      As expected, DragonFlyBSD 3.8 has been released. This release brings several new features to the popular BSD operating system but the 3.8 series will be the last to support 32-bit releases.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Netskope: As Use of Cloud Services Grow, So Do Data Breach Probabilities

      A new study from Netskope and Ponemon Institute has revealed that IT and security professionals are expecting cloud services to increase the likelihood and economic impact of data breaches.

    • Court fight heats up over 52 pages of still-secret surveillance info

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end.

      EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler yesterday in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago. They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.

    • Snowden, the Terminator, and Us

      One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.

    • An essay concerning a post-Snowden utopia: Stop the surveillance state

      It’s been almost a year since the June 5, 2013 revelation that the US government was collecting, in bulk, the telephone metadata of every telephone call to and from the United States. The National Security Agency leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden would eventually expose surveillance programs, including Prism, XKeyscore, Tempora, and Muscular.

    • One year on, Snowden affair shows power of big data analytics

      A year ago today, June 5 2013, The Guardian, a UK newspaper, published the first of its exclusives based on documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      Leaving aside the incendiary debate over whether Mr Snowden is a traitor and enemy of the state or a brave citizen who liberated millions of people from illegal surveillance activities, there is no argument over just how significant his activities were in the context of data security. That the phrase “post-Snowden” has passed into common parlance among security professionals is evidence enough.

    • A New Round Of OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Discovered
    • OpenSSL Security Advisory [05 Jun 2014]

      OpenSSL 1.0.0m and OpenSSL 0.9.8za also contain a fix for CVE-2014-0076: Fix for the attack described in the paper “Recovering OpenSSL ECDSA Nonces Using the FLUSH+RELOAD Cache Side-channel Attack” Reported by Yuval Yarom and Naomi Benger. This issue was previously fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g.

    • Heartbleed Redux: Another Gaping Wound in Web Encryption Uncovered
    • OpenSSL fixes another severe vulnerability
    • Chrome for Android Update
    • Early ChangeCipherSpec Attack (05 Jun 2014)

      The good news is that these attacks need man-in-the-middle position against the victim and that non-OpenSSL clients (IE, Firefox, Chrome on Desktop and iOS, Safari etc) aren’t affected. None the less, all OpenSSL users should be updating.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Ukraine Junta’s Air Force massacre of unarmed civilians in Luhansk, 2 June 2014

      Kiev’s Junta “anti-terrorist op” has aimed principally to retake administrative or symbolic buildings held occupied by disaffected people in the Donbass region, which strongly reject the idea of being ruled by a government instrumented by fascists and Nazis. These buildings are meant to be retaken by force, as the Ukraine government refuses talks with the political representatives of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, etc, and which have established autonomous administrations after their respective referendums on sovereignty.

    • Obama: Keep the Cannon Fodder Coming

      Translation – ”Thanks for sending so many young Scots to die in Iraq and Afghanistan for us. Look forward to seeing them die in Syria or Iran soon. Keep the cannon fodder coming. Sorry have to nip off now to approve some teenagers on a drone kill list. Keep storing those nuclear warheads for us.”

    • Remember the USS Liberty? The US and Israel wish you didn’t

      Israel launched air attacks against Egypt’s airfields at 7.45am on 5th June 1967. Within a couple of hours most of the Egyptian air forces was destroyed on the ground. At the same time, Israeli tanks scythed across the Sinai Desert heading for the Suez Canal and its troops initiated fighting on the borders with Syria and Jordan. False reports, meanwhile, claimed that Egypt had launched a major attack on Israel, which was fighting back in self-defence, a familiar refrain ever since. By mid-morning, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was telling the US ambassador in Tel Aviv “an ever larger curtain of lies” and claimed that Israel had “no intention of taking advantage of the situation to enlarge its territory.” Another lie.

    • Steve King Not-So-Subtly Implies Susan Rice Works for al Qaeda

      In a nice li’l tweet, King railed against the incredibly controversial swap of five Gitmo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier kept prisoner-of-war by a Taliban-aligned group in Afghanistan for the past five years. Upon his return, details have emerged that seemingly indicate Bergdahl defected from his troop before his capture, while the official narrative has always been that he was “taken in battle.”

    • Two Australians were killed by US drones. Of course that’s our business

      The fact that finding yourself on a police watchlist can lead to a death penalty meted out on the other side of the world should worry our attorney-general. Why doesn’t it?

    • PM slammed over terror comments

      The Prime Minister’s claim that Kiwis are being converted to radical Islam and joining al-Qaida lacks credibility…

    • Australian killed in Yemen drone strike not radicalised in New Zealand, says Muslim preacher
    • New Zealand Stance on Drone Killings Attacked

      A Christchurch academic and lawyer has accused the Prime Minister of washing his hands of the killing of a New Zealander (Muslim bin John) and an Australian (Salma al Russi) in a US drone strike in Yemen.

      Speaking at a public lecture in Christchurch, David Small said that the moment New Zealand intelligence agencies hand over information to a country with an active kill-first-ask-questions-later drone campaign, the New Zealand government has a responsibility to ensure that the subject of that intelligence is not subject to extra-judicial killing.

    • Drone killings: IHC orders police to register FIR against ex-CIA station chief

      The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has ordered the police to register a First Information Report (FIR) against former Central Investigation Agency’s (CIA) station chief Jonathan Banks for his involvement in 2009 drone strike that killed family members of a tribesman.

    • CIA drone strikes: embarrassment for US as Pakistan court orders murder investigation

      Campaigners say court decision could open floodgates to more criminal cases against controversial strikes and call for international arrest warrant against American spy

    • Pakistan court orders police to charge ex-CIA station chief

      Islamabad’s High Court on Thursday ordered police to press charges against the CIA’s former station chief for murder, conspiracy and waging war against Pakistan.

      Judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui issued the orders following a 2010 court petition by drone activist Kareem Khan, whose brother and teenage son were killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan tribal district.

      The former top spy left Pakistan in December 2010 after his identity was disclosed through the court case, and there is little expectation Islamabad will seek his return to face charges.

    • US military should publish all investigations of civilian deaths

      There is, in fact, an easy way for the Department of Defense to fulfill the president’s wishes. It could release redacted investigations of incidents in which civilians were killed during combat engagements involving the U.S. military. Although this is not well known, the DoD has conducted thousands of these investigations, generally in a thorough and professional manner. More important, most of them are already releasable by request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

    • US Drone Strike Kills Four in Central Yemen

      The commander, identified as Jafaar al-Shabwani, was believed to be one of the four people killed in the strike, though the identities of the other three are completely unknown beyond being labeled “suspects.”

    • Grandfather of American drone victim abandons lawsuit against govt
    • Relative of Americans Killed by Drone Strikes: No Justice in U.S. Courts

      Having lost faith in the ability of U.S. courts to provide justice and accountability for their relatives’ deaths, the family members of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 have decided not to appeal a court decision dismissing their lawsuit challenging the killings.

    • Taliban Claim U.S. Drone Strikes Almost Killed Bergdahl ‘Several’ Times

      The Taliban warned the U.S. during prisoner-exchange negotiations that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that U.S. drone strikes had come close on several occasions to killing the soldier while he was in captivity, U.S. officials said.

    • Taliban Warned U.S. That Drones Nearly Killed Bergdahl
    • Libyan renegade general Khalifa Haftar escapes suicide bombing
    • In Libya suicide bomber tries to kill General Hifter

      An attack by a suicide bomber on the home of the CIA-linked General Hifter who is leading a campaign against the government and Islamic militias called Operation Dignity killed three people.

    • Rogue Libyan general escapes suicide attack

      His two decades in exile in United States gave rise to accusations he was linked to the CIA first from the Gaddafi regime, and then from rival rebels.

    • Libyan rogue General Haftar survives assassination attempt

      But he remains a figure of suspicion for many veterans of the uprising, with his U.S. exile leading some of them to accuse him of links to the CIA, something also claimed by Gadhafi regime.

    • Hifter supports role for Egyptian army in Libyan conflict

      Al-Masry Al-Youm asked about his long period of exile in Virginia, where the CIA’s headquarters are located. He maintained a steady tone, confirming that [claims he collaborated with the Americans] were lies launched by his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood. He explained that if he was going to spy for anyone, it would have been [former President] Moammar Gadhafi when he was at his peak.

    • Concern over Irish troops in Syria3

      The 117 Irish soldiers based in Syria as part of the UN Disengagement Observer Force – the thin blue line separating Syrian and Israeli forces on the Golan Heights since 1974 – are coming under attack from Syrian rebels armed, trained and paid by the US, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Government needs to protest loudly to these countries to protect the lives of its soldiers and the aims of the UNDOF mission.

    • The Real Villains of the Bergdahl Tale

      The right-wing media is denouncing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a “deserter” who wasn’t worth ransoming from the Taliban, but the real villains are the architects of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars who frivolously put the many Bergdahls in harm’s way, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • This Is Where Americans Planned to Spend the Nuclear Holocaust

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Why is palm oil so controversial?

      Palm oil is everywhere. This globally traded vegetable oil is found in thousands of products you buy off the shelf, like ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, toothpaste, soap, cosmetics. Palm oil is in hundreds of products we routinely buy yet, environmentally, it’s incredibly destructive. Although palm oil is relatively cheaper to produce, animals and indigenous communities suffer tremendously due to the cultivation. Studies have proven that while palm oil is a very successful ingredient it has proven to be detrimental to the well being of the orangutans, causing a decrease of at least 90% along with other species

    • Keystone XL pipeline vulnerable to attacks, NextGen report says

      The Keystone XL oil pipeline would be vulnerable to attacks threatening water supplies for millions of homeowners and farmers, according to a report by NextGen Climate, a political group led by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.

  • Censorship

    • Media Self-Censorship Suppresses 3 Key Elements From Obama Foreign Policy Analysis

      Obama’s first job after college in 1983 was with the CIA front company Business International Corp.

    • How Chinese Censorship Tries To Disappear References To Tiananmen Square

      We all know that China and their “Great Firewall” of censorship exist and we have a general idea of just how deep the censorship goes. We’re also aware of the justifications that the Chinese government use for this censorship, including the notions that they’re just protecting their innocent citizens from all the evil on the internet, as well as censorship committed by some of their antagonists (including the USA). But if you thought that this censorship was chiefly about pornography or current events, you’re quite mistaken.

    • Privacy Online Should Be Expected

      We should begin to expect more transparency as more information is revealed in the wake of the revelations that the NSA has been spying on citizens, by recording their telecommunications and digital transmissions.

      At the moment, the ruling is directed at Europeans, and Google is reported to be receiving more than 10,000 daily requests. However, globally, other citizens can also expect the effect to be assimilated throughout the virtual ecosystem, as the discussion about online privacy is ignited.

    • Search Engine Yandex Shows Allegiance With Moscow Listing

      Shares in Russian internet search engine Yandex will begin trading in Moscow on Wednesday in a move that will please the Kremlin and could shield the Nasdaq-listed company from any tightening of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.

  • Privacy

    • Google moves to boost email privacy by releasing end-to-end encryption tool

      End-to-end encryption offers another layer of security by encrypting data leaving a user’s browser until it is decrypted by the recipient. The service has been available for some time via tools including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), but such tools have failed to become mainstream as they require a higher level of technological know-how.

    • Google announces end-to-end encryption for Gmail (a big deal!)
    • Websites, privacy groups mount “Reset The Net” campaign against NSA spying
    • Reset The Net – 05 june 2014

      When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.

    • Judge rejects suit but questions NSA surveillance

      A federal judge raised privacy questions while dismissing a lawsuit filed by an Idaho woman against President Barack Obama regarding the collection of cellphone information by the National Security Agency.

    • Judge Says Supreme Court Should Overturn Awful Surveillance Precedent, But Until It Does, He Has To Reject Case Against NSA

      We’ve written plenty about the case Smith v. Maryland, which established the dangerous Supreme Court precedent that there is no 4th Amendment expectation of privacy to be found in any data or information you give to a third party. Judge Richard Leon, back in December, ruled that the NSA surveillance efforts were so different from the situation in Smith (involving police getting dialing information on a single person from the phone company) that it wasn’t an applicable precedent in the case in front of him, brought by Larry Klayman. That case is now being appealed.

    • US Marshals Step In To Keep Florida Police Department’s Stingray Documents Out Of The Hands Of The ACLU
    • U.S. Marshals Seize Local Cops’ Cell Phone Tracking Files in Extraordinary Attempt to Keep Information From Public

      A run-of-the-mill public records request about cell phone surveillance submitted to a local police department in Florida has unearthed blatant violations of open government laws, including an incredible seizure of state records by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the Justice Department. Today the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida filed an emergency motion in state court to preserve the public’s right of access to government records.

    • NSA Chief Defends Facial Recognition Database By Denying Claims That Weren’t Made

      In terms of collecting images, no one stated anything to the contrary. The collection is likely operating like many other NSA collections — on a large scale that increases the likelihood that incidental collection of American data and content will occur. The “appropriate legal steps” are the same ones that have been used as talking points over the last year.

      Likewise, no one suggested in the article that the NSA targeted US citizens. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about the NSA’s programs is the fact that they’re clearly untargeted. The NSA doesn’t select a person and start the surveillance from that point. The surveillance is pervasive and ongoing and any selection tends to occur long after tons of data/communications have been collected. It’s the after-the-fact nature of the programs that makes them so dangerous. Further, the lack of solid minimization rules means tons of data from bulk collections sits around in NSA servers just waiting for someone to find a reason to look through it. So, while the NSA may not “unilaterally target American citizens,” it has the mechanisms in place to do so.

      As for Roger’s last non-denial, it was clearly stated in the New York Times article that there was no indication that the NSA had access to US drivers license databases. Rogers’ last denial addresses “some people” (whoever they are) that have a clearly wrong interpretation of the leaked documents, but doesn’t address what was actually written. And it completely avoids the undeniable fact that, with as many “input” channels as the NSA has, collecting the sort of information a drivers license database holds would be simple enough, even without direct access.

    • Volume of encrypted email rising amid spying fears

      The volume of email cloaked in encryption technology is rapidly rising as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major Internet companies try to shield their users’ online communications from government spies and other snoops.

    • NSA can easily bug your switched-off iPhone: Here’s how you can stop them

      Edward Snowden’s recent revelation that the NSA can bug cell phones even when they are turned off left some experts split on whether it is true or not. But a group of hackers claim that at least there is a way to protect your phone from spies’ ears.

      Snowden, who exposed the American government’s secret mass surveillance program, has been making headlines in the media for almost a year with shocking details about the scale of snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA).

    • NSA-Mocking Easter Egg Found In Google’s New Email Encryption Plug-In
    • Google Mocks NSA In Easter Egg

      It was last October that the Washington Post mentioned about leaked slides from the NSA’s top secret MUSCULAR data interception program, sharing details on how the NSA was able to step in and intercept data from Google’s cloud servers through an exploitation in an SSL gap. That particular slide has proven to raise a fair amount of controversy, especially so where Google employees are concerned. The comment read, “SSL added and removed here :)”, and did not go endear itself to Google employees. Of course, revenge is a dish best served cold, and Google has not forgotten about that, having hit back in a latest Easter Egg in their latest email encryption plug-in.

    • Holder Prioritizing Domestic Terrorism, but Silent on Role of NSA

      US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday he was reconstituting a task force to coordinate the work of several Department of Justice agencies on thwarting homegrown terrorism within the US.

    • German server lockbox scores MEELLION dollar seed-smashing record

      Cheers and laughter could be heard late last night through the walls of a small Hamburg office as staff celebrated an unlikely win; their punt to build a NSA-subverting server that encrypts everything a small business might do in the office had made bank with a record-breaking $US1 million in crowdfunding sourced in 89 mins.

    • Berlin must practice what it preaches
    • Schneier: ‘Most of the world is under surveillance’

      Security technologist Bruce Schneier tells DW why he finds it curious that the German BND is getting a free pass on surveillance and why Europe should take the lead on protecting privacy in the digital age.

    • Looking at NSA & GCHQ as role models: German intelligence plans their own mass spying program

      Last week, leaked secret documents revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent to the NSA, has asked the German Parliament for an additional 300 million Euros to extend its surveillance program in an effort to rival that of the U.S. and U.K.

    • Opinion: German prosecutor worthy of praise
    • Merkel won’t be quizzed in NSA probe
    • Germany to Probe US Spies for Bugging Merkel’s Phone
    • Bomb plot convict seeking new trial

      The government’s secret surveillance program becomes an issue in the Portland case

    • Man convicted in car-bomb plot seeks new trial, citing warrantless wiretapping

      The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.

    • Ore. man seeks new trial for car bomb plot; NSA data helped convict Mohamed Mohamud

      The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.

    • Orwell or liberty: One year later, holders of power still ignore Snowden

      A year has passed since Edward Snowden started telling us what really was going on in the world. Since that date, various holders of power have been struggling – without success – to reclaim the control of the narrative, the control of the news flow.

      But in the age of the net, the power of narrative rests squarely with the many, rather than with the elite. People have become aware of mass surveillance, even if they haven’t become aware of its full consequences yet. But the story is out. The proverbial cat isn’t just out of the bag, but has left the entire city and is halfway across the continent. This hasn’t prevented an ivory tower establishment from playing “no see, no hear, no speak” monkey games, pretending Snowden does not exist and that people don’t already know what we know.

    • Citing Snowden Leaks, Colleges Nationwide Launch Anti-NSA Surveillance Protests
    • Students Are Willing To Die For Freedom, Liberty, Privacy

      It’s the day we began to learn just how incredibly intrusive government spying on average Americans had become in this technological age. June 5, 2013 – the day we began to understand what was at stake – our freedom, our privacy, our personal lives. The day the first of many news stories – courtesy of Edward Snowden – began to paint a picture of a shocking new world.

    • China state media calls for ‘severe punishment’ for Google, Apple, US tech firms

      US companies such as Yahoo Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People’s Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.

    • Weighing up the impact of Edward Snowden

      As you read this, the United States will be waking up to the one-year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first leaks on his country’s surveillance programs to the world’s newspapers.

    • Edward Snowden affair fallout still rocks US one year on

      A year after Edward Snowden revealed the vast scope of the US data dragnet, America is still reeling from the fallout, which damaged ties abroad and triggered fears of “Big Brother” government.

      In the latest twist since Snowden handed over thousands of US intelligence secrets last June, Germany has launched a criminal probe into snooping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

    • A snapshot of NSA intrusion

      The National Security Agency’s digital face book may or may not include images scraped from Facebook. An agency spokeswoman declined to divulge that information to The New York Times.

      The agency has managed to intercept millions of images, “including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images,’” according to documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those documents describe the trove of data as presenting “tremendous untapped potential,” the Times reported.

    • ​‘Snowden became most wanted by US injustice system’

      Thomas Drake: Well it generated a worldwide discussion and debate about surveillance and what is at stake in terms of individual sovereignty and privacy and how far the US in particular in partnership with others, including other countries and other security services as well as major telecommunication concerns and internet service providers in gathering data, collecting data and finding out everything there is to know about us. And much of it has been conducted in secret, and he was able are able to bring out significant documentation, prime evidence to actually prove it.

    • IBM, Lenovo Server Deal May Take Longer Than Expected

      Reports began to surface in early April that the IBM’s sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo—which is based in Beijing, China—was getting close scrutiny from U.S. agencies around issues of national security. Government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FBI, buy x86 servers from IBM, as do the largest telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-lenovo-server-deal-may-take-longer-than-expected.html#sthash.m6Wan9Dl.dpuf

    • Op-Ed: Snowden is the definition of a patriot

      The opinion of Edward Snowden is wide ranging. Some call him a traitor, others call him a patriot. The truth sits firmly in the latter. Edward Snowden is a red, white and blue patriot whose act of civil disobedience came at a price everyone should revere.

    • Snowden publically supports Reset the Net campaign
    • Snowden sounds call to action for Reset the Net web protest

      The NSA document leaker joins Google, Mozilla, Reddit, and many others in a campaign and day of action that aims to help Internet users “take back” their privacy.

    • Year of the whistleblower: 10 things we didn’t know before Snowden
    • Bay Area man exposed government surveillance 8 years ago

      It was eight years ago that we first learned of a man named Mark Klein. He didn’t work for the government; he worked for the phone company. When he started asking questions about a secret room in the building where he worked, there was no turning back.

    • Will the Government Finally Acknowledge Which Telecom Companies Cooperate With the NSA?

      Yesterday, advocates for government transparency argued for the release of more documents that could reveal how the Federal Intelligence Act Surveillance (FISA) Court has provided oversight of the US intelligence community and confirm which telecom companies cooperated with the government. It’s the latest step in an uphill battle that’s been waged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2011 for records they say may reveal disputes between the FISA court and the intelligence community, confirm the existence additional surveillance programs, and provide official acknowledgment of some essential details of known programs that have been already revealed in the media.

    • The New York Times v. Glenn Greenwald

      Earth to Glenn Greenwald: If you write a book slamming the New York Times, it’s naïve to expect favorable treatment in the New York Times Book Review. Been there, done that. Twice as a matter of fact.

    • Australia pleaded for more spying on its citizens, new book claims

      Australia ”pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.

    • The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail: The Spy Who Misspelled Me

      Things seem to have gone downhill since then. One NSA slide details a program called BLARNEY by which the agency pressures such U.S. corporate vassals as AT&T into assisting with the illicit surveillance of their customers. Seeing this for the first time, I had a flash of inspiration. The reader may recall how the ACLU kept trying to sue the NSA for the bulk warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, including presumably those American citizens who work for the ACLU, but the courts wouldn’t grant them standing to launch the suit since all of that was classified and thus couldn’t be revealed in court. What the ACLU needs to do now is track down whoever it is whose homemade St. Patrick’s Day block party invitations the NSA ripped off to get this BLARNEY logo and have them sue for copyright infringement.

    • Edward Snowden, a Year Later
    • Safety possible without surveillance

      Prof Kevin P.Clements calls for a New Zealand commission of inquiry to re-evaluate the value of the Five Eyes security arrangement.

    • Admiral Michael Rogers, New NSA Director Really Doesn’t Get Why Americans Don’t Want to Be Spied On

      As reported earlier this week, the National Security Agency is now collecting photos from online to create a massive facial recognition database. Americans shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about that, says new National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, according to Washington Post article today headlined, “New NSA chief seeks to reassure public on surveillance.”

    • New NSA Chief Rejects Portrait of Snowden as Foreign Spy

      The new head of the National Security Agency has distanced himself from previous government suggestions that whistleblower Edward Snowden is a foreign spy. Officials including former NSA director Keith Alexander have contended that Snowden may have worked with Russian or other foreign intelligence agencies. But at a public forum with Bloomberg News, new NSA chief Michael Rogers shot down that theory.

    • Online privacy: Facebook is better than you think, Amazon not so much
    • ACLU: We now have the power to rein in NSA mass surveillance

      The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating nearly a year after journalist Glenn Greenwald initiated a deluge of reporting on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, including a cache of NSA documents stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • Binney, Wiebe and Ratner on the NSA

      CCR President Emeritus Michael Ratner and NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney examine the relationship between the NSA and U.S. global dominance, the stance of Democrats and Republicans towards surveillance, and mainstream media coverage of these issues

    • The impact of forced data localisation on fundamental rights

      A tool to target dissidents

    • Google to cover earth in Wi-Fi via $1 Billion+ worth of satellites
    • Google Using Encryption but Emails Still Not Private

      Google and other companies are using encryption on emails, but they are still not completely private. One thing that many people fail to realize is that the encryption is from the server side. It does not stop those at the email providers from reading the content of emails.

    • Most Americans applaud Snowden’s exposure of NSA mass surveillance – poll
    • SAPPHIRE: PRISM proves not all clouds were created equal, says SAP CEO
    • Today is the day we Reset the Net

      A pledge for developers and site operators: Here are best-practices for people who make mobile apps, host sites, and write code to make the Internet more secure against mass surveillance. For example, mobile developers can use cert pinning and end-to-end encryption to keep their users safe and private. And websites can use SSL to protect their users’ privacy when they use the net.

    • As Snowden Leak Anniversary Approaches, Intelligence Community Prepares to Declare Victory

      As June 5 approaches — and with it the one year anniversary of the first reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks — the privacy community is calling supporters to redouble efforts to improve the NSA “reform bill,” which I call the USA Freedumber Act, in the Senate.

      I explained here why the Senate is unlikely to improve USA Freedumber in any meaningful way. The votes just aren’t there — not even in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    • Snowden provides U.S. with a reason for change

      Benjamin Franklin said it all: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”

    • The real NSA scandal is overseas

      More than 12 years after 9/11, the United States continues to have a foreign policy mindset that demands zero tolerance on terrorism and treats even minor threats like existential challenges. In the pursuit of perfect security and in meeting the demands of a hugely expansive view of American power, the U.S. has failed to consider the ultimate consequences and potential political fallout — both at home and abroad — of what achieving that goal means. And that’s a challenge that goes far beyond the NSA.

    • Is The NSA Building A Spy System Hitler Would Have Loved?

      Recent revelations that the government can remotely turn on a phone and listen to conversations come without press examination if this historic spying capability is being misused

  • Civil Rights

    • A New Form of Homicide in Canada’s Prisons: The Case of Ashley Smith

      Ashley Smith, a nineteen year old, mentally ill, inmate committed suicide while under suicide watch at a Correctional Institute in Canada. Ms. Smith was imprisoned at fifteen for throwing apples at a postal worker. During her imprisonment she suffered multiple cases of emotional and physical abuse. The first and mildest abuse she suffered was being denied sanitary products and adequate toilet paper during her menstrual cycle. The worst abuse she suffered was a combination of emotional and physical, and occurred when Ms. Smith was transferred between nine different institutions seventeen times. When she was transferred between institutes she was restrained by officers so she could be hooded and duct taped to her seat while she pleaded with them to stop hurting her.

    • Britain’s first secret trial: this way lies trouble
    • Attorneys for terror suspect kicked out of ‘secret’ court hearing

      But in a groundbreaking ruling in January, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman granted Daoud’s attorney Thomas Durkin the right to examine secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act records, which Durkin hopes could provide grounds for having the case against Daoud thrown out.

    • Classified U.S. Document at Stake in Bomb Sting Appeal

      Daoud was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in September 2012 at the age of 18 after allegedly trying to detonate a device given to him by an undercover agent. He later pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and trying to damage or destroy a building with an explosive.

    • Obama Really Can Close Gitmo

      Over the weekend the government of Qatar brokered a dramatic deal between the US and the Taliban to swap five Guantánamo prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier held as a prisoner of war for almost five years. Flexing his political clout, President Obama demonstrated his ability to navigate with ease through the Congressional obstacles in the way of releasing prisoners from Guantánamo. Some House Republicans accused the President of breaking the law to get his way. But the Obama administration made it clear that the President had added a “signing statement” to the bill restricting the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, saying that the restrictions violated his Constitutional prerogative.

    • Washington Wants Maduro Dead

      He’s Venezuela’s democratically elected president. It doesn’t matter. Washington’s dirty war continues.

      It’s done so since Chavez’s December 1998 election. He became president in February 1999. He served until his March 5, 2013 death.

      He survived Washington’s April 2002 coup attempt. A 64-day 2002 – 03 general strike and oil management lockout.

    • Return to Truman’s CIA, author Melvin Goodman says

      President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

    • Not a Liberal Democracy

      New Labour were the chief culprits in moving Britain away from a liberal democracy and into an authoritarian state.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Be Sure to Comment on FCC’s NPRM 14-28

      I am writing in response to NPRM 14-28 — your request for comments regarding the “Open Internet”.

      I am a trained computer scientist and I work in the technology industry. (I’m a software developer and software freedom activist.) I have subscribed to home network services since 1989, starting with the Prodigy service, and switching to Internet service in 1991. Initially, I used a PSTN single-pair modem and eventually upgraded to DSL in 1999. I still have a DSL line, but it’s sadly not much faster than the one I had in 1999, and I explain below why.

    • Will Member States Defend Net Neutrality, in Line with the European Parliament?

      On June 6, during the next Council meeting, ministers will be invited to share their position regarding the proposal for a Regulation on Net Neutrality. After the rise of eurosceptical forces in the recent European elections, will the European governments be ready to support the European Parliament’s vote and defend our freedoms?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

06.04.14

Links 4/6/2014: More Tizen Devices, Fedora Linux Project Leader Matthew Miller

Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zettaset Orchestrator Enhances Open Source Big Data Security

    Zettaset has expanded its Big Data security offerings with the announcement of support for Hortonworks and other open source Hadoop 2.x distributions in its Orchestrator management and security platform.

  • Intel storage : Open source + software-defined expectations
  • Why open source development is getting more secure

    With fewer defects being found in major open source projects than in large proprietary software packages, what are the security strengths and weaknesses of open source development?

  • HP clarifies views on OpenDaylight, open source

    It was HP Networking’s Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer who said seven months ago that she couldn’t see why anyone would use an OpenDaylight controller in their SDN. But it was also Bethany Mayer, now senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business, who drove HP to raise its membership investment and participation in OpenDaylight just two weeks ago.

  • Continuuity, AT&T Labs to Open Source Real-Time Data Processing Framework
  • New Fedora Leader, Open Source Security, and Saving TrueCrypt

    In today’s Linux news, a new project manager is named for Fedora. Nick Heath says Open Source is more secure because of a “heightened focus on quality controls.” And a team of developers are trying to save TrueCrypt one way or another.

  • openQRM Community Summit 2014: Talks and presentations online!
  • Perforce open-sources popular version control tools

    Perforce Software todayannounced it has released open source versions of P4CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.

  • Events

    • Video app challenge and hackathon at Kaltura Connect

      Kaltura Connect is a conference all about open source video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities and educational organizations, healthcare, media broadcasters and new-media publishers.

  • Web Browsers

    • A high-profile fork: one year of Blink and Webkit

      In 2013 the browser wars sprouted a new rendering engine: Blink. When Blink forked in April 2013, Webkit had a total of 1.8 million lines of C++, 2,500 commits per month and was the most popular browser engine. On mobile, Webkit backed the top 3 browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Android Browser), accounting for the majority of mobile eyeballs. This post is a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

    • Launch of “What is open education?” resource on Opensource.com

      At Opensource.com, we love sharing stories about the ways open source tools and principles are changing the nature of teaching and learning today. Over and over, we’ve seen how approaching education the open source way can transform classrooms all over the world.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Tools Cauldron 2014: GCC/LLVM Collaboration, HSA, Accelerators

      This year’s GNU Tools Cauldron is taking place next month at the University of Cambridge where some very interesting compiler-related discussions will be taking place.

    • Pre-lunch – Richard Stallman’s talk

      His talk was quite how I expected it to be. He was idealist – Aditya and I discussed that he had to be it, as the face and primary driver of Free software. Richard spoke of the advantages of Free software, where he pointed out the numerous back doors that have been found in proprietary software to spy on users. He spoke of the GNU time line, how he had started it, how Emacs and other things came about. At some point of time, he expressed his annoyance to the fact that people confuse GNU and Linux, and free software and open source software. He spoke of how people think Linus is the father of free software etc. I quite enjoyed his talk. At some points, though, I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t really need to use negativeness to put his point across. He didn’t just differentiate between free and open source software, and he didn’t just say how free software is better than the open source philosophy, he went on to stress on why open source wasn’t good enough. If you’ve seen his sessions, you’ll probably understand what I mean.

    • grep-2.20 released [stable]

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Thermal Issues Appear To Cause My ASUS Zenbook Linux Woes

      Given this ASUS ultrabook is only a few months old, hopefully the ultrabook will be able to work out fine until the mobile Broadwell processors hit the market when I decide on my next laptop/ultrabook or end up back with a MacBook Pro.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Beware the next circle of hell: Unpatchable systems

      Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP in April was met with a collective gulp by the IT community. For good reason: Approximately 30 percent of all desktop systems continue to run XP despite Microsoft’s decision to stop offering security updates. Furthermore, a critical security flaw in Internet Explorer 8 disclosed recently by HP’s TippingPoint Division opens the door to remote attacks on XP systems that use IE8.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • ‘Muddying a Murky Picture’: NYT’s Ukraine Kremlinology

      There is a tendency to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin is orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, sending in irregular Russian forces to stir up pro-Russian separatist sentiment.

      As guesses go, this might not be a bad one–but journalism is supposed to be about presenting evidence to confirm such speculation. The New York Times clearly has a hunch about deep Russian involvement in Ukraine. The ways it tries to confirm this hunch are curious.

      [...]

      What you’re left with from the Times is the suggestion that the lack of direct evidence is probably proof that Russia is up to something– i.e., “leaving no fingerprints.”

      During the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists spent their time poring over state propaganda in an attempt to understand what was really going on in the USSR. It bears some resemblance to what one might be seeing in the New York Times now.

    • Horrific Stories of Two Babies Victimized by the War on Drugs

      The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster, often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.

    • California State Sen. Leland Yee charged with promising guns, missiles from Muslim group to agent for campaign donations

      The California State Senator, Leland Yee, has been charged with the conspiracy to deal firearms, as well as wire fraud. Yee was arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI-agent in exchange for donations towards his campaign. The allegations towards Yee outlined in an affidavit from an FBI agent were not only pointed towards the Senator, but to twenty-five other people as well. According to the court documents, the allegations against Yee included a number of favors that he had requested in exchange for campaign donations. He also performed “official acts” in exchange for donations to get himself out of a $70,000 debt that he acquired during a failed San Francisco mayoral bid.

    • World starts to love UK again as memories of the war in Iraq fade

      The Country Ratings Poll asked more than 24,500 people from 24 nations whether they felt positive or negative about 16 countries and the EU. The UK finished third, with 56 per cent of those surveyed saying they thought it was having a good influence internationally.

    • Donald Trump and Neocons Bash Deal that Freed U.S. Soldier from Taliban Custody

      On Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from retweeting delusional sycophants begging him to run for president to comment on the successful rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States’ last (and only) prisoner of war in Afghanistan.

    • Microsoft demos real-time voice translation using Skype

      The Fierce Take: There is no doubt that Skype Translate could be an invaluable business tool, though the skeptic can’t help but wonder if the NSA would also utilize this to bolster its various wiretapping efforts.

    • Richard Clarke Uses Fiction to Criticize Our Use of Drones

      In that sense, we as a country are paying another price as a consequence of the Republican clown show. Blind trust in government is never a good thing for a civilized and free society. But when the opposition is so blinded by its own ideology that it is deaf to the facts and mute to a constructive discussion to prevent mishaps from occurring again, it means they cannot be trusted to hold the government accountable.

    • Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: US Drone Program Under Obama “Got Out of Hand”

      Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, Sting of the Drone. We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”

    • Ex-Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Committed War Crimes

      Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, tells Democracy Now! he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Clarke says. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least — were war crimes.”

    • May 2014 Update: US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
    • Relatives of Victims of Drone Strikes Drop Appeal

      The relatives of three United States citizens killed in American drone strikes without trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit they filed against Obama administration officials.

    • Sen. Rand Paul Is Right to Oppose Targeted Killing of U.S. Citizens

      Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has quite rightly called on the Obama administration to publicly disclose its legal justifications for the claimed power to order the killing, without trial or hearing, of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being terrorist leaders planning attacks against the United States. The dispute came up, most recently, in the context of David Barron’s successful nomination to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. As a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron reportedly co-authored at least two memos providing the legal rationale for the administration’s decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

    • Why we’re marching against the Nato gang of warmongers

      Wherever there is the threat of war there are always people banging the drum—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is among the worst.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Artist Stops Oil Pipeline Cold

      Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork.

    • Fukushima Disaster Still A Global Nightmare

      The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.

      Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.

    • Ukraine conflict wake-up call for EU’s looming fuel and energy crisis – Oxfam

      Charity calls on EU to end reliance on imported and domestic fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency and boost renewables

    • Global Warming: Obama’s Failures Compared to China’s Real Action

      Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan announced Monday is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power.

  • Finance

    • After Dinner at 11, will its working-class kids still have dreams at 20?

      Class and ethnicity, rather than ability, will probably determine the adult lives of Channel 4′s 11-year-old dinner guests

    • How I discovered I have the brain of a psychopath

      I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man

    • Bruni’s ‘Middle’ = Corporate Tax Cuts and No Minimum Wage Hike?

      It’s well-established by now (Extra!, 7/06) that political reporters prefer to talk and write about Democrats who stay close to the “center” instead of placating the left-wing party base. This is simply smart politics, these observers note, since it’s always better to be in the middle, because that’s where most people are.

      The problem is that pundits’ idea of the “middle” doesn’t seem to correspond to reality.

      [...]

      How opposing a minimum wage increase and keeping taxes low for corporations and the wealthy centrist? These are not popular policies in general, and certainly not among Democrats in the state Cuomo governs. Nonetheless, Bruni is keenly worried that Cuomo may be promising too much to other Democrats, who might tug him away from this “middle” and “hijack his legacy.”

    • Three Things to Watch for Now That Seattle Has Passed a $15 Minimum Wage Law

      Yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the highest minimum wage in the country. Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the bill into law this afternoon, just after 1 p.m. in Cal Anderson Park. The first phase of the wage raise is scheduled to start April 1, 2015, and headlines around the country seem to be asking if Seattle, the progressive urban utopia, is just the beginning of a nationwide trend.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • 10 Photos of Amazon Chiefs’ Clash With Brazilian Police at World Cup Protests

      Hundreds of Amazon chiefs clashed with police in Brazil last week as the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 12, draws closer.

      According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s copy1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.

    • Our prisons have mental health problems

      The government may not mean to kill people with mental disabilities but it’s deeds, not motives, that matter, and when the coalition subtracted political cost from economic gain, it found those with disabilities were the easiest people in Britain to dispose of.

      Mental health is the NHS’s Cinderella service, even in good times. In recession, it’s hammered. Simon Stevens, the new chief executive as NHS England, has given us his priorities. He gabbles that he wants to “future proof” the NHS “against challenges ahead”.

    • Florida Judge Erupts at Lawyer: ‘If I Had a Rock, I Would Throw It at You’

      Weinstock, who reportedly felt pressure from the judge to convince his client into waiving his right to a speedy trial, snapped back in defense. Then Murphy challenged Weinstock to a fist fight outside.

      “You know, if I had a rock, I would throw it at you right now,” Murphy says in the video above. “Stop pissing me off … If you want to fight, let’s go out back and I’ll just beat your ass.”

    • Time to Reopen the Case on CIA Torture

      He blew the whistle on CIA waterboarding, but the government keeps trying to sweep the issue, and him, out of sight. From prison, John Kiriakou says it’s time for a special prosecutor.

    • Father Sues School After It Brings In Cops To Question His Son About Drawing Of A Person Being Hanged

      Maybe if schools stop handing misbehaving students over to police officers, aggrieved parents won’t be nearly as aggrieved… or so likely to sue. Schools are publicly funded already, but that’s no reason to keep dipping into homeowners’ wallets to pay out settlements for schools’ bad decisions.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Rep. Latta Breaks New Ground In Introducing Anti-Net Neutrality Bill Where Almost Every Claim Is Laughably Wrong

      Rep. Bob Latta achieved an impressive feat last week in introducing some legislation, which he claims is to make sure the internet remains “open and free.” While we’re big supporters of an “open and free” internet, what’s most amazing here is that almost everything that Latta claims about the bill is not true — including the whole “open and free” bits.

    • Verizon Begs To Be Classified Under Title II For Subsidies; Screams About Parade Of Horribles Any Other Time

      If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the whole net neutrality fight, you’d know that the key issue is whether or not broadband services should be reclassified under Title II of the Telecom Act. In the early to mid-2000s, the FCC declared both cable and DSL broadband to be information services under Title I, rather than telecommunications services under Title II. This basically means they are not subject to common carrier rules, including non-discriminatory rules that are the key issue around net neutrality. And, of course, the telcos are putting up a big fight over this, listing out a supposed parade of horribles that would happen if they were reclassified under Title II.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • OVERNIGHT TECH: Advocacy groups oppose DOTCOM Act

        A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), urging the Senate to push back on an amendment to the House’s recently-passed defense funding bill that would keep the Obama administration from going forward with its plans to shift Internet oversight.

      • Company Hired By Ecuador Uses Bogus Copyright Claims To Censor Website Of Ecuadorian Newspaper

        We’ve written a few times about Spanish company Ares Rights, which presents itself as an “anti-piracy” firm, but rather than searching the internet for unauthorized movies and music, has a long history of working for Latin American governments, using questionable copyright claims to censor the internet and take down content those governments don’t like. The latest example may be the most extreme, as Ares Rights used a DMCA claim in the US to block the website of Ecuadorian newspaper La Republica for a period of four hours last week.

      • British Recording Industry Thinks ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Proves Google Can Stop Piracy

        As the discussion over the EU’s decision to force Google to uphold a “right to be forgotten” continues, various industry heads have begun to weigh in on the subject, pointing to this as evidence that Google could do more to combat piracy.

06.03.14

Links 3/6/2014: Linux 3.15-rc8 , KDE Frameworks 5, Samsung Tizen, Dell Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Release notes: May 2014

    What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.

    angular-rt-popup (New, github)

  • A startup called Skymind launches, pushing open source deep learning

    Skymind is providing commercial support and services for an open source project called deeplearning.4j. It’s a collection of of approaches to deep learning that mimic those developed by leading researchers, but tuned for enterprise adoption.

  • Skymind launches with open-source, plug-and-play deep learning features for your app
  • Choosing a Linux web server: Nginx vs. Apache
  • Out in the Open: The Little-Known Open Source OS That Rules the Internet of Things

    Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni solved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.

  • Telcos Pay Lip Service to Open Source

    Telecom service providers may acknowledge the value of open source technology, particularly as they adopt virtualization, but they are not entirely ready to embrace it warmly, a panel discussion here revealed.

    Five large service providers — AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), and Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI) — were represented on a single panel as part of a pre-conference NFV workshop, and while they agreed on a lot, open source technology didn’t get a consensus vote.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Vice President: Trading Away Your Privacy

        Do you trust the National Security Agency or the Internal Revenue Service more than Google or Facebook? If so, you’re not alone. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that most Americans do not trust big tech companies.

        Mozilla’s Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, says “data hygiene” should be something every new or established tech company should be thinking about. Dixon-Thayer sat down with Reason TV at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas this year.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • What’s Next for OpenStack Is Ironic

      The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now in the development phase for its next major release code-named Juno, set to debut in October. Among the major new features in development is a technology known as “Ironic,” which provides bare metal server provisioning capabilities.

    • Guavus Joins AMPLab for Open Source Big Data Collaboration

      Another Big Data analytics company has entered the open source realm. Guavus has become an official sponsor of the AMPLab, a research initiative hosted at the University of California at Berkeley to drive open source Big Data innovation.

    • Do you know your OpenStack history?

      In historical terms, NASA worked with Rackspace to develop OpenStack back in 2010.

    • ownCloud gets new CMO

      ownCloud announced in their blog that Claudine Bianchi has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The move aims to secure a stronger position in File Sync and Share for the most popular open source software in this category.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.2.5 RC1 Is Now Available for Testing

      The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the first Release Candidate for 4.2.5 branch and it comes with numerous changes and improvements.

      According to the changelog, the text rotation has been fixed, the upper margin of multi-page floating table has been fixed, the set-all language menu has been added, output file extension is now adjusted when exporting, accepting and rejecting changes in a selection is now allowed, the strange brightness and contrast adjustment from Microsoft Office has been corrected, and the mapping between ATK and UNO roles has been improved.

  • CMS

    • What’s New in June for Open Source CMS

      Who has time to handle post-CMS deployment needs when there’s so much to do developing the platform? That’s the thinking of the creators of Tendenci, an open source content management system (CMS) project for associations and other nonprofits (NPOs).

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3 Is In Beta, Adds Radeon KMS & Xen HVM

      Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there’s support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple’s MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • How to treat government like an open source project

      Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.

    • Mark Johnson of OSS Watch opens up about the challenges of open source procurement

      The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We’ve looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He’s got a knack for communication: concise with impact.

    • South Korean govt open source forum to hear EU cases

      IT strategists working for the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch municipality of Ede will participate in a conference organised by South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National IT Promotion Agency, to be held on 3 June in the capital Seoul.

    • Exposing the Flaws of the U.S. Media’s Dangerous Ukraine Propaganda

      The press has taken a near-sighted view of the crisis, spinning in ways that only create a partial picture.

      The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)

    • What has open source got to do with open government?

      Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, highlighted at the conference that an open and transparent government is not enough if it lacks civic participation. “In my view, openness and transparency should stimulate their sense of ownership in open government.”

      Dr Alanna Simpson, Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank-Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, told me that the Indonesian Government is a leader in making open data and open source available.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • PHP 5.5.13 Updated for Two Security Vulnerabilities
    • To beat this new video game, reprogram it

      But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash makes manipulating the game’s source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

Leftovers

  • Philadelphia Inquirer co-owner among seven dead in Boston plane crash

    Family members said one of the other victims was the wife of a New Jersey borough commissioner. James P Leeds Sr told the Associated Press that his 74-year-old wife, Anne, died Saturday night in the Massachusetts crash. Leeds said he got a text from his wife from the plane at 9.36 p.m, four minutes before the crash.

  • Why Middle Eastern lovers are marrying in Cyprus

    The island’s appeal is simple: couples of mixed religion can have a civil ceremony that, though not allowed back home, will still be recognised in law

    [...]

    In 1980, 61 Lebanese brides and 78 Lebanese grooms were married there, as well as 98 Israeli grooms and 99 Israeli brides. In 2013, there were 2,131 Israeli weddings, 581 Lebanese ones, and 35 Syrian unions. Some municipalities, such as tourist-friendly Livadia, report even more startling figures; last year, of the 1,000 or so weddings it recorded, 350 were Lebanese, 425 were Israeli, and 20 were Syrian.

  • Science

    • First Man to Walk in Space Celebrates His 80th Birthday

      Soviet cosmonaut and first spacewalker in the world, Aleksei Leonov, celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday. In March 1965 he was outside his spaceship for 12 minutes, connected to the craft by a 5.35 meter tether. Later, Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leonov is also an accomplished artist, whose works are displayed in many art galleries in Russia and abroad, and an author of several popular books about space. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have congratulated the legendary cosmonaut, who was twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title, on his anniversary and wished him good health, happiness and success. “Your professional biography, rich in significant and truly historical events, and all your life is a worthy example of unblinking devotion to the cause and of enormous personal courage,” Putin said in a telegramme, published on the Kremlin website on Friday.

    • “Why Did Life Begin During Early Earth’s Heavy Impact Period?” New Research Shows a Strong Link

      “It’s interesting that 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, the early Earth experienced a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment where there were a lot of impacts, including large impacts, and this period also overlaps with the evidence of the earliest life on Earth,” said Haley Sapers, an astrobiologist at the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program at McGill University in Montreal. “One might ask why life arose during such an inhospitable part of Earth’s history. Maybe impact cratering had a role in the origin of life.”
      Impacts on a water-rich planet like Earth or even Mars can generate hydrothermal activity — that is, underwater areas boiling with heat. Seafloor hot springs known as hydrothermal vents more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface can be home to thriving ecosystems on Earth, including giant tube worms 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The impact that created the Ries crater may have generated hydrothermal activity lasting as long as 10,000 years, given microbes time enough to colonize the area.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Deceitful Compromise Clears The Way For GMO Crops In Europe

      An unholy alliance of pro and anti- GMO countries have struck a deal that will sweep away the obstacles to genetically engineered crops in the EU. By allowing – under limited circumstance – individual member states to prohibit the growing of GMO crops on their territory, the European Commission expects to boost GMO cropping in the EU overall.

    • Is your lifestyle permanently damaging your hearing?

      Belinda worked as a model, lived in a nightclub and often went to noisy parties. There was loud music wherever she went. Then she went to art school, where she listened to music through headphones while she painted. Now, with a quieter job in finance, she lives with the legacy of irreversible damage to her inner ear.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The United Arab Emirates’ “Drones For Good” Website Is Terrible

      It’s not surprising then, that, picking up on one of the latest technology trends, the United Arab Emirates’ Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum would launch a “Drones for Good” competition, offering $1 million for the best positive drone design. The UAE will be taking international entries for drone ideas in categories like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, economic development until August.

    • After Using Promise Of Drone Memo Release To Push Its Appeals Court Nominee Through, Administration Returns To Dragging Its Feet

      The American government has killed four Americans with drone strikes since 2009, all of which were completely detached from any notion of due process. At best, the DOJ builds a case against the foreign-located citizen and, if the target resides in a nation where the US can get away with utilizing weaponized drones, the American citizen is sentenced to death via push-button operator.

    • US troops ‘kidnap’ 4-year-old drone strike victim from hospital, allege parents

      A four-year-old girl whose face was blown off during a US drone strike in Afghanistan was kidnapped by American troops and hidden by an international organization, her family says.

      The child, named Aisha Rashid, was travelling with her parents, a sibling and several other relatives from Kabul to their home in the village of Gamber in Kunar province on a hot September day, when the drone exploded, Expressen.se reported. An uncle, Meya Jan, is at home on his farm in that village when he receives a phone call about the strike from the neighboring village. He and others rush to the strike.

      Suddenly they hear a voice. “Water, water…”

      It is Aisha. She is missing a hand, her leg is bleeding, and there is nothing left of her eyes or nose.

    • Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: U.S. Drone Program Under Obama “Got Out of Hand”

      Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting of the Drone.” We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”

    • Michael Oren finds Israel vindicated by UN report that it slaughtered 101 civilians, including 33 children

      A few days ago, Phil reported on Yousef Munayyer’s take on the nauseating Wolf Blitzer interview with “CNN analyst” (and former Israeli Ambassador to the US) Michael Oren on the recent IDF sniping murders of two Palestinian teenage boys.

    • Imperialist threats and the limits of populism

      Every time the working class and poor of Latin America try to take a step forward and write their own history they confront the power of U.S. imperialism. It uses whatever is in fashion at the time — coups, blockades, manufactured protest movements, referendums or trade sanctions — to turn back the clock.

      When longstanding polarization in Venezuela erupted into street protests in February and March, the United States, true to form, played its usual role in the unrest. Using money, tough talk and lobbying among Latin American countries, the U.S. tried to shore up opposition to the elected government of Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor.

    • Yup, Obama’s Still Arming And Training Al Qaeda

      Not wavering from his foreign policy mission of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to restore an Islamic Caliphate under their control, Mr. Obama has ordered the training and arming of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Assad. Current reports indicate that the forces loyal to Assad are gaining ground against the Muslim Brotherhood–supported rebels.

    • Swap to Free Alan Gross Depends on Obama, “Cuban Five” Spy Says

      The release of U.S. government contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban prison depends solely on the “political will” of President Barack Obama, a Havana spy who spent more than 15 years behind bars in the United States said on Monday.

      To support that assertion, Fernando Gonzalez cited Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban members being held at Guantanamo for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American POW in Afghanistan.

    • Activists Demand US Govt Reveal Files on Terrorism Against Cuba
    • “False Flag Terrorism” to Sustain America’s “Humanitarian” Agenda

      Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China’s spreading Communism in the early 1950’s, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy’s spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.

    • 6,000 Journalists Refrain from Naming CIA Station Chief

      Last weekend, a White House press report distributed to 6,000 journalists, included the name of the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, alongside said title.

    • Not Forgotten: Street Art to Remember the Victims of the School of the Americas
    • Cleveland car chase ends with two dead, 137 shots fired and six police charged

      A night-time car chase in Cleveland that ended on a schoolyard where more than 100 shots were fired at the suspect’s vehicle appeared to be over when an officer opened fire again, a prosecutor said in announcing charges against the patrolman and five police supervisors.

    • Afghanistan 2016 withdrawal keeps secret Bagram detainees in limbo

      President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials.

      On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans.

    • Syria’s ‘western-backed’ rebels? Not in weapons

      Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes that captured weaponry appears to be the most important fuel of the armed rebellion, followed by self-made arms and materiel, and then foreign-supplied items.

    • US moves towards sanctions as Venezuela charges coup plot

      The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation mandating sanctions against Venezuela as officials there presented evidence of US involvement in a plot to bring down the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

      The bill, passed in a voice vote by the House with only 14 members in opposition, demands that the Obama administration draw up a list of Venezuelan officials allegedly responsible for repression during violent protests that have been organized across the South American country since last February. They would be sanctioned with the freezing of any assets in the US and the denial or revocation of visas.

      Washington’s step closer toward another blatant imperialist intervention against Venezuela came on the same day that government officials in Caracas publicly presented what they described as evidence of US involvement in a plot by the far-right in Venezuela to overthrow the government and assassinate President Maduro.

    • Harper Attacks ‘Evil’ Communism In Lengthy Keynote Speech

      Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.

    • Walk to protest drones

      A group of people, including religious leaders in Berrien County, are taking to the road from Chicago to Battle Creek to protest what they see as a menace from the sky.

      The participants will walk from Chicago to Battle Creek on June 3-14 to protest the use of armed drones in the “War on Terror,” that they say kill innocent civilians, create more enemies and undermine America’s standing in the world.

      “The use of armed drones pose many legal, strategic, tactical, and ethical problems,” said the Rev. Dan Scheid of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Benton Harbor, who will walk and host discussions on the issue. “As a citizen of the United States and of the world, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is bad public policy. As a follower of Jesus, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is immoral, and my baptismal and ordination vows compel me to witness against them.”

    • Afghanistan drone attack kills more civilians

      According to local officials in the eastern province of Kunar, the US-launched drone was on a targeted attack which killed and injured unknown people, some of them civilians.

    • New president of El Salvador is former rebel leader

      San Salvador – Sanchez Sanchez Ceren, 69, a former leader of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front(FMLN) was sworn in as the president of El Salvador. He had won the presidency in a close March runoff vote against his conservative opponent.

    • FBI agent who killed bombing suspect’s friend probed

      Bay Area officials in Oakland are reviewing seven years of police disability retirements after learning last month that one of their former officers was collecting a disability pension even while he was working for the FBI.

      Former Oakland police officer Aaron McFarlane received more than $52,000 in disability benefits each year while he was working as an FBI special agent in Boston.

    • Setback for former Portland man suing FBI, alleging torture and challenging no-fly list
    • ‘Cross-border crime means we need FBI for Europe’

      His parting shot was a call for a European FBI to tackle cross-border crime gangs and the call for UKIP to follow in the footsteps of Sinn Fein ex-MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who did not take up the seats they won in the Commons.

    • Obama at West Point

      In the words of Charles Krauthammer, a strong critic of Obama and supporter of the George W. Bush administration who has neoconservative tendencies: “And you didn’t hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism. It was the rhetorical equivalent of that classic national security joke in which the presidential aide, devoted to policy option X, submits the following decision memo…

      [...]

      The difference between Bush and Obama is that the latter is much more selective in his interventions. Such a correction was what the American people wanted when they elected Obama in 2008 — and inevitable after the two unsuccessful wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • Obama at West Point

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Neil deGrasse Tyson: When the rich start losing money, they’ll take climate change seriously

      Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson characterized the naysaying surrounding climate change as par for the course in footage aired on Monday from his interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes,

    • George Osborne accused of making climate change worse with tax breaks

      Friends of the Earth claims chancellor handed out £2.7bn of incentives to North Sea oil and gas firms

    • Dirty U.S. Coal Finds a Home in Europe

      Even as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny at home, America’s dirty and unwanted coal is being embraced in one of the world’s cleanest energy markets: the European Union.

      At the biggest power plant in the U.K., operated by Drax Group PLC, a small black mountain of a million tons of coal sits at the base of a dozen 374-foot cooling towers.

    • Why Superfreakonomics’ authors are wrong on geo-engineering

      A fierce debate has been raging between climatologists and Superfreakonomics authors Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, culminating in an impassioned New York Times blogpost yesterday by Dubner. From RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network

    • Why Green Capitalism Will Fail

      Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.

    • Our egalitarian Eden

      Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.”

    • Brazil laundering illegal timber on a ‘massive and growing scale’

      Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday.

      After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered evidence of systematic abuse and a flawed monitoring system that contradicts the Brazilian government’s claims to be coping with the problem of deforestation in the Amazon.

      In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace cited five case studies of the fraudulent techniques used by the log launderers, including over-reporting the number and size of rare trees, logging trees protected by law, and over-extraction. It notes how forest management officials are implicated in the wrongdoing and several have previously been fined or detained for similar crimes in the past.

    • The age of climate warfare is here. The military-industrial complex is ready. Are you?

      During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a “creeping national security crisis” that will require the armed forces to “respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food.”

      The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.

      A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a “threat multiplier,” but now – even worse – a “catalyst for conflict”, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades…

  • Finance

    • 50 million in poverty get a fraction of the coverage of 482 billionaires

      With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.

    • New federal database will track Americans’ credit ratings, other financial information

      As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.

    • “How Immigration Became Illegal”: Aviva Chomsky on U.S. Exploitation of Migrant Workers

      We are joined by Aviva Chomsky, whose new book, “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” details how systemic prejudice against Mexicans and many other migrant workers has been woven into U.S. immigration policies that deny them the same path to citizenship that have long been granted to European immigrants. She also draws parallels between the immigration laws now in place that criminalize migrants, and the caste system that has oppressed African Americans, as described by Prof. Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow.” Chomsky’s previous book on this topic is “They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths about Immigration.” She is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

    • Seattle votes for $15 minimum wage

      Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the city’s minimum wage to the highest level of any major US city – $15 (£9) per hour, twice the national minimum.

      Wages would begin to rise next year, ultimately reaching $15 from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 over three to seven years, depending on the business.

      A councillor who supported the push said the vote “sends a message heard around the world”.

    • Pope Francis Calls for ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ of Wealth
    • Ex-Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney blasts “radical,” “fundamentalist” capitalism

      Well, this ought to cause a stir at this summer’s garden parties among Canada’s elites.

      Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada Governor (now the Governor of the Bank of England) has come forward to condemn what he calls “unchecked market fundamentalism.”

      He delivered the remarks last week at the Conference for Inclusive Capitalism, an annual gathering of global political and financial elites that featured keynotes by Carney along with Prince Charles and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

    • China home prices clock first decline in 23 months

      Residential and commercial buildings are seen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Home prices in major Chinese cities registered their first monthly decline in 23 months in May.

    • How Wealthy Elites Are Hijacking Democracy All Over the World

      Amid the upheavals in Thailand, Ukraine and Egypt, wealthy elites have used popular movements and elections to ratify decisions in their favor.

    • Britain is still feasting on credit – and the next crunch will hit in 2016

      Except for one big difference. By early 2016, the era of record-low interest rates is over. Borrowing is getting steadily more expensive. And the result is starting to destabilise our entire economic model.

    • The cowardly tax pursuit of Britain’s poorest

      A few weeks ago, an official from the Cabinet Office gushed on his blog about a jolly exciting trip, a kind of pilgrimage, to Amazon and Google in Seattle and San Francisco. Francis Maude, the unofficial government minister for paperclips and parsimony, led the expedition. It was mindblowing, the official reported afterwards.

      They looked at the IT, were given a sneak preview of the cutting edge innovations. It seemed they had unlimited time to talk about all manner of things. But there was no indication that anyone raised the fact with these multinational behemoths, that on any right-thinking estimation, they owe us billions of pounds in tax. Amazon’s UK subsidiary paid £2.4m in corporate taxes in 2012, despite sales of £4.3bn. Google paid £11.6m in the same period despite sales of £506m.

    • Qatar accused of paying $5mn in bribes to win World Cup bid

      Senior football officials in Africa received over $5 million in bribes to make sure Qatar won the bid for the 2022 World Cup, the Sunday Times reports citing leaked documents.

      According to the paper, the money came from former FIFA vice-president and infamous Qatari businessman, Mohamed Bin Hammam.

      Bin Hammam reportedly used 10 slush funds controlled by his private company – as well as cash handouts – to make dozens of payments of up to $200,000 to the heads of the 30 African football associations.

    • Federal Workers Good at Paying Taxes, USA Today Expose Conceals

      The front page of USA Today (5/23/14) blew the whistle on federal workers: They are tax deadbeats who owe billions in back taxes.

      The story also revealed that they owe less than most people.

      Confused?

    • Stiglitz: Tax-Dodging, Corporate Welfare Destroying US Economy

      A new progressive tax code would end the assault on shared prosperity, create jobs, and help save the planet, says Nobel Joseph Stiglitz

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Serbian PM demands OSCE apology over allegations of censorship

      Serbia’s prime minister accused Europe’s chief security and rights watchdog of lying on Monday after it alleged his government tried to smother online criticism of its handling of devastating floods last month.

    • China escalates attack on Google
    • China tightens enforced Tiananmen silence on anniversary eve
    • Google: One takedown request every 7 secs

      Google has had one demand every seven seconds to suppress information about people’s pasts, it was revealed on Sunday.

      The rush of censorship requests follows the internet giant’s move to provide forms allowing people to ask that certain information about them be hidden when their name is searched online.

      The figures indicate that large amounts of material could disappear from public reach as a direct result of an EU court decision that search engines must enforce a “right to be forgotten”.

    • Egypt satirist goes off air

      Egypt’s internationally renowned satirist, Bassem Youssef, has announced the end of his popular television show, citing pressure from the authorities.

    • The real tragedy of Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef’s censorship is he played a role in it
    • Google & take-down requests – Pointless, worrying & censorship?

      I’ve avoided talking about this story until it progressed further. Historically Google has had many take-down requests, many to do with “piracy” and there’s also court order’s for ISP blocks on domains – we already have an increasing trend towards censorship. But is some censorship good? Whilst the copyright take-down’s and ISP blocks are mostly useless, with the recent ruling involving Google removing search results for you and me, requires further examination.

    • India’s Newest Media Baron Embraces Censorship

      Bold initiatives characterize India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who famously lives in a 27-story building in Mumbai, a city where most people languish in slums. Last month, his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., sought to prevent circulation of a new book which claims that Reliance successfully pressured the previous Indian government to double the price of natural gas. Amazon received a cease and desist notice, as did even an individual who had merely forwarded an e-mail invitation to the book’s launch. And Thursday, Ambani moved to buy a whole swath of the Indian media: Bloomberg News reports that Reliance, which has already invested $11 billion in a high-speed cellular network, will now spend $678 million for majority stakes in two major media companies, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. and TV18 Broadcast Ltd.

    • Saudi censorship blurs lines between journalism, activism

      Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools–a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities–are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.

      The first step came in January 2011 with new regulations for online media that could be used to restrict coverage, including applying the kingdom’s already highly repressive press law to online media. Shortly after, the Ministry of Culture and Information began blocking local news websites that failed to register, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    • Jordan’s free press record dims with website restrictions
    • Encouragement (Sort of) About Press Freedom

      At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Self-Determination as Anti-Extractivism: How Indigenous Resistance Challenges World Politics

      Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.

    • We All Must Become Zapatistas

      Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.

      “The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.

    • I am a British citizen – not a second-class citizen

      Coming through passport control is an ordeal, I am followed on the street and hassled by security services. Not all citizens enjoy the same rights

    • Nothing We Do at Firedoglake Involves Letting the Government Decide

      What is Firedoglake? How does it work? How does the site make money? Are there any other websites you could write for? What do you think you plan to do next?

      Sometimes describing what I do at Firedoglake to family, friends and people I encounter after speaking at events is a bit perplexing to people. This is not a more prominent news media organization like New York Times, Rolling Stone or Huffington Post. But I have found not being more prominent uniquely positions Firedoglake to pursue specific projects.

    • The CIA Can’t Control the Truth at Guantánamo Forever
    • Will Eric Holder Back Off?
    • James Risen’s Fate Now Unclear
    • NY Times reporter faces jail time after Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal
    • Does the Taliban Treat Its Prisoners Better Than the U.S. Treats Prisoners?
    • US government should withdraw Risen subpoena
    • US court declines to intervene in NYT case
    • Supreme Court rejects attempt by reporter to shield source
    • Editorial: Weakening press freedoms by omission
    • Supreme Court rejects reporter’s bid to protect source

      A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.

    • Supreme Court rejects New York Times reporter’s First Amendment plea

      The case had been closely watched as possibly setting an important precedent about the First Amendment, news reporters and confidential sources. Instead, Risen will now face a decision about officially naming his source for a book he wrote about Iran or refusing to answer questions under a Justice Department subpoena. (The source’s name has been widely reported as part of an official legal action.)

      Last Thursday, the Justices met behind closed doors to consider accepting Risen’s case for the Court’s next term, which starts in October 2014.

    • How the UK taught Brazil’s dictators interrogation techniques

      As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.

    • Brazil’s World Cup 2014: Private Security “Made in the USA”

      As the World Cup nears, the Brazilian press has reported that the American company Academi, formerly Blackwater, carried out training of Brazilian military personnel and federal police in April.

      The training is a facet of the military cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States signed in 2010 during the second term of the Lula de Silva administration in preparation for containing terrorist acts during this year’s World Cup. Academi is a private security company based in the United States, and has used mercenary soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • War Is Peace, Citizens Are The Enemy

      Bill Gertz reported this week on a memo outlining Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens – a memo from 2010. Remember how the blogs and many of us out here were ringing the alarm bells on Obama’s stance that he could use the military and drones against American citizens? Remember how we were marginalized and called crazy for it? Turns out, ‘crazy’ is relative.

    • Second Informant Surfaces in ICE’s Mayan Jaguar Cocaine-Plane Op

      The ICE undercover operation played out in the first decade of the 2000s (roughly 2004 until sometime in 2008) and involved the use of US government front companies to sell aircraft to suspected Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.

    • Robert Fisk: Alaa al-Aswany, Egypt’s greatest living novelist, knows Sisi is not a true democrat – but is still hopeful that he can ‘do good’
    • Saudi Deportation of Migrant Workers

      In an effort to increase job opportunities for Saudi Arabian citizens, the Saudi government is detaining and deporting thousands of undocumented foreign migrant workers. Part of the deportation process includes detaining large populations in what has been described as “appalling” conditions. These detention centers have had reports of guard brutality, overcrowding, lack of food, and poor hygiene. Furthermore, most of these migrant workers are Somali, and are deported back to one of the most unstable, dangerous areas in the world.

    • Tales of Army Discord Show Tiananmen Square in a New Light

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube’s monopolistic behaviour is hurting indie music labels

        So there’s every reason to believe that YouTube is, indeed, bullying the independents into accepting a deal that dramatically undervalues the investment indies make in new emerging artists. Unlike the lack of support songwriters had when PRS experienced the same tactic, the indies can surely count on songwriters to support them in standing up to the bully. But when will the competition commissions around the world do something about it? It’s not only artists that will be worse off if the indies give in – so will music fans all over the world.

      • The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Taken into Custody in Southern Sweden

        Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co-founder was arrested in Southern Sweden. TPB co-founder was wanted by Interpol and apprehended in a police raid. Peter did not serve prison time for his role in Pirate Bay operations. TorrentFreak noted that he was arrested exactly eight years after police conducted the raid.

        Peter was wanted by Interpol for more than two years and he was arrested in a place near Malmö, Sweden. Interpol had been looking after his role in The Pirate Bay case.

      • Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested in Sweden

        Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.

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