05.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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During that time, Michaels’s computer-savvy son was messing around with alternative operating systems for his PC. Through him, Michaels learned about Linux and other software that was free to be used, altered, and shared by anyone. Linux came with a license that turned the concept of licensing on its head: Instead of restricting people from copying the product, it restricted people from restricting it or any of its offshoots. It marked the code indelibly as part of the commons.
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When he got to Rio, Lee spent one entire day strengthening Greenwald’s computer, which at that point used Windows 8. Lee was worried spy agencies could break in, so he replaced the operating system with Linux, installed a firewall, disk encryption and miscellaneous software to make it more secure.
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Techtalk discussed the open source operating system Linux and where you can go to learn more about it.
“The short answer is that as far as courses are concerned they are a little bit thin on the ground. There used to be a group called Ballarat Linux Users Group… there is also a group called Viclan which runs local area administration”.
“Linux is a free open source operating system that is probably described as an alternative to Windows. It’s free, you can download it and it runs on most PC’s. Apple is excluded at this point in time but most PC’s that run Windows will run Linux”.
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Desktop
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If you’ve been following the market share reports, you know that Chromebooks–portable computers running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are starting to succeed, especially in several niche markets such as the education market. Additionally, PCMag.com has a big story out on why Microsoft should be worried about Chromebooks, and Business Insider has argued that Chromebooks are the best hardware choices for many users. The fact is, some new incentives from Google as well as some newfound forms of compatibility with popular applications make Chromebooks more viable than they ever have been.
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Server
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As companies grow their data centers to accommodate more cloud services and applications, their resource management practices also grow increasingly complex. CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that uses containers to help manage these massive server deployments.
On May 19, CoreOS joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with Rackspace Hosting and Cumulus Networks. All three companies are playing a crucial role in the data center transformation and see open source as the lynchpin for optimal scalability, efficiencies, security and data center savings.
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For years, the traditional model in networking was for much of the work to be done in hardware. But with the rise of cloud computing and virtualization, and the need for networks to become more agile and flexible than ever, a trend is beginning to take hold to take networking in the same direction that computing has gone. We are seeing more and more that the networking functions traditionally done in the datacenter by dedicated, almost exclusively proprietary hardware and software combinations, are now being defined through software.
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Kernel Space
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An open-source Thunderbolt driver for supporting Apple MacBooks might be added to the Linux 3.16 kernel.
Going on for months has been a Linux driver to support Thunderbolt on Apple MacBook systems. A special driver is needed for supporting Thunderbolt on Apple hardware since Apple implemented Thunderbolt holt-plug support within their OS X driver rather than at the firmware level, which is where it’s implemented by other Thunderbolt devices.
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Probably the easiest way to start kernel programming is to write a module – a piece of code that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel and removed from it. There are limits to what modules can do – for example, they can’t add or remove fields to common data structures like process descriptors. But in all other ways they are full-fledged kernel-level code, and they can always be compiled into the kernel (thus removing all the restrictions) if needed. It is fully possible to develop and compile a module outside the Linux source tree (this is unsurprisingly called an out-of-tree build), which is very convenient if you just want to play a bit and do not wish to submit your changes for inclusion into the mainline kernel.
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BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler that shares a lot of code with the CFQ scheduler. The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler has long been part of the mainline tree but BFQ hasn’t been pulled yet even after many revisions and comments. The next opportunity for BFQ to land would be with the Linux 3.16 kernel whose merge window will be opening in June. New features of BFQ with the latest work includes low latency for interactive applications, low latency for soft real-time applications, high throughput, strong fairness guarantees, etc.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa is up to 1.4 million lines of code and has already seen almost 2,500 Git commits so far this year.
With Mesa 10.2 planned for release this week, this morning I ran GitStats on the Mesa Git code to look at the latest development trends for this open-source OpenGL library with the various mainline hardware drivers from Intel’s classic DRI driver to the Gallium3D architecture and its many drivers like Radeon, Nouveau, and Freedreno.
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Mesa 10.2 will be released very soon and while it does offer a lot of new features within its 1.4 million line code-base, it isn’t perfect and lacks some features still being sought after by open-source Linux fans.
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Yesterday on Phoronix we had benchmarks of high-end NVIDIA and AMD GPUs when looking at the Linux OpenGL performance on the proprietary drivers. For those more concerned about the 2D performance of the modern GeForce and Radeon graphics cards, here’s some benchmarks for you.
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The first beta release of the Catalyst 14.6 proprietary Linux graphics driver will soon be available.
The Catalyst 14.6 Linux driver will introduce official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, install improvements by having better defaults and prompting to auto-install the packages generated by the driver, and various bug-fixes are landing.
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Since writing about the features of the Catalyst 14.6 Beta earlier today, the x86/x86_64 proprietary Linux driver has surfaced on a third-party web-site for those wishing to try out this latest AMD Linux graphics driver.
As explained this morning, Catalyst 14.6 Beta for Linux comes with official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, driver installer improvements, and various bug-fixes as the primary changes.
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Benchmarks
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After last week carrying out separate NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks and similar AMD Radeon Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.04 tests, today we are pitting the GeForce and Radeon graphics cards against each other on Ubuntu Linux with the very latest drivers to see how their performance compares now head-on. With this testing we have some Steam games plus are also monitoring the power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and GPU thermal metrics.
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Applications
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XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, is now at version 13.1 RC1.
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Rhythmbox 3.0.3, an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes and designed to work well under the GNOME desktop environment, has been released.
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As I understand it, telnet just gives you a tool for accessing the telnet protocol, probably in the same way that a browser is a tool for accessing http (and other) content. So once it’s up and running, there’s not much of telnet itself to see.
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Every operation made with LFTP is reliable, which means that, if any non-fatal error occurs, the operation is retried automatically.
This latest version of LFTP is quite a big one and the developers have implemented a large number of changes and improvements, even if the previous release was made just a couple of weeks ago.
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Proprietary
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It is said that 95% of all supercomputers run Linux, so why do they still not get an invitation to the party? If you look at any cloud storage review, you will quickly notice that Linux users are often times left as an afterthought. Too many cloud service providers give Windows and Mac more than their share of the limelight despite the plethora of user-friendly capabilities of Linux. So, it can be asked, what do cloud storage providers have to offer Linux users?
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Chrome is going places these days. Google’s browser-turned-desktop is proving out to be a dark horse in the OS marketplace. A few years after its first release, Chrome has turned itself into a veritable threat to Microsoft’s dominant empire. The recent Scroogled campaign targeted at Chromebooks only seems to confirm the fact that Google is slowly spreading its claws into a domain that is solely controlled by Redmond.
For business owners, Chrome offers a lot of choices. It is free from the cycle of operating systems and the agony they bring with their difficult licensing, while also in sync with most of the Google services they already use. Those benefits aside, Chromebooks are cheap, well designed, and are extremely fast. The success of Chromebooks is worrying Microsoft so much that they cut Windows licensing fee by a significant amount.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s not every day that a major title like The Withcer 2 arrives on Linux and you would imagine that everyone is ecstatic about it. This is just the sort of game that is needed to push the Linux platform forward and to determine more developers to port their titles.
The problem is that the developers didn’t actually make a port, they made the version for the Windows platform work on Linux, with the help of a wrapper similar to Wine. This means that even if the game works, some users will have a difficult time playing it due to various problems, but especially because of poor performance.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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We aim for a 12 weeks release cycle which is a little under three months. The schedule is divided into 4 distinct parts: a 4 weeks development period which allows for features and fixes to get commit followed by a 1 week stabilization period which allows only fixes to be committed into the master branch. We then repeat the 4 weeks development period followed by a 3 weeks stabilization period to complete our schedule.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Originally, my plan was to directly push metadata to most KDE projects. The problem is that there is no way to reach all maintainers and have them opt-out for getting metadata pushed to their repositories. There is also no technical policy for a KDE project, since “KDE” is really only about the community right now, and there are no technical criteria a project under the KDE umbrella has to fulfill (at least to my knowledge, in theory, even GTK+ projects are perfectly fine within KDE).
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So what are we looking for? Photo wallpapers, illustration wallpapers or graphical and abstract wallpapers are all accepted for submission, personally I would suggest to avoid text elements or logo’s entirely – the theme we’re going for is a hopeful futurism but this should be considered something to focus around, not a prerequisite.
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The Randa Meetings really bring KDE and its software forward. But as most of the participants are young people, students (and we try to bring new people to every KDE sprint), parents or just can’t afford the travel costs, we need some help.
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Two years ago the Qt3D module was showing lost of promise for 3D support within the popular, cross-platform toolkit. However, just before the Qt 5.0 release, Nokia shutdown their Qt Brisbane office that among other Qt modules was responsible for the work on Qt3D. Nokia’s late actions with Qt prior to selling it off to Digia was a a big blow and led to Qt3D being demoted. Fortunately, Qt3D 2.0 is coming along as a maintained, rewritten version of the 3D support for Qt.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Moka started as a single icon theme but it has evolved into an entire project which includes multiple GTK and icon themes for the Linux desktop as well as icon themes for Android, all designed / developed by +Sam Hewitt.
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This distribution caught my eye from a DistroWatch review. That review concludes that it isn’t clear exactly what the goal of this distribution is. Looking at the website more, I can’t say that it’s any clearer to me either. All I can glean is that this distribution aims to please more experienced users with a rolling-release model, maintain a small base of packages so that those will be polished before use, and target newer computers by using KDE and only 64-bit releases. I’ll have to try this distribution out to see if there is any more information regarding the target audience of this distribution. I tried KaOS on a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.
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HandyLinux 1.5 is a nice looking system. It reacts quickly to your actions, snappy and fast. It is more or less easy on resources: only about 250 Mb of memory when idle, though you might expect even less from the Debian+Xfce combination.
However, there are still some things for developers to look at. French roots are visible, menu can be extended for easier use, packages are missing or broken. That’s not something you would expect from a distribution that claims to be “Powered by Debian”.
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Antergos 2014.05.26, a distribution based on Arch Linux that used to go by the name of Cinnarch, has been released and is now available for download.
The only RC for Antergos was launched only a few days ago and now the final version of this very interesting OS has arrived. Besides the normal updates and improvements that are to be expected from a new build, the developers have also integrated a unique theme developed by the Numix project, which really sets this OS apart.
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As usually, Kali Linux 1.0.7 features various new tools, updated applications, as well as numerous fixes in order to make Kali Linux a more stable and reliable Linux operating system. This includes a new version of the Linux kernel, among other things.
There are numerous Linux distributions in the open source ecosystem, but there are very few built specifically for penetration testing and digital forensics. The former iteration of this distro, BackTrack, is one of the most downloaded OSes and it’s the go-to operating system when you need a professional solution.
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New Releases
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Salix MATE 14.1 RC1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the MATE desktop environment, has been released and users can now test it.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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Manjaro has slowly become one of the best Arch-based distributions, and the Xfce flavor is powering on with the first Release Candidate in the new 0.8.10 series. This is not the first flavor that gets a release in this new branch, but it’s one of the most popular.
Despite what users might think, most of the Manjaro flavors are actually developed by the community and not by a central team. In fact, the Manjaro ecosystem is so large that it would be very difficult for just one team to take care of all the versions. Xfce, on the other hand, is an official one, so it might seem a little bit more polished than the others.
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Slackware Family
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Porteus 3.1 (Kiosk Edition) is based on Slackware 14.0 and relies on Linux kernel 3.12.20 and Firefox 24.0. It’s a 32-bit system, which is entirely locked down to prevent tampering with any of the components (including the browser).
“This distribution release includes bug fixes, software updates and new features. At a mere 50 megabytes, the Porteus Kiosk Edition ISO includes just the libraries and utilities required to run Firefox in a secure environment, making this a perfect fit for kiosks and other web terminals.”
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Kwheezy is a Debian 7 Wheezy fork that uses KDE as the default desktop environment. While the name is very intuitive, making reference to both KDE and Wheezy, there will be a problem when Debian Jessie will become the stable Debian version, because the name will not match any more.
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Lightweight Linux distributions are inherently energy saving. By definition you’re using a fewer resources to run your system, which in turn requires less power and electrical draw. Throw in some power-efficient hardware and idle power draw will be minimal. These lightweight systems – while naturally energy-conserving – don’t normally include any specific optimisations for power saving. This is where wattOS comes in.
While also lightweight, wattOS strives to strike a balance between conservative code and usability. The net result is a little less wattage while idle and a longer-lasting laptop battery when disconnected. It’s the usability part that is very important to wattOS: something like Puppy Linux or Tiny Core may likely be less resource-intensive while idle, however you need to make some level of sacrifice regarding the desktop and available software to use these distros.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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LightDM is a display manager that’s mainly used in Ubuntu distributions, but users will find it in other Ubuntu-based distros as well. It’s not a visible part of the operating system and it’s not something that users interact with at any level.
The LightDM development has been going at a steady pace and its devs have just released a new version that is designed for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn). It doesn’t have too many changes, but there are a couple of interesting ones.
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Gwendal Le Bihan, maintainer of the Cinnamon PPA, has confirmed he will be discontinuing the popular desktop environment. At least the stable releases the community has become accustomed to that is. The development of the Cinnamon desktop environment will continue through development builds in a separate nightly PPA.
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The firms said they will make the Leadwerks Game Engine software development framework available in the Ubuntu Software Center to provide users of the operating system with a powerful tool for rapid game development under Ubuntu Linux.
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The good news is that it seems like there are only a few small things in between a Linux user and a decent Surface Pro 3 experience, and with any luck by the time these devices hit shelves there will be people eager to help implement fixes for most, if not all of these issues.
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Flavours and Variants
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RhinoLINUX 7.0 has been dubbed “Saucy SUZIE” and the code name betrays the roots of the distribution. The developers have used more than just one base for their operating system, namely Xubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and Linux Mint 16 (Petra). This is rather unusual, especially if we take into consideration the fact that Ubuntu 13.10 is about to reach end of life in a couple of months.
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Topping our coverage tonight, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declares Linux “Mint 17 the best Linux desktop to date.” Terrence O’Brien describes his journey with Linux as from foe to friend, sort of. And finally tonight, KDE tablet Vivaldi appears to be defunct and KaOS gets the once-over.
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Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS trusty tahr is the latest version official ubuntu-derived that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu Studio is free and open source operating system based on ubuntu that dedicated for users and professionals who want an operating system that already includes several open source software for managing and editing multimedia files.
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LynuxWorks, which changed its name and launched BlueCat Linux alongside its older LynxOS RTOS in 2000, has renamed itself as “Lynx Software Technologies.”
In a news announcement, Lynx CEO Gurjot Singh said the company’s “new name reflects broad market adoption of LynxOS and LynxSecure … in connected embedded systems.”
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Technologic Systems has released an open-spec SBC that runs Debian Linux on a Freescale i.MX286 SoC with 0.6-1.3W power draw, and optional GPS and cellular.
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Phones
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Nokia N900 was one of the most appreciated Maemo powered phones, having fans all over the world, despite the fact that the production has been dropped.
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To standardize the design, development, and testing of Firefox OS, Mozilla has partnered with a company called T2Mobile to manufacture, distribute, and update a Firefox OS reference phone called the Flame. Until now, there has been no “reference device” and the options for getting something through retail were limited.
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Open-source projects come and go all the time. In the Apache world though there is a prescribed process by which the ‘going’ happens that is somewhat unique in the world of open-source software development.
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Open source is valuable. Very few people would argue that point. There is most definitely a sense of intrinsic worth. But where does this value exist? Is it in the code produced or in something else?
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EMC is known for its storage appliances that relied on its hardware, but the company is quickly adapting to a software-defined industry. Paving the way for the future, EMC’s Advanced Software Division, led by Salvatore DeSimone is attempting to change the way people use and deploy IT. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante talked with DeSimone at EMC World 2014 about EMC’s vision for the future of software-led enterprise.
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Events
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Ellis, Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University in Springfield, MA, and Hislop, Associate Dean in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, are co-organizers of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), an annual conference that invites educators from across the country to learn how they can incorporate open source tools—and open source values—into their classrooms. It begins May 28 at Drexel University.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In 2013, the Mozilla Foundation commissioned Erik Spiekermann, a famous typographer, to work on a free, open source font family called Fira Sans (initially called Feura Sans).
Recently, the typeface was updated to version 3.1, getting 12 different weights (bringing the weights number to 16), all accompanied by italic styles, a huge character map and extensive language supports. There’s also a monospaced variant: Fira Mono which includes 2 weights (regular and bold).
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SaaS/Big Data
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OpenStack initiatives in the cloud and application policy efforts from VMware and Cisco could greatly change the Internet as we know it.
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CMS
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It’s a product that actually costs nothing, is up against entrenched competitors, and exists in a category that enterprises have in the past been wary of. All in all, marketing open source to marketers was probably never going to be an easy job.
So you might forgive Tom Wentworth if he was a little wary of taking up the role of chief marketing officer at Acquia. But the CMO says that when he received a message from a recruiter asking if he was interested in the position, he jumped at the chance. “I couldn’t have dialled back the number faster when I saw him asking about Acquia,” Wentworth says.
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Here at OStatic, we’ve repeatedly covered Acquia, the small company that focuses on the popular Drupal content management system (CMS). OStatic runs on Drupal, which is known for its modularity and flexibility, and countless sites around the web depend on it. Now, Acquia has closed a $50 million financing round, bringing total investment in the company to $118.6 million. Led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the round includes new investor Split Rock Partners as well as existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and Tenaya Capital. Ravi Viswanathan, general partner at NEA, will also join Acquia’s Board of Directors.
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BSD
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We’re due for the next release of DragonFly, which will be 3.8. If you
have anything you want to get in, do it soon.
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The DragonFlyBSD kernel has now been branched from master for the 3.8 release, thus bumping the Git for DragonFlyBSD 3.9 development.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Switzerland’s ‘OSS directory’, an open source directory service offered and maintained by /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group, is now available in German and French. The register now lists 276 open source service providers, 374 open source solutions and 283 reference documents. The bilingual site was officially unveiled last Saturday in Geneva, during the Fetons Linux conference and trade fair.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The founders of Authors Alliance are U.C. Berkeley Professors: Carla Hesse (Department of History and Dean of Social Sciences), Thomas Leonard (School of Journalism and University Librarian), Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley Law School and School of Information), and myself. I’m a professor at Berkeley Law who focuses on the law of both tangible property (land, cars, etc.) and intellectual property (copyrights, patents, etc.).
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I am gutted that I missed the Q+A session with Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz the Vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. It doesn’t seem to have been advertised widely – only 17 people went – and it deserves to be repeated.
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Elsevier has bought Mendeley – a social network for managing academic bibliography. Scientists put their current reading into Mendeley and use it to look up others. Mendeley is a social network which knows who you are, and who you are working with.
Do you trust Mendeley? Do you trust Elsevier? Do you trust and large organisations without independent control (GCHQ, NSA, Google, Facebook)? If you do, stop reading and don’t worry.
In Mendeley, Elsevier has a window onto nearly everything that a scientist is interested in. Every time your read a new paper Mendeley knows what you are interested in. Mendeley knows your working habits – what time are you spending on your research?
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Open Hardware
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The designs for the ANTVR headset itself and its nifty convertible game controller are proprietary technology. But the designs and firmware for the wireless receiver — which sits between the headset, the controller, and the gaming console — are open source. That opens up a range of possibilities, such as creating custom controllers or using the ANTVR controller to control other devices.
For example, ANTVR co-founder Qin Zheng says you could write software for using ANTVR to control a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, perhaps using the headset to watch the feed from the bot’s on-board camera. You could also make your own version of the receiver specifically designed to work with a game console or device not officially supported by ANTVR. “You can use the signal straight from the USB port,” Zheng says. “We will give the developer all the documentation and libraries.”
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Programming
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Perl 5.20.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 470,000 lines of changes across 2,900 files from 124 authors.
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Among the changes to find with the Perl 5.20 release is experimental subroutine signatures, Unicode 6.3 support, a new dereferencing syntax, key/value slice syntax, improved 64-bit sup;port, security improvements, and many other changes.
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Standards/Consortia
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Open-source developer Poul-Henning Kamp is pushing for the HTTP Working Group to toss out their current work on the HTTP 2.0 standard and to start over.
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Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google’s SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not address.
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Detour, at request of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, seen as attempt to appease hosts after stop at separation wall
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Science
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Early next week, a team of volunteers will use the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to see if they can make contact with a spacecraft that hasn’t fired its thrusters since 1987. If all goes well, the effort could bring the 35-year-old spacecraft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), back into position near the Earth, where it could once again study the effect of solar weather on Earth’s magnetosphere.
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Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion. That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.
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He said it was the saddest moment of his life—which haunted him every night of his life, even while he knew this young kid would have killed him just the same. But that doesn’t matter. If you’re a normal human being, killing another human being will leave a mark on you.
Obviously, Robertson was affected by PTSD. Today we know a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder and veterans of modern wars get treated for these and other mental illnesses derived from their time in combat. But, back then, little was known. Most people assume that PTSD is a relatively modern sickness, but the truth is that every soldier since the beginning of time has been exposed to the same extremely stressing moments, accidents, death, and atrocities that would leave any healthy person scarred for life. All of them—unless they were psychopaths—have suffered PTSD in various degrees.
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Besides ripping Ukraine apart – and getting scores of Ukrainians killed – the US-supported coup in February has injected more uncertainty into Europe’s economy and pushed Russia and China back together.
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One hundred children orphaned by the Syrian civil war could find a home in Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica’s summer retreat, “a mansion and riverfront estate surrounded by rolling pastures,” according to Yahoo News. That would be a welcome sight for any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by Syria’s political turmoil.
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Last week, the Obama administration signaled that it would finally declassify a secret memo detailing its justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens living abroad. The announcement came just hours before the Senate voted to confirmDavid Barron, the memo’s author, as President Barack Obama’s newest judicial appointee.
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According to a UN survey, civilians have been killed in 33 separate drone attacks around the world. In Pakistan, an estimated 2,200 to 3,300 people have been killed by drone attacks since 2004, 400 of whom were civilians. According to the latest figures from the Pakistani Ministry of Defense, 67 civilians have been killed in drone attacks in the country since 2008.
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Judging from my email box in recent years — which often differs on this question with such sources of knowledge as my television or the New York Times — the conscience of our country lies somewhere near Syracuse, New York.
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While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.
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I was reading an editorial criticizing President Obama for not doing more in the international realm. Specifically, it suggested that he was too weak. He was supposedly not responding sufficiently to the alleged Russian threat to Ukraine, for instance. Another example is that some critics believe that the administration should have done more in response to the Arab Spring, in particular, offering more assistance. The editorial dribbled on.
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After the attack on Iraq a frequently heard comment from those with no interest in foreign affairs or much, from activists, journalists and political observers of all hues, was: “Soon no American or British citizen will be safe anywhere on earth, for decades to come. ”
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As President Obama prepares to make another speech explaining his foreign policy, the question is whether he can climb out of the rut of his previous whiny apologies for continuing many of George W. Bush’s abuses, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote last year.
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There has long been a concerted effort to demonize Muslims in the American Homeland as a part of the never-ending big money maker that is the phony war on terror. Big media of course plays a critical role in the dark propaganda campaigns that ensure that millions of Americans will continue to see the menace of al Qaeda and worse lurking in the darkest corner of their closets and under their beds. The connection is never made that the military and security industrial complex need the ongoing Muslim bogeyman to keep those god blessed dollars rolling in and to keep the war machine running on high. The business of America anymore – particularly since September 11, 2001 – is death, as in selling arms, financing repression and peddling surveillance technology against dissidents to friendly tyrants. The wars that drive what is left of the economy must go on as they always will in our own version of Oceania.
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He’s now the principal polio advisor for the United Nations children’s organisation. He is in Australia this week and he joined me in The World Today studio, shortly after stepping off the plane.
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The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.
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Politico is reporting Monday that the White House inadvertently identified the Central Intelligence Agency’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name among the list of officials briefing President Barack Obama on security conditions in Afghanistan during his surprise trip there.
Obama stopped at the Bagram Air Base outside Kabul on his trip to show support for the troops during the US Memorial Day weekend.
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It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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For those not up to speed: Game show host Pat Sajak tweeted this: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.” It was all in jest, you see–though Sajak seems to be dismissive of climate change nonetheless.
And CNN’s Pat-Sajak’s-opinion-of-climate-change guest? Well, far-right bombthrower Ann Coulter, of course.
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Gambier Island sits in the heart of Howe Sound, a thickly forested, dark green hump of land surrounded by a blue ocean, just around the corner from the urban sprawl of Metro Vancouver.
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US scientists fear climate change could have devastating effects on poultry farmers as temperatures reach scorching levels
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Officials in Zhengzhou, China, wanted to build an artificial lake on the outskirts of the city but everything went wrong. The source of water they intended to use dried up and the hundreds of thousands of tons of sand destined for the artificial beach began to spread, covering an area the size of four football fields.
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Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.
The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.
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Finance
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An old, creepy recording shows the Milton Friedman Choir singing that corporations are society’s saviors, that rule and decision making are best left to the so-called free market, and that other moral considerations for the business class should be absolutely gotten rid of.
The clip is a prime exhibit in the too-long history of America’s voodoo enchantment—leading back directly to the influence of 20th-century economists like Friedman—with the notion that human nature is synonymous with relentless self-interest, that the group is best served by its members’ efforts to serve themselves, and that freedom lies in subservience to impersonal forces rather than a conscious, democratic effort to ensure it through legislation.
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Has the UK’s financial HQ done anything meaningful to protect itself from future economic shocks? Stephen Moss goes deep into ‘enemy territory’ to find out
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Politics/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Arriving at Manchester town hall on Sunday night, Griffin came under attack from protesters shouting “Nazi scum off our streets”. Some were rugby tackled by police after throwing placards at him reading “Nick Griffin Must Go”, with one attempting to land a punch on the BNP man.
Speaking after his defeat, Griffin blamed Ukip for taking the BNP’s vote. Asked whether the people of the north-west had rejected his party’s racist and fascist policies, he said: “They’ve voted for Ukip’s racist policies instead.”
He added: “Ukip want to keep out white Poles but let in huge numbers of Pakistanis and Africans.”
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Brian Taylor of BBC Scotland said last night he picked up at Holyrood that the other unionist parties were pleased that UKIP had won the former Lib Dem seat in Scotland and stopped the SNP getting a third. That was the most revealing moment of last night for me – it showed the vicious irresponsibility of the Better Together campaign, and exposed the lie that UKIP are outsiders.
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The BBC’s promotion of UKIP again explodes the myth of UKIP as outsiders.
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My take from the European election results is the UK has voted to remove many of its experienced politicians from Brussels and to leave the EPP and S&D to run the show. By promoting UKIP, we now have eleven fewer elected representatives working on our behalf to improve the UK’s position as new policy evolves, and even if they did suddenly decide to represent us — instead of voting in favour of things like the ivory trade and against flood prevention “to make a point” — they have no parliamentary colleagues they are willing to work with among the other nationalist parties to produce change.
The same story in other countries means the intact set of experienced political operators is from Germany, and the dominant influence from the UK will come from Labour acting within the S&D party who came second in the election. The UK’s ability to influence has been dangerously harmed and the euro-sceptic influence has moved even further from the levers of control (the UK’s Conservatives had already quit EPP by forming a new minority party) leaving pro-europeans from EPP, ALDE, Greens and S&D in control.
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The People’s party was one of the few governing parties to win the largest portion of the vote. But it’s the large gains by leftwing parties that are exciting political commentators. Between them, the two dominant political parties (People’s party and Socialist party) lost five million votes compared with their 2009 performance. Meanwhile, the protest party Podemos (“We can”) took nearly 8% of the vote and five seats. Podemos was formed only four months ago, having grown out of the Spanish indignados who camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square in 2011. Coalition group United Left also gained around 12 seats, further increasing the voice of the left in parliament. “It’s the hour of the people. This is only the beginning,” Podemos’s leader Pablo Iglesias, tweeted. “Clearly, we can.”
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The federal judge who ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s “John Doe” criminal investigation into spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections has regularly attended all-expenses paid “judicial junkets” funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and other ideological and corporate interests.
On May 6, federal District Court Judge Rudolph Randa blocked an ongoing John Doe criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between nonprofit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent $9.1 million on electoral ads during Wisconsin’s recall elections, and the recall campaigns of Governor Scott Walker and state senators. John Doe investigations are similar to grand jury investigations, and Wisconsin Club for Growth — and its director, Eric O’Keefe, a longtime compatriot of the Koch brothers — asked the federal court to stop the probe, alleging it violated their “free speech” rights.
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Censorship
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Laisa Taga, a leading Fijian journalist and editor, has died in Suva, Fiji, aged 56.
For more than 30 years, Laisa worked in a range of media and served as mentor for other female journalists. She was the first woman to edit a daily newspaper in Fiji, and most recently served as editor-in-chief of Islands Business International, publisher of the leading regional news and business magazine for the Pacific Islands.
Originally from Votua village on the island of Vanua Levu, Laisa studied at Adi Cakobau School (ACS), the elite school for young Fijian women.
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Privacy
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Richard Stallman, inventor of the principles of Free/libre software and founder of the Free Software Foundation gave us the immense pleasure and honour of sitting down with us for an open discussion.
Interviewed by Jérémie Zimmermann when he was still a full-time employee of La Quadrature du Net, Richard speaks in great length about surveillance and how to take back control of our communications, as well as about the future of the Internet and computing. Through the philosophy of Free/libre software he delivers his vision for better democratic processes and for a better society. He also brushes topics related to life, the Universe, and Everything
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“I hope there are people who love the feature and post more,” says Facebook’s product manager excitedly about the new feature they just added. We suspect people will not… As The WSJ reports, starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users. Read that again… ‘in the vicinity of users’. In other words, Facebook is unveiling its own NSA-style eavesdropping feature (on you and all your friends). Don’t worry though… even if users decide not to share what they’re hearing or watching, Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows. Sound familiar?
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On Monday our acting director, Emma Carr, took part in a workshop organised by the Care Quality Commission on the topic of covert surveillance in care homes. The session was organised by Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the CQC, and she has shared her thoughts on the session which you can read here.
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American journalist Glenn Greenwald has said in an interview with newspaper Der Standard on Monday that Austria “constantly” works together with the American National Security Agency (NSA).
This came despite recent claims from Austrian Minister for Defence Gerald Klug that the two work together only “occasionally.”
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Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.
“One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.
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The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.
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The USA Freedom Act passed by the House – advertised as ending bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under the Patriot Act – barely scratches the surface. Its main achievement: requiring the foreign intelligence court to vet N.S.A. selection terms used to sift through Americans’ phone, Internet and financial records. Sounds good, right? That’s because the N.S.A. talks about selection terms as being things like phone numbers or email addresses, suggesting that they are targeted at specific bad guys. But in negotiations, the administration insisted on leaving open the definition of selectors. As Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, explained, it is now “so vague that it could be used to collect all of the phone records in a particular area code, or all of the credit card records from a particular state.”
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A grassroots organization hopes its lawsuit related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance program will soon make its way to the Supreme Court.
As a private citizen, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) in February joined with FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, in filing a U.S. District Court lawsuit in the District of Columbia against President Obama and top intelligence officials over NSA surveillance.
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As posted originally on securitycurrent. Full disclosure per Forbes policy: All of the vendors mentioned in this post have been my clients for strategic advisory services during the last ten years.
Cisco’s General Counsel Mark Chandler on May 13 reacted strongly to further news of NSA exploiting Cisco gear, sparked in part by the publication of Glenn Greenwald’s book on Snowden and the leaked documents.
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In October 2012, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 20, ordering America’s national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks. The directive also stated that what it called Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) offered unique, unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world, giving little or no warning to potential adversaries or targets.
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A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said an investigation spanning several months has confirmed “the existence of snooping activities directed against China” as exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
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THE U.S.NATIONAL Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas says a TRANSCEND Media Service report.
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The federal New Democrats are calling for a group of independent experts to investigate warrantless data collection by the federal government.
The Official Opposition says it also wants the group to recommend ways to ensure the privacy of Canadians is protected in the digital era.
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On March 29 this year, the German news magazine Der Spiegel, citing a secret document from Snowden, revealed that 122 world leaders were under NSA surveillance in 2009, and the agency maintained a secret database on world leaders which included 300 files on Merkel.
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eijing accused the United States on Monday of “unscrupulous” cyber surveillance that included large-scale computer attacks against the Chinese government and Chinese companies.
“America’s spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of “anti-terrorism” and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity,” concluded a report prepared by the China Academy of Cyber Space.
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Lately I’ve been on something of a public records binge. I asked for records about my license plate reader data from local law enforcement agencies. I asked for complaint records from the Federal Trade Commission about a sketchy Bitcoin mining hardware maker. A few more requests are still pending.
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Facebook is rolling out a new feature for its smartphone app that can turn on users’ microphones and listen to what’s happening around them to identify songs playing or television being watched. The pay-off for users in allowing Facebook to eavesdrop is that the social giant will be able to add a little tag to their status update that says they’re watching an episode of Games of Thrones as they sound off on their happiness (or despair) about the rise in background sex on TV these days.
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Senator seen in parliamentary footage being used to discipline government department employee
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The Chinese government is pushing domestic banks to remove high-end servers made by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and replace them with a local brand, according to people familiar with the matter, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.
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Civil Rights
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What people think seemingly has little effect on ending what Cubans say is the longest and cruelest economic blockade in human history. Polls show overall U.S. disapproval, Cuban-Americans included. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected the blockade. The prestigious Atlantic Council NGO recently disapproved. Former high-profile blockade defenders in Florida, notably gubernatorial candidate Charley Crist and Cuban-American sugar baron Alfonso Fajul, changed their thinking. U.S. food producers, Illinois corn producers most recently, have called for new regulatory arrangements allowing exports to expand.
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FBI cyber recruits “want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey says.
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When one thinks about law enforcement, it’s safe to assume that its purpose is to ensure the compliance of the law; its purpose is to serve the greater good of its people. If the law and government fail to give justice to its citizens, then what good is it? The government is meant to provide a set of rules for people to adhere to and when not obliged, there are consequences for that action. Under the government there are police who are there to oversee that the law is being followed. So why is it that when the police are killing innocent people, they are not being punished as equally as regular civilians? Is it that the badge or title plays a role in how severe the punishment is, or that the police even get punished at all? Is the badge a “get out of jail free card”?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The 2014 European elections haven’t been kind to the various Pirate Parties, which campaign for digital rights, free speech and decriminalisation of filesharing. In their native Sweden, the Pirates lost both their MEPs, dropping from a 7.1 percent vote share to just 2.2 percent. In Finland where high-profile activist Peter Sunde was campaigning, the party balloted just 0.7 percent. In Britain, the three Pirate Party candidates secured just 8,597 votes combined — just 0.5 percent
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Despite the movement’s founder and loudest voice, Rick Falkvinge, claiming on his blog that the results are a “strong improvement”, it’s clear that this is a bit of a washout for the European Pirates. Their gains in Sweden in 2009 came in the wake of the the high-profile trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, but it’s impossible to argue that 2013′s Snowden revelations and recent renewed interest in net neutrality wouldn’t push traditional Pirate issues towards the forefront of voters’ minds in this election.
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Once the dust has settled, the only cornerstone Pirate policy remaining will be a decriminalisation of filesharing. That’s unlikely to happen for the time being — the rapid growth of legal streaming services is increasingly rendering filesharing irrelevant, and the entertainment industry’s arguments that it could kill their fledgling attempts to manage the digital transition seem to hold water with most politicians.
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Pirate Parties may have had a terrible election but, in Europe at least, Pirate politics is here to stay.
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A few hours after all polling booths across Europe closed, it now becomes clear that the Pirate Party has kept a seat at the European Parliament. The results show that the Pirates won one seat in Germany. That’s also the only one, although the Czech Republic Pirates came awfully close.
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Send this to a friend
05.26.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Despite that I’ve owned an HP 11 Chromebook since its release, I’ve viewed it as little more than a novelty. I work from an office on the third floor of my home, which has a nice size desk, desktop PC and 15.6 inch laptop, both running Windows 8.1.
However, as the weather warms (finally!) I considered making the move out to my porch, something I did last summer as well. In that case I lugged the Windows laptop with me, not a difficult task, but the size is really more than I need for carrying around.
This time I elected to give the HP 11 a shot, as it’s light and easy to carry. The only question was “how will I do my job?”
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Infinite has completed the migration of the ERP system named BPCS/LX from the IBM iSeries operating environment to Linux. This migration was fairly complex in that there were over six million lines of RPG, RPG ILE, CL and DDS code to be recompiled and deployed. Using Infinite’s toolset, Infinite i, to recompile and deploy the applications took less than 6 months. The migration was performed for a global food products company based in the United States.
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With Windows 8 now banned from being installed on Chinese government computers, domestic operating system (OS) developers are itching for a niche in the world’s biggest PC market.
The country’s relatively large OS developers, including China Standard Software Co. and NFS China among others, have fresh opportunities, but their products face long and tough tests.
Windows 8 was banned from all desktops, laptops and tablet PCs purchased by central state organs last week. The announcement made by the Central Government Procurement Center did not make clear whether other Windows products were prohibited as well.
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The success of the SteamOS Linux distribution is revealing that AMD is going to get a kicking in the future and it just cannot see it.
For a decade it would have been fair enough for a consumer chipmaker to ignore Linux. All those who said [insert this year] will be the year of Linux on the desktop were usually greeted with much mockery.
While 2014 is not the year that Linux will take control of the desktop either, the writing is appearing on the wall and it is silly for AMD to ignore it.
SteamOS users are suffering from a lack of proper AMD driver support and it is taking ages for anyone to get games on the OS running.
Valve used Nvidia and Intel hardware, with the promise that AMD support will arrive later, however no one seems to be in a rush.
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Ubuntu has the biggest range of interfaces with names such as Unity Desktop, Kubuntu, KDE, Lubuntu and UbuntuGnome. However, most of these interfaces can be downloaded and installed into other distributions. “Beginners often feel more comfortable when the interface is similar to Windows,” says Georg Esser. Two of those distributions are KDE and Cinnamon.
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Server
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When industry analysts and research firms have been reporting that the future of proprietary UNIX is bleak, IBM has announced investment of $2 billion in their RISC-based Power platform launching new Power systems based on the Power 8 processors.
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IBM is also betting heavily on Linux. Apart from IBM Power Linux, Redhat and Suse, the Power 8 platform supports Ubuntu and Debian. It supports the byte order format little-endian popular in x86 platforms, which makes it easier for developers to port applications from x86 to Power 8.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Following the benchmarks I posted this morning showing Intel Haswell graphics having some OpenGL slowdowns with the newer Mesa graphics driver code, I tested a sharply different Haswell system to see if the performance differential was also to be found on this Intel ultrabook with Iris Graphics 5100…
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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CherryTree 0.33.3, a hierarchical note-taking application that features rich text and syntax highlighting, storing data in a single XML or SQLite file, has been released and is now available for download.
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Proprietary
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I’ve loathed Flash for a long time, I barked about it in a column a while back. Frankly, I’m glad to see it gone from Chromium though I do recognize that that will cause problems for some Linux users. But its really not the end of the world, eventually the web will move on from Flash anyway.
And let’s remember that not everybody wants Flash on their computers anyway. It can be a huge resource hog that can cause a lot of power management problems on mobile devices and laptops as it tends to drain battery power fairly quickly. Some people simply prefer to avoid Flash as much as possible.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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When Firaxis announced Civilization: Beyond Earth last month, the developer had a couple of surprises in store. For starters, the game is Linux-bound – a rather major development for fans of that OS. Secondly, the game will also be supporting AMD’s low-level graphics API, Mantle.
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Thanks to the recent fiasco of The Witcher 2 I wanted to write down some thoughts on why we shouldn’t accept bad quality ports from developers.
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Valve is now the biggest service that distributes games for Linux and it looks like it’s the best thing that’s happened for this platform in a long time. The problems with this picture is that Steam is slowly transforming into a monopoly, which is never a good thing.
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Four years ago LGP was offline for months when its lone server failed. Since then, and the takeover by a new CEO, there hasn’t been much to report on… Even with many AAA games coming over to Linux and the outlook for Linux gaming never looking better. LGP has now been offline again for nearly one month.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kraft is KDE software to help people driving a small business. Emphasis is on small and business. We are not talking CMS, ERP or any other monster. Kraft is about a handy alternative for people who wrote their first 25 invoices using Libre Office and now start to think of how they could could be more efficient in doing that: Using structured templates, being able to create an invoice based on a quote that was done before, no need to fiddle around with slipping paragraphs, a proper address book, such stuff. zollstockSoftware for people who have other things to do than sit in front of their computer. Hard to understand for geeks like us who enjoy this technology, but yes, there are a lot of people who do not, who just use computers because they must, because they have a business.
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With the release yesterday of a Fedora 20 image with KF5 + Plasma-Next as the next-generation KDE stack, I decided to finally give it a whirl.
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This week we had the beta release for our upcoming release of the next iterations of our Plasma workspaces. This also includes KWin 5.0 which has the first major transition since the introduction of Compositing back in 2008. The changes in KWin are huge as we ported to Qt 5 and with that also to XCB and QtQuick2. Personally I comare it to having exchanged the engine, the tires, adding new spoilers and getting a new finish for our car. But after such a huge change there will be the one or other screw which needs to be tightened to get the fastest car in the race.
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The result is a KPhotoAlbum client for Android. The client serves images from a running version of KPhotoAllbum on the desktop. I just released the first preview of the work yesterday, along with a video showing it in action. See this blog for details on how to get a copy of it running on your computer.
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The Google Summer of Code coding period starts tomorrow. I have done everything possible in order to have plenty of time to dedicate to my project, adding support for QML and Javascript in KDevelop, and many interesting things are already happening.
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Thanks to Ivan Čukić tip both kactivities packages have been split between binary and libraries. Infact, Ivan told me KDE 4 needs kactivities 4.x libraries, but it works with kactivitymanagerd ship by kactivities from KDE Frameworks.
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In Plasma, we have traditionally relied on the font settings dictated by the distribution we run on. This means that we’ll take whatever “Sans” font the distro has set up (or has left to something else), and worked with that. The results of that were sub-optimal at least, as it meant we had almost no control how things are going to look like for end users. Fonts matter a lot, since they determine how readable the UI is, but also what impression it gives. They also have effect on sizing, and even more so in Plasma Next.
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The idea of these quick talks is to try and get much more content into Akademy. It is a really good opportunity to showcase what your team has been up to for the past year or to present an idea you have.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Apart from the pleasure to walk around in the room, take a look over the shoulders of people and helping out on non-obvious things, it was extremely eye-opening to realize again how many obstacles you need to pass in order to finally make a contribution – running a recent GNOME version, finding the documentation that is supposed to explain the following steps, having a GNOME Bugzilla account, finding a task (bug report) that sounds interesting, finding the corresponding code repository, locating the documentation file to patch in that code repository (in some subfolder called “C” instead of “en”), using git (formatting the patch, providing a commit message), uploading the patch somewhere for review.
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Yesterday the GTK+ gestures support branch was merged but besides that basic gestures support within the GNOME tool-kit, there’s also many other features and improvements on the agenda for GTK+ developers.
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As many other already expressed on planet GNOME, I find Philip‘s post pretty disconcerting, especially since he mentions some of the projects I work on and that over the last years have seen many successful and rewarding contributions from OPW interns and GSOC students.
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On the one-hand “Linux” is well-understood; on the other, there is a rich variety of Linux distributions available. How do they differ and what’s new in each release?
The term Linux is understood to be a popular open-source operating system. Technically, Linux is the kernel – the heart of the operating system which provides boot capabilities, interacts with hardware and makes a file system and applications available. It is the accompanying wide suite of similarly free and open source software that turns the kernel into something that home and business users alike can use as a productivity or entertainment platform. It is these combinations of kernel, bundled applications and configuration defaults that make up what we know as Linux distributions or distros.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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Manjaro 0.8.9, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has received its seventh pack in the series and the developers are working to release the next stable version the series, 0.8.10.
The Manjaro developers have already released quite a few update packs for this version of the operating system and they managed to extend the life of the distribution considerably. This seventh update in the series is a special one and comes with a very important set of packages that allows its users to test the next KDE Framework that is still under development.
“Our last stable update was a little bumpy. We hope we get this one better. New would be the addition of KDE5s first beta. You can install it side by side to KDE4 or as a single desktop. Please use: pacman -S kf5 kf5-aids To enjoy Plasma-Next packages you have to add Archs kde-unstable repository to your pacman.conf file. Use any Arch-Mirror for that repository,” said the developers in the official announcement…
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS, the open source Linux-based operating system that recently came under the purview of Red Hat, has launched a new initiative aimed at helping vendors to deploy open source virtualization technologies on the CentOS system. And the Xen Project, whose members will chair the effort, is leading the charge, according to a recent announcement.
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Fedora
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While a bunch of KF5 packages have been already included in Fedora Rawhide, more will be available, starting with the next week. Fedora 21 wil be an interesting release, since the GNOME version uses GNOME 3.14, the first desktop environment with official Wayland support.
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Debian Family
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As you may know, the LXDE developers have started the porting of their LXDE desktop environment to Qt, the new project being called LXQt. While LXDE is based on GTK+2, the developers have decided to port LXDE on Qt5, instead of GTK+3.
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Also, the system compositor has been updated, the system being capable to recognize many more third party controllers.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As you may know, the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn has started a few weeks ago. For now, Ubuntu 14.10 is the same system as Ubuntu 14.04, but with some under-development additions.
While Ubuntu 14.10 was initially based on Kernel 3.13 (the kernel used on Ubuntu Trusty), the developers have recently implemented Kernel 3.15 RC5 to power up Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn.
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Ubuntu AIO (all-in-one) DVD is an unofficial Ubuntu image that enables the users to use Ubuntu 14.04 in all its traditional flavors: Unity, GNOME, KDE, XFCE and LXDE, all from a single image.
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Ubuntu Kylin is an official Ubuntu flavor, developed by Canonical, China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP) and National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), for the Chinese users, providing a desktop environment in Chinese and the popular software that the Chinese people need, installed by default.
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The Kubuntu team has been thinking about what to bring up to the CC for a few weeks, and at our Mumble meeting, discussed it there as well. Rohan Garg, Scott Kitterman, and Philip Muscovac (Shadeslayer, ScottK, and Yofel) attended with me (thank goodness!).
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As you may know, a new version of Ubuntu Dual boot, codenamed M9 (having similar features as MultiROM Manager), has been released by Canonical, coming with support for both Android and CyanongenMod, a bunch of fixes and some updated on the Ubuntu side. It enables the users to install both Ubuntu Touch and Android, on the same device.
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As you may know, the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn has already started. For now, Ubuntu 14.10 is the same system as Ubuntu 14.04 (using Kernel 3.13), but with some under-development additions, but the Canonical developers are about to adopt Kernel 3.15 soon.
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For those curious about the impact of running Intel “Haswell” HD Graphics 4600 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then pulling in the latest Mesa 10.3-devel code followed by the Linux 3.15 kernel, it’s not entirely a happy story if you are looking to maximize your Intel Linux graphics performance capabilities.
Having done a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS this week on a Core i7 4770K system I figured I would do the usual graphics driver performance update of comparing Ubuntu 14.04 out-of-the-box (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1) against pulling in the latest Oibaf PPA packages to have xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 DDX and the Mesa 10.3-devel Git master code (a big leap from Mesa 10.1.0). Lastly, with the updated Intel user-space graphics drivers I then updated kernel-space by moving to the Linux 3.15 kernel via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.
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So, you just installed Ubuntu 14.04? Well, it’s time to make it your own. Here are ten little things you can do to make sure the already awesome Trusty Tahr becomes your computing home:
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My choice, and I hope it’s not el beso de la muerte (that’s the kiss of death, to those who don’t speak Spanish) for me to say it, is California LoCo leader Nathan Haines, who I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog post. Again, I have known Nathan for years and he has been an eloquent advocate and steady leader in the California LoCo for quite some time. There are few in FOSS for which I have as much respect as I do for Nathan, and his leadership skills are top-notch. If Canonical misses the chance to hire Nathan as their Community Leader, they should at least — at the ultimate very least — make him the Community Leader’s monkey boy.
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Flavours and Variants
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As you may already know, Pinguy OS 14.04 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and uses GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment, but other interesting apps available by default: Gno-Menu, Media Player Indicator, Top Icons and a bunch of Gnome Shell extensions installed by default, and of course, a Docky for the most used apps and a Conky for displaying system information.
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LXDE 14.04 Beta 1 (64 bit/amd64 only), based on Lubuntu 14.04, has been recently a few days ago, coming with some notable changes.
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Put it all together and you have a very fast, very secure, and very smooth and easy to use desktop. While other operating systems lately seem to be determined to make things harder for users—and no, I’m not just talking about Microsoft and Windows—Mint’s developers keep improving an already superb desktop experiences.
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Based on the GNU/Linux operating system, Red Pitaya can be programmed at different levels using a variety of software interfaces, including: HDL, C/C++, and scripting languages. HTML-based web interfaces enable access to Red Pitaya’s functionality in most Web browsers from a smartphone, tablet or personal computer.
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There have been more than a few tiny computing boards released in the past few years, and this trend won’t be slowing down any time soon. So meet VoCore, which is quite possibly one of the smallest Linux computers ever made.
The tiny coin-sized board is kitted with 32MB SDRAM, 8MB SPI flash memory and a system-on-chip clocked at 360MHz. It features no video-out or GPU, so don’t expect to turn it into a retro-gaming station or home theatre PC. Although sluggish compared to a Raspberry Pi, versatility, portability and low wattage is the VoCore’s real aim.
But its secret weapon is its 10/100M Ethernet, USB and 802.11n Wifi support. In fact, VoCore can run the embedded devices Linux-distro OpenWrt, turning it into a little super VPN router that one could realistically take anywhere.
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The open source universe expands one spiral arm wider this week with the formation of a new non-profit foundation called prpl.
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Formerly found on Palm smartphones and HP tablets, webOS has a new lease of life on LG Smart TVs where it offers a change from your typical TV interface. Simple to navigate and mostly pleasing to the eye, webOS is a welcome addition to the Smart TV space.
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Phones
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For now, the Jolla phone is available only in shops from Finland and Estonia, but it can also be ordered from the Jolla Store, in a lot of European countries.
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Yes, we know that Android smartphones are the best in the Market right now, but there is a big problem when it comes to battery back, take for example Nexus 5. Hence, Jolla came up with a solution for the same. Jolla recently launched a new smartphone named ‘The First One’ with the new Sailfish OS. For those who are not aware, Sailfish operating system by Jolla – the brainchild of a group of ex-Nokia employees and MeeGo developers got debuted a year ago. The best part, Sailfish OS supports the Android applications and can be operated with some unusual gestures.
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Android
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They want to be the first ones to release a dual booting Ubuntu Touch and Android tablet, having 2 GB of RAM memory, 64 GB of internal storage, a quad-core CPU, a 10.1 Retina display, keyboard connectors.
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In the desktop world, most screens have, up until recently, rather similar ppi’s (pixels per inch) and the differences were many times mitigated by the distance to the user eyes, larger screens had smaller ppi’s but were further away from the user eyes. This meant that the fundamental metric to design anything was the PIXEL – the smallest almost indivisible element that you could use. Because of this fact fonts that apparently used different metrics were in reality using pixels, the logical value for ppi was hard-coded in the several desktop OS’s. To avoid that, the font size widget size ratio would change from screen A to screen B. All of this was only possible due to the fact the range in ppi’s was rather limited…
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The open source community is participating in this race to the cloud in two key ways. First, much open source software, particularly software for enterprises and small businesses, is now available on a SaaS basis. This provides customers with quality, low-cost applications and eliminates the hassles of deploying software on their own servers. At the same time, it gives open source companies a viable business model that allows them to make money from their technology.
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A research lab at Zurich’s University of Applied Science has helped a data centre provider to create a new open source cloud hosting environment for its European research and development program.
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Adobe has released its 100th Typeface family, Source Serif, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Adobe Originals font library. Source Serif is an open-source font available via Adobe Typekit or via SourceForge.
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OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, offers some metering tools as parts of the core OpenStack code. But it lacks a robust performance monitoring framework, which is why GroundWork has rolled out a new solution for tracking the performance of various parts of the OpenStack public and private cloud infrastructure.
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Hortonworks says the deal struck this week to acquire XA Secure will help provide a comprehensive approach to Hadoop security for the first time.
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SnapChat settled with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month over a complaint that its privacy claims were misleading, as reported by USA Today, and last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a report listing the company as the least privacy-friendly tech outfit it reviewed, including Comcast, Facebook, and Google. Last year, WhatsApp faced privacy complaints from the Canadian and Dutch governments, and like Snapchat, its security has been an issue as well.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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I’m in the process of trying Fedora 20 on my retina MacBook and I ran into a peculiar issue with Chrome. Some sites would load up normally and I could read everything on the page. Other sites would load up and only some of the text would be displayed. Images were totally unaffected.
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Mozilla
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The problem I see, however, is something I’ve witnessed for some time now, and while I’m aware that I will probably look like I’m howling with the pack (something I do not like at all) I believe I should come clean about it. This problem is about Mozilla itself, what it does, how it operates, its own standing within the Free and Open Source Software community and its revenue model. In fact, I believe all these points are tightly connected and discretely conspired to bring Mozilla where it is today. This is not to say that I don’t like what Mozilla does and has done. This is not to say that there isn’t a whole bunch of great people inside Mozilla: there are, I know several of them. This is not to say that Mozilla is not an exciting set of projects and ventures: I think it will continue to be exciting in the years to come. And many of us know what technology does to any project or company in just a few years: kill it or make it blossom.
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SaaS/Big Data
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At last weeks OpenStack conference, Red Hat found itself being painted as the pantomime villain by some of its competitors.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The beta release of LibreOffice 4.3 is available this week with many new features being under development for this popular open-source office suite.
Among the features being worked on for LibreOffice 4.3 is going from a 16-bit character limitation of Writer paragraphs to now 32-bit, changes to navigation buttons and other UI elements, DrawingML import/export support, proportional image scaling support, support for printing comments in margins, improved formula engine support within the Calc spreadsheet, auto detection of fax4CUPS printers, improved PDF importing, improved OOXML support, and many other changes.
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CMS
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Director of new media technologies at the Executive Office of the President of the United State of America Leigh Heyman was recently reported to be the man behind all the modern interactive media delivered during Barack Obama’s last ‘state of the union’ address.
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Orion announced in early May that it has launched a redesigned client portal that uses open-source code so other providers can build their own pages to integrate into the site.
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Education
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Damian Conway is well known in the Perl community and has worked on Perl 6 for many years; he’s a speaker and teacher, author of several technical books and Perl software modules, and runs an international IT training company, Thoughtstream, which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level in Europe, North America, and Australasia. His website is: http://damian.conway.org
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Funding
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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For those that haven’t already moved over to the recently released GCC 4.9, the third point release to the GNU Compiler Collection 4.8 series has finally surfaced.
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Public Services/Government
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The administration in the Austrian capital, Vienna, is expanding its use of open source solutions, including on its workstations, because of new requirements, open data, budget constraints and the major shift towards smartphones and tablets.
“Open source helps to solve IT vendor lock-in situations”, Norbert Weidinger, ICT-Strategist for the city, said in a presentation on the city’s use of free and open source solutions.
Open source is now well-established in the city’s main IT operations, according to the presentation which Weidinger delivered at a Major Cities of Europe conference in Dublin on 17 January. The city has 454 Linux servers (from a total of 2,000 servers), 270 Apache instances, uses Postgres to manage 380 databases and MySQL to manage another 90. Open source is used for file and printing services, for e-government services and for external and internal websites.
“We’re promoting the use of open source products where possible”, Weidinger said.
The IT department’s responsibilities include the IT in the city’s public healthcare, public schools and the administration of city-owned housing.
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In the UK, The National ICT Category Management Programme (NICTMP) is intended to guide local governments towards better IT, including using FLOSS. It’s about time. Many small businesses and governments are scarcely more skilled at IT than consumers and a little help can go a long way towards huge savings greater diversity and better IT. With FLOSS it’s easy to put up a web-server sharing information with the public and using open standards to ensure interoperability with minimal cost. I think savings of 20% are at the lower end of estimates. In my experience, software licences can save 20% of IT costs but ease of maintenance could do that again and getting full performance out of hardware purchases that much again. Local governments in UK spend hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware and software for IT each year. Break-even can be immediate if hardware is re-used by using FLOSS. Governments should be looking at savings of ~50% by using FLOSS. There’s a reason M$ and “partners” do what they do. It doubles the cost of IT making slaves of us all providing free labour. FLOSS works for us the users and not some monopolists.
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A new model for IT procurement for local governments in the United Kingdom is urging public administrations to use open standards, to create room for agile and innovative software solutions including open source. One of the aims of the National ICT Commercial Category Strategy for Local Government is to reduce IT expenses by 10 to 20 percent over the next five years.
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Technology is the easy part in government. The biggest challenges are cultural barriers – it’s a question of thinking in a more collaborative and open way, believes Ben Balter, Government Evangelist for GitHub, a social network for open source communities.
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Aneesh Chopra, President Obama’s choice to be the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2012, wants to do something about the problem. He is teaming up with a group called the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation to address the problem. Their plan: develop the software necessary to run an election and release it as an open-source project. Chopra and his colleagues believe that could lead to better election systems while simultaneously saving cash-strapped states money.
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White House and agency IT leaders discuss how open source can empower government IT project teams, at FOSE conference in Washington, D.C.
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Licensing
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The latest version of a tool used to teach kids how to program video games, animations and interactive art is now open source. The Scratch 2.0 editor and player can now be found in GitHub under the GPL version 2 license.
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Openness/Sharing
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Skyhook is new to the bitcoin ATM-scape but is already interesting many with its first project – the first ever portable, open-source bitcoin ATM machine, with prices starting at $999.
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Open Data
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The Danish capital, Copenhagen, has been making available the open source code for its bicycle navigation app, I Bike CPH. The app will be demonstrated at Traffic Jam Session, a public transport innovation hackathon next week Tuesday to Thursday in the Swedish city of Malmö.
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Open Hardware
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“The horizon [in open source hardware] I am most excited about is open cores, open source designs for processors that can be implemented in firmware in an FPGA, for example,” said Oskay, the vice president of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), an educational non-profit group started in 2012.
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In this article we’ll be using Node.js and the Duino library to get real-time CPU data and display it with a series of LEDs. We’ll also look into adjusting the brightness of those LEDs with a potentiometer, and running the app as a background process with Forever.js.
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Novena, an open laptop platform designed for hackers, has surpassed 280 percent of its crowd-funding target, and the open-hardware computing devices will start shipping in November.
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Galileo 2.0, an uncased computer, will be the follow-on to the first-generation single-board system that sells for around US$70. It could ship as soon as next month, said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Devices Group.
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A Beijing-based company, ANTVR Technology Co., Ltd., has created an open source version of the Oculus Rift and has reached $145,000 of its $200,000 Kickstarter goal after just four days.
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Programming
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Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed “AArch64″ as ARM’s official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.
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While Scratch may seem like a very simplistic programming language that’s just for kids, you’d be wrong to overlook it as an excellent first step into coding for all age levels. One aspect of learning to code is understanding the underlying logic that makes up all programs; comparing two systems, learning to work with loops and general decision-making within the code.
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I’ve been working on an automated wildlife camera, to catch birds at the feeder, and the coyotes, deer, rabbits and perhaps roadrunners (we haven’t seen one yet, but they ought to be out there) that roam the juniper woodland.
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Clive is the new operating system announced on Friday and is written in Google’s Go programming language, features a “new weird file protocol” called ZX, and uses parts of the Plan 9 operating system. Clive is also going to run on a modified Nix kernel.
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A quick option for building Web and iOS apps is on the horizon from a group of developers in Europe. Hoodie is an open source tool for building Web applications in days via an open source library described as being easier to use than JQuery.
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Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is signaling that Pope Francis in his visit to Bethlehem on Sunday will strongly support the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state.
Implicitly, Pope Francis will condemn the Apartheid system of military rule used by Israel in the West Bank, though he likely won’t use the word.
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Amirzai Sangin, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Afghanistan said Sunday that the phone calls are recorded by devices which have been set up in the country to fight drugs smuggling.
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Assange said that Afghanistan was the second country where NSA “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic and international phone calls.”
Bahamas was revealed as one of the country where the phone calls were being recorded by National Security Agency in earlier reports; however the second country was called “country x.”
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The White House inadvertently included the name of the top CIA official in Afghanistan on a list of participants in a military briefing with President Barack Obama that was distributed to reporters on Sunday, the Washington Post reported.
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Science
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In an article published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, University of California at San Diego behavioral scientist Ayelet Gneezy and University of Chicago business professor Nicholas Epley tracked people’s responses to three types of promises: broken ones, kept ones, and then ones that were fulfilled beyond expectations. And while it’s true that everyone gets upset when a promise is broken (I’m looking at you, housing-contractors-who-claim-bathroom-renovations-will-be-done-in-a-week), it turns out that overdelivering on something won’t make anyone significantly more impressed by your awesomeness.
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Health/Nutrition
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On Tuesday, May 20, voters in two counties in Oregon passed ballot initiatives to ban the growing of genetically engineered crops.
Jackson County’s Measure 15-119 passed overwhelmingly, by 66 percent – 34 percent. Proponents of the ban raised only $375,000 compared with a record nearly $1 million raised by the opposition, which included agribusiness giants Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer.
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Security
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Wired reports that Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu”, the LulzSec hacker who became an FBI informant and helped take down numerous other hackers, will be sentenced on Tuesday, May 27. The government will seek a sentence of just seven months, citing time served and his immense cooperation with the government.
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Anarchism and the Lower East Side go hand in hand, so should we be super surprised that one of the most notorious hackers of our day operated from within the Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D?
You’ll recall that in June 2011, hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was caught by the FBI and quickly turned snitch. The high-ranking capture immediately paid dividends, as “Sabu” was the man who once led the outlaw LulzSec, an offshoot of the notorious Anonymous organization. With the new traitor status, he helped deliver a number of top hackers on a platter and still helps the bureau with his connections.
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U.S. prosecutors say a hacking group’s mastermind should be spared a long prison sentence due to his quick and fruitful cooperation with law enforcement.
The man, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York, is accused of leading a gang of international miscreants calling themselves “Lulzsec,” short for Lulz Security, on a noisy hacking spree in 2011, striking companies such as HBGary, Fox Entertainment and Sony Pictures.
Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, led a high-profile campaign that taunted law enforcement, released stolen data publicly and bragged of their exploits on Twitter. Their campaign touched off a worldwide law enforcement action that resulted in more than a dozen arrests.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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For one group of Americans, that wasn’t enough. On their own, the Americans offered to provide 70,000 Russian-made assault rifles and 21 million rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army, a major infusion they said could be a game changer. With a tentative nod from the rebels, the group set about arranging a weapons shipment from Eastern Europe, to be paid for by a Saudi prince.
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While Canada exports oil, maple syrup, and hockey players, it also deals a lot of arms. And Canadian military exports are growing: the latest available figures say sales jumped more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, with later years reportedly expected to spike.
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On June 9th, 2006, it is said that three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp committed suicide in a coordinated effort. They all died using the exact same methods, in their cells, on that evening.
However, when NCOs (non-commissioned officers) contradicted this account, cracks began to show in the official NCIS investigation. The NCOs revealed that these three prisoners were actually not in their cellblocks the night they died. Rather, they were taken to a secret CIA black spot nearby, dubbed ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Camp No’. While they were returned to their cell at the time of death, more than 12 papers that contradicted the official report of that night were suppressed during an internal investigation.
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Legal charity Reprieve has called on the Scottish Government to ensure that police investigating the use of Scottish airports by CIA ‘torture flights’ have access to a major US Senate report on the spy agency’s secret ‘rendition’ programme.
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Political. America is freeloading. Events belie the local panel’s assertion that the Philippines invited the United States as our guest, to use our former bases and facilities—rent-free—as counterweight to China. The Chinese became aggressive in the West Philippine Sea in 2012; the United States decreed its “pivot” to Asia much earlier. Clearly, America decided, unilaterally, to make the Philippines home to thousands of its soldiers, aircraft carriers, battleships and warplanes. And the Philippines followed America in a zombie-like stupor.
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Egypt has been deemed a leading supporter of this week’s mutiny within the Libyan military.
Diplomatic sources said renegade Gen. Khalifa Hafter was receiving guidance and military support from Egypt.
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Neocons never blush at their own hypocrisies, demanding Russia respect international law and do nothing to protect eastern Ukrainians, while demanding President Obama ignore international law and create a rebel “safe zone” in Syria, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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In other words, the incitement of North against South, Christians against Muslims, was recognised as the most potent strategy that could push Nigeria into sectarianism. In fact, that Boko Haram has extremist religious connotation is believed to be enough to keep Nigeria busy to think beyond its survival.
So carefully managed, it is impossible to trace Boko Haram’s funding and arms supply sources; unless one has a privileged access to the CIA-led trillion dollar terror economy, which Loretta Napoleoni, in her book, ‘’Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Network,’’ argued is impossible for CIA’s unofficial funding sources include money laundering, terrorism, extrajudicial killings, drug trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, human trafficking, gambling and illegal arms and oil sales.
Known not to leave anything to chance, the CIA ensured that it was in full control of both the mainstream and grassroots media in Nigeria. This was a smart move since it is a given that the one who controls what the people read, hear and watch invariably controls what the people think about and how they think.
Thus, fully aware that press freedom actually belongs only to those who own the press, the CIA is secret marriage with some media owners and as a result has been successful at controlling and manipulating what gets to most Nigerians.
Little wonder no one seems to wonder how the US Embassy (and by that the CIA) gets its intelligence, including the recent announcement it made that “As of late April, groups associated with terrorism allegedly planned to mount an unspecified attack against the Sheraton Hotel, in Nigeria.”
The problem is that our government is not bold enough to demand their source of intelligence, and why rather than sharing such important intelligence with Nigeria, the US chose to make them public in the form of announcements.
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Prime Minister John Key thought the candlelight vigil outside his house last night was “not really cricket”.
About 30 protesters gathered outside his Auckland home last night in a candlelight vigil commemorating “the numerous deaths of civilians and the illegal killing of ‘supposed’ terrorists, including New Zealander Daryl Jones — killed by the US drone strike programme”.
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Prime Minister John Key has hit out at protesters who gathered at his home last night, to protest his position on deadly drone strikes.
Last week Key said drone strikes were justified, but acknowledged innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire.
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While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.
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Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.
By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.
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A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Washington as far back as 2008 that US-EU-NATO meddling in Ukraine could split the country in two.
“Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat,” said the 2008 cable classified by William Burns, than US Ambassador to Moscow and currently the US Deputy Secretary of State.
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A secret U.S. diplomatic cable written six years ago (and tweeted by Wikileaks on Tuesday) foreshadowed much of the tension between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine.
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A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Washington had been warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as early as 2008 that US-EU-NATO interfering in Ukraine would result in the country splitting in two.
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Miffed with the US over indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers over commercial cyber espionage charges, China accused the US of hypocrisy and double standards.
Chinese Defence Ministry posted a statement on its website, saying, “From ‘WikiLeaks’ to the ‘Snowden’ case, US hypocrisy and double standards regarding the issue of cyber-security have long been abundantly clear”.
“The so-called ‘commercial espionage network’ is a pure fabrication by the US, a move to mislead the public based on ulterior motives,” the AFP quoted the statement.
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During the defense appropriations amendment process, Adam Schiff (CA-28) proposed an amendment that would sunset the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) with the end of our combat role in Afghanistan, i.e. December 31, 2014.
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The Russian president accuses the Prince of Wales of ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unroyal behaviour’
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Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Paul said, “I rise today in opposition to killing American citizens without trials. I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the President has the power to kill American citizens not involved in combat.”
“I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court,” the Kentucky senator said.
On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to release to senators a redacted version of the document co-authored by Barron that provided the legal justification for the targeted drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
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Given that he was confirmed on a 53-45 vote, it is highly unlikely that Barron’s nomination would have survived had Senate majority leader Harry Reid not imposed the “nuclear option” last year to prevent senators from stopping a contentious nomination by requiring 60 senators to approve the idea of even having a confirmation vote. As for waterboarding, Barron’s nomination became controversial because he is, as Fram noted, the “architect of the Obama administration’s legal foundation for killing American terror suspects overseas with drones.” 53 Democratic senators are apparently okay with that, even though many if not most of them have gone apoplectic over the idea of waterboarding known terrorists of any nationality who may have knowledge of their fellow travelers’ plans.
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1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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A deep boom rocked through Sanaa, Yemen, the sound coming from outside of the city, perhaps from near the village of al-Masna’a.
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There will be a candlelight vigil outside Prime Minister John Key’s home in Auckland to highlight the issue of US drone strikes.
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Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.
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Just in time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.
Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We erect monuments for those who die while serving in the military, yet for those who return home, there’s little honor to be found.
The plight of veterans today is deplorable, with large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress, homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration (VA) offices.
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AN IRANIAN terrorist responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans in the 1983 Beirut bombings was resettled in the United States by the CIA in return for divulging secrets about Tehran’s nuclear programme, a new book claims.
Ali Reza Asgari is believed to have masterminded the attacks in April 1983 on the US embassy in the Lebanese capital, which killed 63 people, and another attack six months later on the marine barracks and the French barracks, in which 241 US servicemen and 58 French citizens died.
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An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, consortiumnews.com reported.
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An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, says he has no problems with allowing openly gay adults in the organization, but won’t address changing their policy right now.
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SCOTLAND’s role in the interrogation and alleged torture of terror suspects by the CIA could be laid bare by a recently declassified US intelligence report, it has been revealed.
Police are currently investigating claims Scottish airports were used as a stop-off for “rendition” flights, which transferred prisoners to secret jails overseas.
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The unknowing also includes Qatar that has sentenced a Filipino national to death for allegedly selling top secret Qatari military information to “Filipino state security forces” that the Qataris left unnamed.
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The US government continues its efforts to clamp down on leaks of classified information.
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A former police officer in Northern California is being investigated for collecting a disability pension while he is currently working for the FBI.
Oakland city officials are looking into how former police officer Aaron McFarlane receives more than $52,000 in disability benefits from the city while he has been working as an FBI special agent in Boston.
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Federal prosecutors have acknowledged that the two FBI agents and a Homeland Security Investigations agent questioning the youth at the state police barracks in North Darmouth knew a lawyer had called, but neither they nor the trooper who spoke with Griffin passed that information along to the students.
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James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.
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James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.
Referring to al Qaeda groups in Africa and the Middle East, he recently told the New York Times, “I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become. There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”
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Terrorism has fed the FBI’s growth. Between 2001 and 2013, its budget nearly doubled after adjusting for inflation. But Comey was not pleased on arriving to learn that he would be inconvenienced by last year’s federal budget sequester.
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You had to take Johnson’s point. The question was, Why did Obama choose this man? As defense secretary, Gates oversaw an increase in troop strength in Afghanistan from 32,000 (when Obama took office and named him) to roughly 100,000 (before withdrawals began). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting does the counting here. Why did Obama do that?
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Transparency Reporting
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“They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda,” he said of the U.S. government. “I needed to move away from it all. I [still] talked to a few people on the computer but I generally completely disassociated myself with anything to do with Anonymous.”
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In essence, Media Direct seeks to enable encrypted interactions between anonymous whistleblowers, who access it via the Tor relay network, and specified journalists, with the submission server itself not logging anything, thus meaning it has no information to provide should it be targeted by the government of its host country (which remains secret, even from the administrators to the Media Direct site here in Australia). The site automatically deletes material that isn’t used within two weeks, and the keys whistleblowers use to access the server also have a limited lifespan. It’s close to plug-and-play for whistleblowers, as long as they can install Tor.
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The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are still actively pursuing a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
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WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange remains the subject of an active criminal investigation by the United States Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly published court documents reveal.
Papers released in US legal proceedings have revealed that a “criminal/national security investigation” by the US Department of Justice and FBI probe of WikiLeaks is “a multi-subject investigation” that is still “active and ongoing” more than four years after the anti-secrecy website began publishing secret US diplomatic and military documents.
Confirmation that US prosecutors have not closed the book on WikiLeaks and Mr Assange comes as a consequence of litigation by the US Electronic Privacy Information Centre to enforce a freedom of information request for documents relating to the FBI’s WikiLeaks investigation.
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JOHN Shipton says he is not, by nature, the most outgoing of people.
“I’m a private person; I’d prefer to be at home reading a book,” Mr Shipton said yesterday.
But having WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange for a son means Mr Shipton’s life is no longer solely his own.
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Assange will receive an International Award for Outstanding Service in the Defence of Human Rights and Global Justice. You know, one of those.
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Though they’re often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don’t always see eye to eye.
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A rift is forming in the world of leaked top-secret government documents. On one side is Glenn Greenwald, the founding editor of The Intercept online news site, who earlier this week reported that the U.S. government was recording practically every single cell phone call made to or from the Bahamas and another, unnamed country.
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On May 14, João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The two men discussed ways in which Latin American social movements might help Wikileaks. Following their two-hour discussion, the leader told Assange, “If you need asylum in Brazil, we offer our land settlements.” Assange responded with a hug.
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Notorious whistleblower Julian Assange spoke glowingly about Bitcoin during a technology conference in South Africa on Wednesday, calling the currency “the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years.”
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A US intelligence agency is allegedly tapping all phone calls made in Kenya, possibly informing the recent travel advisories and the heightened alert at its Embassy in Nairobi.
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The film 1971, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, documents the activities of “eight ordinary citizens,” but their story is far beyond the ordinary. On March 8, 1971, the group orchestrated a robbery at an FBI office in the Philadelphia suburb aptly called Media, making off with every file. Those hundreds of documents, mailed to the press leading to 50,000 more pages, laid bare the details and degree of government surveillance of the American people. Congressional hearings in subsequent years revealed that the FBI, under the autocratic leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated institutions from universities to community groups and even threatened the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The mere fact of the existence of residential FBI offices, in low-slung brick buildings along tree-lined, mostly residential streets, reflected the acceptance — and even deification of the agency in earlier decades. No member of the Media, Pa., group was ever caught or prosecuted for the break-in. They broke their long silence in the film and a new book by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The government ignores the drawbacks to shale gas, while its erratic policies around solar frustrate budding entrepreneurs
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Sea level rise impacting naval bases. Climate change altering natural disaster response. Drought influenced by climate change in the Middle East and Africa leading to conflicts over food and water — as in, for instance, Syria.
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The current stage of the climate crisis will afflict our Earth for innumerable generations to come, creating increasing havoc. Stage one will eventually transform to a crueler stage two later this century and other stages eventually unless severe measures are introduced immediately. We know the dire consequences for future generations if we fail to act immediately.
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Military coups in Thailand are nothing new. But the latest seizure of power by army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha underscores the risks to democracy when governments consistently fail to deal adequately with the complex convergence of systemic crises.
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Finance
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As a man who has himself experienced wardens deciding, with their “discretion”, to give him a ticket in that very spot before, Steve McMillan perhaps understandably felt he could not just let it slide.
Filming the whole incident on his mobile phone, he can be seen confronting a warden who initially says that it hasn’t yet “been five minutes”.
But when Mr McMillan explains that it clearly has – and that he has this recorded on his phone – the unnamed warden quickly goes on the defensive.
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President Barack Obama has taken several steps over the past few years to address the $1 trillion problem of student loan debt. He’s pushed loan forgiveness programs and efforts to help borrowers reduce payments. One thing that apparently isn’t factoring into his plans, though, is reining in abusive debt collectors that the Department of Education hires to collect student loans debt when people can’t pay.
More than $94 billion of the nation’s student loan debt was in default as of September 2013, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. And the percentage of people defaulting on school loans has increased steadily for six years in a row. In 2011, the Department of Education paid private debt collectors $1 billion to try to collect on that debt—a number that is expected to double by 2016. The tactics used by those debt collectors range from harassing to downright abusive. In March 2012, Bloomberg reported that three of the companies working for the Department of Education had settled federal or state charges that they’d engaged in abusive debt collection.
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We’re at a critical moment in our economic recovery that requires real leadership and people power to ensure true economic democracy in our country. There is incredible work being done to build a strong antipoverty movement, and spaces like these are fundamental to encourage an open dialogue about our strategies and tactics as well as our successes and failures.
As corporate profits keep soaring, workers’ wages continue to stagnate, creating the widest income inequality gap our nation has seen in modern times. At Jobs With Justice we still believe that in America, people who work hard should be paid enough to live with dignity and raise a family. Today, millions of people go to work every day and still don’t earn enough money to feed their families. If people can work full-time and still can’t afford groceries, rent and medication, then the entire model is flawed and unfair. We can’t continue down this path of creating bottom-of-the-barrel, low-wage jobs that condemn our friends and neighbors to poverty.
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Attorney General Eric Holder’s sweetheart settlement with Switzerland’s second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says it well:
“Nor does the plea deal hold any officers, directors or key executives individually accountable for wrongdoing, raising the question of whether it will sufficiently deter similar misconduct in the future.”
Mr. Holder, of course, touted the deal as tough. Credit Suisse was fined a non-deductible $2.6 billion for their long, elaborate plan to provide tax evasion services for many thousands of wealthy Americans. The bank agreed to plead guilty of criminal wrongdoing – a rare demand on the usually coddled large financial institutions. In addition, Credit Suisse, in Mr. Holder’s words, failed “to retain key documents, allowed evidence to be lost or destroyed, and conducted a shamefully inadequate internal inquiry”… through a “conspiracy” that “spanned decades.”
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An anonymous Twitter account is highlighting the poor treatment of maids in Brazil.
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Having watched Tim Geithner’s disgusting defense of the tax-payer-backed re-inflation of a corrupt and knowingly devastating banking system on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and watching the US fine (no jail time for anyone) a Swiss bank which admits its guilt over billions of fraud yet allow them to remain a prime dealer of US Treasuries; we thought the following story from a ’3rd world banking system’ would open a few eyes in the US this weekend as ‘we remember’. As AP reports, a billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed Saturday, state television reported.
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Maybe this is because lefties don’t complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and “even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.” As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.
And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don’t remember that? I don’t suppose you would. That’s because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There’s just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.
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Housing booms are today’s medieval plagues. Boils suppurate on the political backside. People rush to find culprits to lynch. Quacks appear on street corners with fake remedies. Reason takes a holiday.
Thus it was yesterday, as the Today programme’s John Humphrys chided David Cameron for the “housing crisis” and for not building more houses in the Tory shires. It was like curing famine by sending caviar to Africa.
Meanwhile, everyone from Ed Miliband to the governor of the Bank of England screams crisis. There is a crisis when prices fall and a crisis when prices rise. Almost everywhere house prices are still bouncing along the bottom, but at London dinner parties they are a “bubble”.
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Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy.
Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it’s the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals.
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The situation is not entirely comparable to that of Europe and Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Nevertheless, the rise of these far-right parties, their ties to the economic hardships and austerity measures imposed by the European Union, and the spread of nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies are alarming.
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Virus ‘could sort out demographic explosion’ and by extension Europe’s ‘immigration problem’, says founder of Front National
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Politics
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New York Times columnist and NPR/PBS pundit David Brooks (5/19/14) has a solution to the problem with American democracy: We should have less of it.
Surveying the evidence around the globe, Brooks is worried that that democracy isn’t up to the task of managing the present. “Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning,” he laments. “Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for.”
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Former President George W. Bush once said, rather proudly, that he didn’t read newspapers.
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Censorship
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Europe’s moves to rein in Google — including a court ruling this month ordering the search giant to give people a say in what pops up when someone searches their name — may be seen in Brussels as striking a blow for the little guy.
But across the Atlantic, the idea that users should be able to edit Google search results in the name of privacy is being slammed as weird and difficult to enforce at best and a crackdown on free speech at worst.
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In July 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the quasi social-democratic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was elected president of Mexico. Soon after his election and on the inauguration day, massive protests occurred in Mexico, especially the capital, Mexico City, dubbing the election as fraud and, most of all, unfair, as per the Mexican presidential electoral system a candidate which receives most votes, even if not absolute majority, wins a six-year term in the presidential office.
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The censors have asked the makers of the Alia Bhatt Varun Dhawan starrer Humpty Dumpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya to cut the close up of a kiss while allowing a long shot of it on the screen.
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Twenty-four digital television stations have been permitted to resume regular broadcasts, but 14 other local TV channels and international news stations remain off air.
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In Pakistan, apprehensions are rife about Narendra Modi’s flamboyant success. But fervent Modi supporters in the Indian middle classes prefer to place him in the economic governance arena. Dawn recently talked to renowned Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, in Delhi to explore what Modi’s rise means for India.
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A Chinese blogger who called on US Secretary of State John Kerry to push for Internet freedom in China has been fired by his employer, he told AFP on Sunday.
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Privacy
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In particular, it described China as a main target of the U.S. clandestine secret surveillance.
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Afghanistan on Sunday expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.
Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the U.S. National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic [and international] phone calls.” Earlier last week journalist Glenn Greenwald had revealed that the NSA had been monitoring all the domestic and international phone calls of the Bahamas, but had refused to identify the second country, claiming he believed it could lead to the death of innocent people.
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Since the US Department of Justice announced indictments against 5 Chinese military officers, some US media have reported that the US is conducting spying operations not confined to national security. The claims are based on secret documents leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
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While a welcome first step toward reining in a government with “Big Brother” powers, the House bill falls short of the objective of its original sponsors. Transparency measures intended to guard against secret intrusions on personal privacy were weakened. And there are concerns about an undefined “specific selection term” to theoretically limit the reach of government intrusion into personal records and personal communications.
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…making it easier for government officials to gather information about Canadians’ online activities.
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If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.
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FOUR years ago, Valerie D’Orazio was writing a story about a character who knows too much. Whom people want silenced. And who ultimately delivers all her files to the media, via email, so the whole world shall know these dark secrets. Little could D’Orazio have known then that this Marvel Comics story, titled Punisher MAX: Butterfly, was professional prologue to another big assignment: Writing about the life and exploits of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is “considering’ returning to the United States if certain conditions are met, his lawyer told Germany’s Der Spiegel.
“There are negotiations,” Snowden’s German lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck said, according to a translation on RT.com, a news agency based in Russia. “Those who know the case are aware that an amicable agreement with the U.S. authorities will be most reasonable,” Kaleck said.
Snowden is not involved in the negotations, Kaleck told Der Spiegel.
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The US Congress has passed a bill that removes the NSA’s direct input into encryption standards.
According to a report at ProPublica, an amendment to the National Institute of Standards and Technology act removes the requirement that NIST consult with the NSA in setting new encryption standards.
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The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced the criminal indictments of five Chinese army officers, claiming that they helped Chinese companies steal American corporate business information, and that all five are from “Unit 61398″ of the People’s Liberation Army. Since February last year, the U.S. government has accused the unit “headquartered in Shanghai” of being part of a “hacker army” involved in the long-term theft of U.S. trade secrets.
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Scottish supporters of Edward Snowden say an independent Scotland should offer political asylum to the man whose disclosure of classified NSA documents revealed pervasive U.S. surveillance around the world.
Members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) have considered a call for the former NSA contractor, who is currently being sheltered in Russia, to be given political asylum in Scotland if voters opt for independence in September’s referendum.
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China has told its state-owned enterprises to sever links with American consulting firms just days after the US charged five Chinese military officers with hacking US companies, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
China’s action, which targets companies like McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), stems from fears the firms are providing trade secrets to the US government, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to senior Chinese leaders.
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The United States has accused some Chinese of hacking into American companies’ computers but the US itself has been engaging in massive spying of foreign companies and trade officials.
[...]
But in fact the US does spy on companies and trade policy makers and negotiators of other countries, presumably in order to obtain a commercial advantage.
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In January, after the disclosures by Edward Snowden about the scale of the US intelligence apparatus’s cyber snooping capabilities, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to curtail the National Security Agency’s damaging practices and to begin a conversation on how a balance between national security and civil liberties could be struck. If it was clear then that downsizing the surveillance state would be a difficult task, the version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives last week underscored that fact.
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An investigation committee set up by German parliamentarians to look into the NSA’s bulk collection of Europe’s telecommunications data may call several prominent U.S. tech company executives to testify, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, reports The Wall Street Journal. Other witnesses that the committee may call include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Dick Costolo, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) executive vice
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When National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was working to convince journalists to cover NSA documents he taken with him to expose evidence of dragnet warrantless surveillance, he was especially frustrated with one media organization, which has actually received recognition for its work on the NSA files: The Washington Post.
The story of how the Post became involved and, in many ways, let a whistleblower down is a testament to why future whistleblowers should be cautious when approaching such establishment media outlets. What happened is detailed in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA & the US Surveillance State.
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The Bahamas government officials want their US counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation.
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NBC anchor Brian Williams has landed an exclusive interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It will be Snowden’s first American television interview. Williams traveled to Moscow this week to speak with both Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for an hour-long special that will air during primetime on May 28th.
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The U.S.’ escalating feud with China over hacking charges could end up hurting IT suppliers in both countries, as suspicions and eroding trust threaten to dampen the tech exchange between the two nations.
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On the 2004 campaign trail, President Bush denied the existence of an American warrantless surveillance program. But inside the Department of Justice, an attorney leaked information to The New York Times explaining the National Security Agency did indeed eavesdrop on phones around the country.
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Unfortunately, the bill passed by the House on Thursday falls far short of those promises, and does not live up to its title, the USA Freedom Act. Because of last-minute pressure from a recalcitrant Obama administration, the bill contains loopholes that dilute the strong restrictions in an earlier version, potentially allowing the spy agencies to continue much of their phone-data collection.
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Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.
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An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.
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“While it represents a slight improvement from the status quo, it isn’t the reform bill that Americans deserve,” says a staff attorney with the ACLU.
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In the digital world, you never know who is spying on you. There’s hackers, nosy neighbors, a vengeful ex, the NSA, and that’s just a handful of the possibilities.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to keep your messages safe from prying eyes? Now there is.
Take a look at PQChat, an unhackable – yes, I said unhackable – secure instant messaging app.
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As it turns out, people really don’t want the government reading their email. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have launched a new email service featuring end-to-end encryption to ensure complete privacy for users.
Dubbed ProtonMail, the service claims to be fully anonymous. “Because of our end-to-end encryption, your data is already encrypted by the time it reaches our servers,” the site says. “We have no access to your messages, and since we cannot decrypt them, we cannot share them with third parties.”
According to Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, the service was inspired by the revelations of the massive citizen surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA) made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year.
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A new push to encrypt email, keeping messages free from government snooping, is gaining momentum. One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched last Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.
A major catalyst for email encryption were revelations about widespread online surveillance in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. “A lot of people were upset with those revelations, and that coalesced into this effort,” said Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, a new encrypted email service which launched last Friday with collaboration of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN.
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Meanwhile, US is engaged in massive electronic surveillance
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In the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden found a perfect match. I don’t mean to slight the contributions of Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, the other two journalists who first dug into Snowden’s amazing and unprecedented trove of National Security Agency (NSA) documents.
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One characteristic of a totalitarian state is that it is as determined to subjugate its own citizens as it is to conquer foreigners. That’s why Edward Snowden could tell the National Press Club by live video link from his Russian exile that when he was a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) he was appalled to see NSA “collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia.”
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HOLYROOD has triggered a major diplomatic row with the US over a proposal to grant asylum to the “traitor” Edward Snowden in the event of independence.
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Leading Conservative elder statesman Stockwell Day has joined the growing chorus of Canadians speaking out about how Bill C-13 would expose law-abiding Canadians to warrantless government spying. If passed, the controversial bill would grant immunity to telecom companies who hand our private information to the government without a warrant.
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“Play by the rules” seems to be Washington’s sacrosanct motto on international interaction. But time and again rules are just a lump of clay in Uncle Sam’s hands.
In a recent farce about cyber-security, the United States slapped some fabricated charges against five Chinese military officers, accusing them of hacking into the systems of U.S. companies to steal trade secrets.
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NSA defenders still won’t tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden
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It is twenty five years since Tim Berners-Lee had the germ of an idea that became the World Wide Web. Smartphones for everyone have been with us less than a decade. Technology is transformative and world changing. 150 years ago we didn’t have the electric light or the phonograph. Photography was a new and rare technology, and everything we take for granted in our lives today – central heating, hot and cold running water, flushing toilets, fridges, cars, radio, and TV – had yet to be invented, or was at the very least out of the reach of the average citizen.
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Civil Rights
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The US House of Representatives approved an annual defense spending bill early Thursday after rejecting a proposed amendment that would have prevented the United States government from indefinitely detaining American citizens.
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A day celebrating Black liberation utilized for white supremacy
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Obama’s timeline to open trove unmet; Agencies can block declassification
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The deadly Tuesday confrontation between police and 44-year-old Carlos Mejia, which came 11 days after a fatal police shooting of lettuce worker Osman Hernandez outside an East Alisal Street market, was captured on video and spread like a whirlwind on social media.
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Royal backing lets NCPO general tighten his grip on country as more activists and academics detained amid protests
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Calls grow for release of Meriam Yahya Ibrahim and her toddler son and for her sentence, including 100 lashes, to be rescinded
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A man who dressed up in a pig mask, toy bobby’s helmet and hi-vis jacket was arrested on suspicion of impersonating a police officer.
Steven Peers said he has often donned the mock outfit to perform ‘comical parodies’ of Greater Manchester Police after becoming unhappy with how officers behaved during the Barton Moss anti-fracking protests.
He wore it around Manchester city centre while filming sketches yesterday but was stopped by an officer near Bootle Street police station.
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Over the years, seven journalists were imprisoned for publishing an account of Sellis’ death.
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The FBI isn’t investigating any lawyers defending accused Sept. 11 plotters on trial at the Guantanamo military detention camp and has closed a probe of a non-attorney member of a defense team, the government said Wednesday.
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Before heading home this Memorial Day weekend to honor those Americans who fought and died for the principle of liberty, Congress did a number on the basic rights that define that liberty: Guantanamo remains open, Americans are still subject to indefinite detention, our endless wars abroad still have an open-ended legal basis, the NSA will keep spying on us, and the lawyer who said U.S. citizens are legitimate drone targets was just confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship.
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A lack of political will to let law enforcement agencies function independently within their mandate is the main reason for the deterioration of law and order situation in the country, former inspector general of police (IGP) Nurul Huda said yesterday.
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DRM
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Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will support Digital Restrictions Management in its Firefox Browser. The browser will have a built-in utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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As of 18:00 on Election Day, it is clear that the Pirate Party remains in the European Parliament for another term. The German exit polls predict that at least Julia Reda from Germany has just been elected as Member of European Parliament, securing a pirate seat for the coming term. More results as they come in (developing story).
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Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.
This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.
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The latest evidence: Amazon has escalated its battle against book publisher Hachette. Now Amazon won’t allow you to pre-order any Hachette books, the publisher confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday. That means you cannot buy the paperback version of Brad Stone’s Amazon exposé “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”
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Amazon appears to be trying to pressure a book publisher into agreeing to more favorable terms for the online retail giant by refusing to offer pre-orders of some of the publisher’s titles. Books for which Amazon is no longer taking orders include a new novel by J.K. Rowling and the paperback version of “The Everything Store,” an inside look at the operations of Amazon.
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Kim Dotcom has lost his bid to have evidence held by the FBI against him kept a secret. The information , a 200-page document which includes a sampling of 22 million emails relevant to his extradition case, may now be made public. Efforts by Dotcom to gain access to government held documentation against him were also rejected.
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The three largest BitTorrent trackers have banned the IP-ranges of several major hosting companies. The move aims to make it harder for anti-piracy outfits and other information gathering outfits to snoop on file-sharers. Unfortunately, the changes also mean that users of some VPNs, proxies and seedboxes can no longer connect.
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Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities. Most of the time they don’t, and the world gets a valuable public service of simple, ubiquitous Internet access.
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05.25.14
Posted in Law, Patents at 5:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In patent law, just like in most other areas of law, ‘reforms’ achieve nothing except reinforce the status quo
BOGUS ‘reforms’ are common vehicles for ‘normalising’ what’s already in place; such is the case with the NSA ‘reform’ that has been branded “Freedom”. Newspeak triumphs again.
The ‘Freedom’ Act basically stamps (for approval) what was lumped on top of ‘Patriot’ Act in the same way that patent ‘reforms’ in the US (also named along the lines of “invent” or “innovation”) basically authorise patent trolling and do nothing to limit patent scope, which expanded over time.
Years ago we cited reports that Intellectual Ventures, the world’s largest patent troll (which is highly connected to Microsoft), spent millions lobbying the US government along with Bill Gates. They don’t want anything to change. Now we know that patent trolls continue getting their way in Congress because money — not logic — drives US policy. To quote a long new report: “Trial lawyers are heavy donors to Democratic politicians, including Reid. A Washington Post article on Reid’s fundraising during his 2010 campaign noted big-money fundraisers taking place at a Florida trial lawyer’s home, as well as one held in California by the top securities class-action law firm, now named Robins Geller Rudman & Dowd.”
Another report from the same site shows how hard it has become to challenge patent trolls in the US:
Judge: FindTheBest can’t use anti-extortion law against a patent troll
[...]
Last year, consumer search website FindTheBest tried to use an anti-extortion law to fight back against Lumen View Technology, a patent troll that attacked it with a “matchmaking” patent. While FindTheBest was able to knock out Lumen’s patent in short order, its lawsuit based on the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act came to an end this week.
The judge’s opinion recounts some of the facts that led up to the RICO case, such as Lumen’s attorney, Damian Wasserbauer, accusing FindTheBest CEO Kevin O’Connor of committing a “hate crime” for using the term “patent troll” against one of Lumen’s owners.
Basically, not only patent law is flawed in the US; it’s now expanding to copyright in the sense that APIs are deemed copyright-able. █
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05.24.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Individuals and businesses migrate to Linux for a variety of reasons. Some do it for cost efficiency. Others make the computing change for the greater flexibility open source software provides.
Either way, leaving behind an existing computing system is not impossible. Deploying Linux desktop or server takes planning and resources, but that is what any business implementation takes.
The reasons for pushing users away from Microsoft in both desktop and server deployments are different for each customer. One of the recurring migration drivers is constant threat of Microsoft license fee increases. Another is the demand for community-sponsored support in lieu of corporate proprietary solutions, according to Tomas Zubov, CEO of IceWarp.
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Now that Valve has made the In-Home Steaming feature available to everyone who is using Steam, you might ask yourself if it’s of any use for the majority of the Linux players, but that’s not the most important question. This seemingly unimportant feature has much broader implications and it might be the game changer in the competition between Windows and Linux.
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The announcement has gone out. The gist? Flash will no longer work with Chromium on Linux. Many of you are probably wondering, “What is Chromium?” Essentially, Chromium is the open-source version of Google’s massively popular browser, Chrome. The big Flash debacle is simple: the old way of handling Flash (within a browser) is insecure. It was driven by the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) — an architecture that dates back to Netscape Navigator 2.0. NPAI that’s insecure, obsolete, and doesn’t work well on smartphones and tablets — which is a death knell in and of itself.
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Desktop
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I’ve never understood why some Linux distro developers seek to copy OS X. It’s a fine operating system in its own right, but if somebody wants OS X then why not just buy a Mac?
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Server
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Designed for massive server deployments, CoreOS consumes less than 200MB of working memory per instance
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IBM’s actual work on Linux in the 2000s wasn’t a philanthropic exercise – it gave IBM something vital in selling its x86 servers. It freed Big Blue from relying on single supplier Microsoft. IBM improvements to Linux and IBM server sales drove customer demand, which then drove improvements to Linux. Linux unhooked the enterprise data centre from its reliance on Windows and saw companies run both OSes.
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AMD’s “Bald Eagle” R-Series processors offer four 3.6GHz “Steamroller” cores with Heterogeneous System Architecture support, plus Mentor Embedded Linux.
AMD has a dual-platform strategy for embedded: G-Series on the low end and R-Series on the high end. Now, the chipmaker has launched a second generation of AMD Embedded R-series processors in both CPU and APU (accelerated processing unit) variants, with the latter offering integrated, rather than optional discrete AMD Radeon graphics. AMD tipped its Bald Eagle R-Series processors last September, and has launched sales for five new variants. The new R-Series CPUs are designed for gaming machines, digital signage, medical imaging, industrial control and automation, and communications and networking infrastructure, says AMD.
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Version 6.6 Beta 1 of the RHEL-derivative ClearOS is now available with new packages for this Linux distribution designed to serve as a network gateway/server.
ClearOS 6.6 Beta 1 is based on the latest upstream RHEL/CentOS packages while introducing packages for WordPress, Joomla, Tiki Wiki, and other changes. ClearOS 6.6 development also focuses upon IPv6 network support and ClearOS 7 compatibility.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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If you have a machine with slow hard disks and fast SSDs, and you want to use the SSDs to act as fast persistent caches to speed up access to the hard disk, then until recently you had three choices: bcache and dm-cache are both upstream, or Flashcache/EnhanceIO. Flashcache is not upstream. dm-cache required you to first sit down with a calculator to compute block offsets. bcache was the sanest of the three choices.
But recently LVM has added caching support (built on top of dm-cache), so in theory you can take your existing logical volumes and convert them to be cached devices.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA GRID Workspace is a virtualized desktop environment from NVIDIA that offers “cloud-delivered graphics acceleration for enterprise applications.” The NVIDIA GRID Windows client was released yesterday for a limited time only. Linux and Mac OS X are said to be in the works, so while I’m waiting for the Linux client to be released, I decided to test-drive the Windows client on an installation of Windows 7 Pro in a (VirtualBox) virtual environment.
Yes, that’s running a virtual desktop on a virtual desktop. I didn’t know how responsive the system will be, especially when I allocated only 1.3 GB of RAM to Windows 7 and it did not have hardware acceleration enabled.
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Benchmarks
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After this week having carried out benchmarks showing Intel’s Windows 8.1 OpenGL driver is outperforming their open-source Linux driver but NVIDIA’s driver on Ubuntu Linux is commonly faster than Windows 8.1, the time has come to benchmark several different AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Windows 8.1 Pro x64 with all available updates and each OS using the latest Catalyst 14.4 driver.
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Applications
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In my last article, I started a series called Command-Line Cloud. The intent of the series is to discuss how to use the cloud services we are faced with these days without resorting to a Web browser. I spend most of my time on the command line, so that’s where I’d most like to interface with cloud services. My last article described how to use Google Calendar from the command line, and in this article, I talk about a more general cloud service—RSS feeds. If I had written this column a few months ago, it would have been more focused on replacing Google Reader itself, because that was the primary RSS aggregator I used, but Google preemptively killed off the service and left a lot of users, including myself, scrambling to find a replacement. Although a number of people were able to find some sort of Web-based replacement, I realized the main features I wanted (sorting stories by date and vi key bindings to view the next story) were absent in a lot of the existing Google Reader replacements. What’s worse, a lot of people were using this as an opportunity to make a quick buck by selling access to RSS services (and of course, still capturing everyone’s valuable Web-viewing habits).
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Judging by its description and my observations, I fear that tcpspy may have crushed under the Wheels of Progress.
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I feel as though a great opportunity has been missed, a chance to really drive a peg into the landscape of *nix software. Look at this application, and tell me what you think it ought to be called:
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Proprietary
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INTEL HAS OUTED a refreshed version of its software development kit (SDK) for OpenCL applications running on the Windows and Linux operating systems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Most Linux gamers don’t want to spend $30+ USD for some game that’s several years old where they may already own the Linux copy, they could buy the Windows copy for just a few dollars, and where it runs fine under Wine/CrossOver software. With Valve on Linux, we’ll be getting fresh games and if you have the game already on Mac OS X or Windows, it should be available from the Steam Linux client (assuming it’s been ported to Linux).
The old titles from LGP also aren’t anything that were even really compelling when originally released, with most Windows gamers likely never even having heard of them, like Gorky 17, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, and Gorky 17. The few worthwhile games out of Linux Game Publishing were Shadowgrounds, X2/X3, Postal II, and Cold War.
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Unreal Engine developers Epic Games hope to make Linux a “first class member” of the Unreal Engine family for both gamers and developers.
While Unreal Tournament’s return to Linux was good news for gamers, developers could’ve been left with subpar tooling that would make it harder for indie developers and large game studios alike to justify the effort to adapt their complex workflows to our favourite OS.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Digia has upgraded its bootable, Linux and Android ready Qt Enterprise Embedded GUI with Qt 5.3, Qt Cloud support, Qt WebEngine, and Qt Quick Compiler.
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A few days ago we had the Krita Sprint 2014 in Deventer. It was very productive, with all expected topics discussed but also unexpected improvements that came from it.
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I continued to work on KOrganizer and was blown away by the community. The people were helpful, passionate, and excellent in what they were doing. It felt like meeting old friends, although we didn’t really know each other, and mostly only communicated via the Internet. Personal meetings came later, and the feeling of meeting friends has never gone away. It’s part of the magic of free software.
Over the years I wrote a lot of code, maintained frameworks and applications. I learned a lot. I grew into the board of KDE e.V. and am serving as its president now. I met a lot of people in KDE and in many other communities. I got a job working on and with free software, and I’m still doing it. It has been an incredible ride.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The gestures support for GTK+ seem to be primarily the result of One Laptop Per Child and Red Hat. Among the GTK+ gestures are for dragging, long presses, multi-press, panning, rotating, swiping, zooming, etc, and obviously geared for tablets and other input devices. The GTK+ gestures support is almost 10,000 lines of code.
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When Windows 8 was first released many people were shocked and even horrified by the garish Metro interface. Some even left Windows for Linux or shifted back to Windows 7. Now you can experience some of the…er…magic of the Metro interface in the Blue Pup distro (a Puppy Linux spin), according to LinuxInsider.
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LXLE is yet another Linux distribution that targets old/slow/aging PCs. LXLE 14.04 is now in beta and at its heart is powered by Ubuntu 14.04 with the LXDE desktop environment.
LXLE 14.04 Beta uses Lubuntu 14.04 as its base (the LXDE version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) while adding TLP by default for power management, improvements to the LXDE desktop components, and features other reported improvements to make this distribution supposedly better for old and slow PCs.
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A penetration test, or the short form pentest, is an attack on a computer system with the intention of finding security weaknesses, potentially gaining access to it, its functionality and data. A Penetration Testing Linux is a special built Linux distro that can be used for analyzing and evaluating security measures of a target system.
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LXLE, or Lubuntu Extra Life Extension Paradigm, is a distribution that is usually based only on the LTS (long term support) releases of Lubuntu, which means that these builds are pretty rare. The developers’ goal is to provide a very stable system that features support for a very long time, in this case for three years
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With a pint-sized PC like the Raspberry Pi, it’s fitting that it be paired with similarly small software. But managing to get a working operating system out of just 25MB? That’s no mean feat.
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Today, the Chakra team has announced the availability of a new version of their Linux distributions. This is the first release of the Chakra Descartes series which will follow KDE point releases( 4.13.1 for the moment ). The new version features new artwork ( more screenshots HERE) which improves many aspects of the operating system.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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The quick — back of the napkin — explanation of the Fedora.Next initiative is that Fedora will be producing 3 distinct products: Workstation, Server and Cloud. With the introduction of these products, each of them will need to have their own logo and a brand that ties them together. Máirín Duffy of the Fedora Design Team recently blogged the initial set of ideas of how these logos might look. Jump over to her blog and check it out, and if you want to get involved, the Fedora Design Team is always open to all volunteers.
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As we’ve covered, there have recently been several articles from publications including the Wall Street Journal and ReadWriteWeb stating that Red Hat won’t support customers who choose a rival OpenStack distribution. There is much controversy, surrounding the issue, and Mirantis’ Boris Renski has an interesting post up about the issue. “We are currently in active talks with Red Hat to collaborate on supporting RHEL for customers who choose the Mirantis OpenStack distribution,” he writes, as he forwards a number of points about how Red Hat’s policies could be more inclusive.
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Fedora
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California is simple and to the point. It shows your calendar, appointments, and lets you add appointments too. Pretty much all you need from a calendar app. It is also integrated with the “evolution data server” (the backend service that stores calendar data in Fedora), so your calendars appear in the drop-down when you click the clock at the top of the Fedora desktop.
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KDE Frameworks 5 Beta and Plasma Next, the two pieces of software that will eventually replace the current KDE SC paradigm on the desktops, have just landed in the Fedora 20 repository.
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Debian Family
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Acme Systems unveiled a Debian-ready, 53 x 53mm COM using Atmel’s SAMA5D3 SoC, with microSD, optional NAND flash, and extended temperature support.
Acme Systems, which earlier this year released an Arietta G25 computer-on-module built around Atmel’s 400MHz ARM9 SAM9G25 SoC, has now spun an “Acqua A5″ COM using the SAMA5D3. Atmel’s 536MHz, Cortex-A5 based system-on-chip has also appeared in ShiraTech’s SODIMM-style AT-501 COM, which similarly ships with Debian Linux.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has been very busy in the last couple of weeks promoting Ubuntu, but not the desktop version. It turns out that Ubuntu is a hit in the cloud ecosystem as well and that it dominates the OpenStack race.
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Flavours and Variants
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Netrunner 14 RC1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, featuring KDE as the default desktop environment and integrating many GNOME/GTK+ programs to make it Ubuntu-compatible, has been released and is now available for testing.
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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer. Tiny Core Linux is a tiny operating system designed to offer the bare minimum you need to get started while taking up as little disk space as possible. Seem like a match made in heaven? The folks behind Tiny Core thought so too… this year they launched a version of their operating system called PiCore which is designed to run on the Raspberry Pi.
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Tobii announced a Linux-based eyewear device with advanced eye-tracking software that lets market researchers see what’s capturing the viewer’s attention.
At first glance, Tobii Glasses 2 may look like another Google Glass competitor, but there’s more — and less — here than meets the eye. First, this is not a casual date: the glasses cost a whopping $14,900, and the Premium Analytics package goes for $29,900. Second, the eyewear is not designed for snapping photos of checking the Internet on the move. Instead, it lets researchers see what is captivating a test subject’s interest. The device can be used to watch what you’re looking at on a website, a TV screen, or signage, or when walking into a store or restaurant. They can analyze how you drive a car, train on equipment, or even play sports.
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Phones
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The Neo900 project remains an effort to provide a motherboard replacement for the once-popular Nokia N900 smart-phone while carrying on the tradition of the OpenMoko project.
The Neo900 project has been talked about for many months and there’s finally some new news… It turns out the Neo900 is making some progress but Golden Delicious Computers is stepping down from their role and issuing refunds as it’s cancelled the project, meanwhile there’s a new organization to take its place. The developers say Golden Delicious Computers cancelling the project “[fixes] the organizational structure issues and move everything forward.”
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Android
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Google introduced the £30 Chromecast in the UK back in March following the successful launch of the device in the US. Compared to the sale figure of more than a million devices shipped in the US, the 100k figure does pale in comparison, but nonetheless it is a solid start for the device in a new land. Also, given that fact that the device isn’t as pricey as some of its other competitors like Apple’s AirPlay and Roku 3, the Chromecast have a very good probability of being a dominant force in the field.
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Amazon, the company behind the most successful e-book reading device in the market has decided to spread its wings once again. The retail giant has been making many technological endeavors recently. First, they came up with Kindle, which was wildly successful. Then came Kindle Fire, which was a direct competitor to the Nexus line of tablets. If competing with Google wasn’t enough one time, Amazon came up with Kindle Fire TV. Now, if the rumors are true, Amazon is coming up with a new smartphone. Will it succeed? We don’t know. But we do have some expectations from the retail megastore.
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Some of you might not know this, but Android is actually based on the Linux kernel, although the Google developers are releasing it with a modified version of the kernel. This has been the case right from the beginning and the Android source has been released under a number of open source pieces of software.
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Fortunately, this streak of pragmatism was bound to end. In the past few weeks, we’ve picketed Mozilla for supporting DRM and pilloried Red Hat for competing against OpenStack rivals. The community that once spent years counting the number of free software angels that were bumped off the Open Core pin is back to eating its own.
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Vendors like MIPS owner Imagination, Broadcom and Qualcomm are looking to drive MIPS adoption with the Prpl Foundation.
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Two years ago Amit Rohatgi helped bring Google’s Android to MIPS processors. Today he wants to bring the rest of open-source software to the architecture.
Rohatgi’s latest effort is a consortium called prpl (pronounced purple). (The name was suggested by Rohatgi’s wife, a graphics designer, and refers to the logo color of Imagination Technologies, the company that bought MIPS in February 2013.) Its 10 founders include Broadcom, Cavium, Ikanos, Lantiq, PMC-Sierra, Qualcomm, and a handful of smaller companies that use or make MIPS-based chips.
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Samsung Electronics is considering joining Qualcomm’s AllJoyn project, but there is some debate over the possibility as Samsung is currently developing its own Internet of Things platform, industry watchers said Wednesday.
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Public sector organisations with proprietary systems that are struggling to provide competitive costs or innovation may provide the spur to overcome reluctance in the adoption of open source technology, according to one London CIO.
Geoff Connell, who is joint ICT head for two London boroughs, Havering and Newham, has said that although open source is already being adopted within the public sector, the technology is present used for more niche tasks rather than total solutions.
Connell’s thoughts continue the debate over whether open source technology can better cost efficiencies related to the use of proprietary software in the public sector.
For Connell, total cost of ownership (TCO) remains the key challenge to adopting open source software and technology in the public sector.
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AT&T wants to tap the open-source community to develop cool applications for connected wearables, mobile devices, home appliances and cars.
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Many of you can probably relate to this: that machine, whether it be a laptop or a desktop computer, that just seems to hate any Linux operating system you throw at it. Poor performance, inefficiency or non-working bits of hardware or functionalities seem the norm whenever you try your favourite Linux distro on it to the point where you reluctantly accept this machine may only ever be usable on it’s factory installed OS (often Windows, of course). I too had this experience but it turns out sometimes a little patience and the fast moving nature of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) can turn things around.
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When you want to set up an application, most likely you will need to create an administrative account and add users with different privileges. This scenario happens frequently with content management, wiki, file sharing, and mailing lists as well as code versioning and continuous integration tools. When thinking about user and group centralization, you will need to select an application that fits your needs.
If the application can connect to a Single Sign On server, users happy will be happy to remember only one password.
In the proprietary landscape of directory servers, Active Directory is the dominant tool, but there are directory servers that can also satisfy your needs. The LDAP protocol is the base for all the open source alternatives, independently of how they are implemented. This protocol is an industry standard and allows you to create, search, modify, and delete your users or groups. And, if the application is able to connect to an LDAP server, you will not have to be concerned with understanding the protocol.
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Events
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The OpenStack Juno Summit from May 12 to 16 provided users, vendors and developers of the open-source cloud platform with a forum to discuss ideas and innovations. The OpenStack initiative got started in 2010 as a joint effort of NASA and Rackspace, and has grown to include tech heavyweights such as including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco and AT&T.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Other Chrome releases are also now updated to Version 35, including Chrome OS and Chrome for Android.
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After what feels like forever in the making, Google has today released the first stable version of Chrome for Linux to use Aura, the search giant’s in-house graphics stack.
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Mozilla
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Fresh Player Plugin is a new (alpha!) wrapper that allows Linux users to use Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Firefox, Opera and other NPAPI-compatible browsers.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The CEO of Nebula as well as the company’s founder discuss how they plan on scaling the business in an increasingly competitive market.
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OpenStack at its core is an open source project – it’s free code. But what makes OpenStack come alive are the vendors that have contributed to make that raw code and then turned it into a product businesses can use. Here are the top 15 companies leading that effort.
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OpenStack has an impressive list of corporate backers. Red Hat, Rackspace, HP, IBM and AT&T are contributing thousands of lines of code to the open source project and helping deliver an updated version of the cloud computing platform twice a year to allow for easier installation and better manageability.
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What is an OpenStack superuser? Or perhaps more aptly, who is an OpenStack superuser? As OpenStack continues to mature and slowly make its way into production environments, the focus on the user is continuing to grow. And so, to better meet the needs of users, the community is working hard to get users to meet the next step of engagement by highlighing those users who are change agents both in their organization and within the OpenStack community at large: the superusers.
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Healthcare
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An NHS England leader has told Trusts to look towards open source for electronic patient record (EPR) systems.
During the e-Health Insider (EHI) CCIO open source conference, Richard Jefferson, the Health Service’s head of business systems, claimed such solutions provide “the biggest bang for buck.”
Jefferson also added that the organisation is prioritising the EPR space and encouraging a move to open source because of the greater value for money it offers for Trusts.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Command line options take precedence over configuration file statements.
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Openness/Sharing
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Huang’s diligence paid off and at a time when other kids were focused on getting a high score on Asteroids, he was reading DIY electronics guides in Byte magazine and building add-on cards for the Apple II.
Today Huang, who goes by the nickname ‘bunnie’, has just drummed up more than $700,000 through the website Crowd Supply for his project to build an open source computer called Novena.
Huang is setting out to create a machine whose inner workings are as transparent as the computer that three decades ago sparked his lifelong interest in creating hardware.
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Open Data
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Not long ago, the working definitions of “open government” and “open data” barely overlapped. Open government was all about holding up government to public scrutiny via Watergate-era methods—namely, making sure that meetings were held in public and that agencies responded to requests for information. Open data was about providing information in formats that computers can understand. Today, open government and open data overlap so substantially that it’s routinely necessary to explain that they’re different.
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Open Hardware
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Servergy, a Texas-based IT innovation and design firm and IBM technology partner announced a partnership with the University of Texas Wednesday in a move that will see the two open a lab designed to marry innovations developed through IBM’s OpenPower Foundation and the Facebook-led Open Compute Project.
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In March 2014 alone, Twitch was single handedly responsible for 1.35% of all downstream traffic in North America.
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The evidence is mounting that a deliberate action by someone on board caused the diversion and disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. But over the past week and a half since the plane vanished, as contradictory information came in from various sources, people floated plenty of crazier ideas about the plane’s fate.
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Security
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A day has passed since the online tat bazaar admitted its customer database was hacked back in February, and the method of encryption is still not known. We do what wasn’t encrypted: millions of people’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses, which were stored in the ransacked database alongside the passwords.
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Jordan said in his tweet that he notified about the vulnerability to eBay. A screenshot published in his twitter account shows that he is able to upload a ‘shell.php’ file in the following location…
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Another day, another company that has disclosed that one of its main databases has been hacked and user information has been compromised. So far eBay hasn’t divulged full details of the breach. Reportedly the attackers accessed about 145 million records. Now, the online auction company is urging its 128 million active users to change their passwords. The attackers were able to access everything from users’ full names and addresses to email addresses. But eBay asserts that the compromised database didn’t contain financial information, which the company encrypts anyway. The company also said PayPal users weren’t impacted. The breach, which is just the latest in a long list of security issues that have affected large enterprises with large customer bases, should teach us a lot about security, or the general lack of it, across the Web. The massive Target breach in December showed what can happen when huge databases containing customer information are breached and the data stolen. Reports about eBay demonstrate, once again, how even a huge Internet business, which should know how to defend itself against sophisticated cyber-attacks, can be compromised. This eWEEK slide show highlights what we can learn from this latest attack.
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A protocol based on “discrete logarithms”, deemed as one of the candidates for the Internet’s future security systems, was decrypted by EPFL researchers. Allegedly tamper-proof, it could only stand up to the school machines’ decryption attempts for two hours.
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Traditional password authentication has long been recognised as the weak link in the security chain, even before the Heartbleed vulnerability exposed the private keys of millions of servers worldwide. A password the user can easily remember is rarely a good password, while a good password is rarely easy to remember.
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Andy Greenberg has an online article in this morning’s (May 23, 2014) Wired.com, with the title above. Mr. Greenberg writes that, “for the past two years, DARPA has been working to make waging cyber war — as easy as playing a video game.” “On Wednesday,” he notes, “DARPA showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-standing software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months: that program has had a new toy. The agency is experimenting with using Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — to give cyber warriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations — in some cases with the goal of better targeting for them to attack.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The defendants were three Chechen brothers, one of whom was accused of shooting Politkovskaya in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006, as well as their uncle and a former police officer.
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In a New Zealand television interview last week, American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill said in that the National Party government is “extremely aware” of US drone attacks, including one which killed NZ citizen Daryl Jones (also known as Muslim bin John) in Yemen last year. Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, who was in Auckland at a writers’ festival, also implicated the Australian government.
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Gov. Terry Branstad signed 11 bills into law Friday, including a ban the sale of electronic cigarettes and alternative nicotine products to minors in Iowa and a separate measure designed to create parameters for the use of drones, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles.
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A year ago, President Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University in Washington in which he made the case that it was time to wind down the “boundless global war on terror ” and “perpetual wartime footing” that has been a feature of American life since 9/11.
Indeed, the CIA drone program in Pakistan has stopped completely since the beginning of this year. This is a noteworthy development given the fact that there have been 370 drone strikes in Pakistan over the past decade that have killed somewhere between 2,080 to 3,428 people; most of whom were suspected militants, but also a smaller number of civilians.
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During a discussion on President Obama sending troops into Chad to help the search for the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano told Shepard Smith that American drone strikes have done more damage than the terrorist organization.
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Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America”.
Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.
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Five new Reaper drones announced by David Cameron in December 2010 to support British troops in Afghanistan are still not yet in operation, the Bureau can reveal.
The new drones were bought as an urgent purchase and were part of a £135m package intended to effectively double the size of the UK’s fleet of armed drones in Afghanistan, and its surveillance capacity. But more than three years after the purchase was announced, and with just months to go before the UK’s troops are due to leave the conflict, the additional Reapers are yet to take to the skies.
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Anti-war protesters displaying model drones and photos of known victims of the US military and secret CIA targeted assignation program will greet family and friends of the graduates as they enter West Point gates at 7 am. The protest will extend to 9:30 am; graduation ceremonies begin at 10:00 am.
The protest has special meaning for those in the US Army because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, a more deadly version of the infamous Predator drone, is being integrated into use in every Army division.
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That President Obama, formerly a professor of constitutional law, and David J. Barron, “one of the memo’s authors” and an Obama nominee to a federal appeals court judgeship, could conceive of even a shred of justification for such crimes boggles the mind.
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President Obama gave an eloquent speech on May 23, 2013 on the issues of endless war, US drone strikes, Guantanamo, and the 12-year old AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force). Compare his words then with the reality one year later.
“For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our debts and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.”Reality? The “direct” cost of our Iraq & Afghan wars is over $1.5 trillion, and the Administration wants a $79 billion blank check for fighting undefined wars in FY 2015. (That’s on top of a “basic” Pentagon budget of $495 billion).
“…there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility (Guantanamo) that should never have been opened.” Reality? There were 166 prisoners at Guantanamo a year ago, 154 now. Most of them have been formally cleared for release, and most of the rest have not been formally charged. Hunger strikes there are on-going. Efforts to secure the release of US Army POW Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Afghan Guantanamo prisoners have not succeeded.
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A year after President Obama laid out new conditions for drone attacks around the world, US forces are failing to comply fully with the rules he set for them.
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Libya’s renegade General Khalifa Haftar is leading a military campaign against the country’s Islamist-led government and militants; however, his past life in America and old ties to the CIA are likely to be a stumbling block on his road to power.
Following his botched February coup attempt –when he appeared on television announcing the dissolution of the government only to be scoffed at by the-then Prime Minister Ali Zeidan as “ridiculous” – launched this week “Operation Dignity” to rid Libya of “terrorists” and “corrupt” officials.
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Commander has managed to rally influential bodies in offensive against post-Gaddafi government but is dogged by old CIA link
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The American public might never get to know the entire history of the events that occurred during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, not at least until the Central Intelligence Agency is finished revising the draft copy of its history, which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA’s cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA’s draft “official history” could be withheld from the public under the “deliberative process” privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.
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Every day across the planet the CIA instigates the arrest, torture and murder of people whose only wrongdoing is opposing the crimes being committed by those in league with Pax Americana. Arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, all of the most evil activities on this planet are being instigated and directed by the CIA. So why is Glenn Greenwald protecting these bastards?
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The confrontation between the Kiev putschists, backed by NATO and Ukrainian federalists, supported by Russia, has reached a point of no return.
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Made available today: a letter from Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, which was sent to President Obama in January of this year and urged him to speed things up in the 9/11 case—chiefly by declassifying additional information regarding the CIA’s long-since-discontinued program of rendition, detention and interrogation.
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Covert U.S. planning to block the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile began weeks before his September 4, 1970, victory, according to just declassified minutes of an August 19, 1970, meeting of the high-level interagency committee known as the Special Review Group, chaired by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “Kissinger asked that the plan be as precise as possible and include what orders would be given September 5, to whom, and in what way,” as the summary recorded Kissinger’s instructions to CIA Director Richard Helms. “Kissinger said we should present to the President an action plan to prevent [the Chilean Congress from ratifying] an Allende victory…and noted that the President may decide to move even if we do not recommend it.” – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155768#sthash.svf3Lrin.dpuf
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The CIA, the Coup Against Allende, and the Rise of Pinochet
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In fact, that’s why America’s Founding Fathers opposed a standing army for the United States. It’s also why President Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers that the military-industrial complex pose to America’s democratic processes. It’s also why President Truman, thirty days after the Kennedy assassination, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post that talked about the sinister nature of the CIA.
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West also said he was told the attackers were with Ansar al-Sharia and government officials are being threatened with their pensions being cut if they speak out about Benghazi.
As far as why U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi at the time, West claims he was informed that there was a “covert weapons scheme going on in Libya, Benghazi.”
“We had been supplying radical Islamists with weapons against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, effectively supplying the enemy and destabilizing that country,” he added.
“And it seems that there was a CIA weapons buy-back program, the aim of which was to ship the retrieved weapons out of Libya through Turkey, and to the Islamist forces in Syria.”
West apparently believes in his source enough to allege Benghazi will “make Iran-Contra look like Romper Room.” However, due to the unanswered questions about the source, it’s impossible to verify the claims at this time.
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Those were the words not of an aggressive Chinese spy, but none other than Stansfield Turner, the Carter-era CIA director, who in 1992 argued that the United States should more aggressively carry out intelligence operations aimed at securing America’s leading economic position in the world.
If it weren’t for matters of patriotism, the former CIA director probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at allegations of Chinese spying unveiled by a Pennsylvania grand jury and the Department of Justice this week.
Indeed, the tactics the Obama administration has accused China of using have also been debated at the highest levels of the U.S. government as possible instruments of American power. Other countries have carried out operations similar to those the Pennsylvania grand jury have accused Chinese spies of carrying out.
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Transparency Reporting
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Of course, thanks to Wikileaks this evening, we now know the country that Glenn Greenwald redacted from his original report was Afghanistan.
Why on earth should the Afghanis not be allowed to know the sheer scale of surveillance they live under? In fact, would many be surprised? This is an excellent related article, do read.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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At least 21 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in Vietnam on Thursday during violent protests against China in one of the deadliest confrontations between the two neighbours since 1979.
Crowds set fire to industrial parks and factories, hunted down Chinese workers and attacked police during the riots, which have spread from the south to the central part of the country following the start of the protests on Tuesday.
The violence has been sparked by the dispute concerning China stationing an oil rig in an area of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. The two nations have been fighting out a maritime battle over sovereignty and that battle has now seemingly come ashore.
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Glaciologist Richard Alley explains that losing West Antarctica would produce 10 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries. That’s comparable to the flooding from Sandy—but permanent.
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Sawant and Spear are buddies because she left her scientific research to help run Sawant’s victorious Socialist Alternative campaign for City Council last year. She also spent much of that time as Organizing Director of the $15 Now campaign, which is somehow magically about to pass just a year after it began, to the collective bewilderment of the rest of the United States.
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Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who—other than a few suckers—could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.
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Finance
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Three in ten Britons believe that they will soon be replaced in their job by a robot, according to a report.
Almost half of the 2,000 members of the British public surveyed (46 per cent) admitted they are concerned that technology is evolving too quickly and is undermining traditional ways of life.
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Searching for growth opportunities in a world still beset by financial crisis, multinational corporations and globalists are hyping all kinds of “emerging markets.”
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Almost four out of 10 Canadians who don’t have a job have completely given up hope of ever finding one, a new survey suggests.
In a poll carried out by Harris Poll and published Friday by employment agency Express Employment Professionals, the company surveyed 1,502 unemployed Canadians. None of them had a job, and not all of them were receiving EI benefits.
The results were eye-opening.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Labour played the game of negative expectations in a massive way, claiming a net gain of 150 seats would be a victory for them. So far they have a net gain of just 82. But the extraordinary thing is that the BBC have, throughout the Breakfast News period – the largest TV news watch of the day – been unable to add up all the council seats yet. Sky has totaled every single one of the council seats declared overnight, while the BBC has been able to total under half – and the BBC has come up with a Labour net gain of 102. This has enabled the BBC to show a three figure Labour gain on its strapline all morning, and lead every news bulletin: “Major gains for UKIP in English local elections. Labour has also made gains. A poor night for the Conservatives and Lib Dems”.
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The BBC are way behind in their totalizing, and cherry picking the Labour gains. The BBC have consistently been showing about 7% of all seats contested as Labour gains. Sky consistently shows under 3% of all seats contested as Labor gains.
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The public may be on the cusp of learning more about the two “John Doe” investigations into Scott Walker, his associates, and groups that spent millions to get him elected.
On May 21, the Wisconsin judge in the now-closed 2010-2013 “John Doe I” investigation into Walker’s County Executive during his 2010 run for governor ordered the release of all records gathered in the probe that pertain to county business. That probe resulted in six convictions for Walker aides and associates, including for political fundraising on the taxpayer’s dime. Now, the decision about what records to release rests with Walker’s successor as County Executive, Chris Abele.
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Censorship
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Information minister Ahmed Bilal Osmanan announced on 21 May that a “special commission” would soon be created to examine all proposed articles about corruption to decide whether or not they can be published. The commission would be under his ministry’s supervision and would consist of members of the president’s office, the government and parliament, he said.
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A former political science professor was discussing the Thai army’s declaration of martial law on live TV when the talk show was suddenly interrupted to transmit order No. 9 from the Peace and Order Maintaining Command.
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An Iranian court ordered Iran’s Ministry of Telecommunications to block Instagram due to privacy concerns on Friday, according to the “semiofficial” Iranian news agency Mehr.
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A columnist for a Turkish newspaper has proved her own point all too well after a piece she wrote criticizing Ankara’s crackdown on press freedom was rejected by her editor.
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Privacy
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LG certainly feels it has the right to do this. In fact, it makes no secret of this in its long Privacy Policy — a document that spends more time discussing the lack thereof, rather than privacy itself. The opening paragraph makes this perfectly clear.
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LG seems very concerned that Smart TV owners won’t allow it to provide them with “relevant ads.” This focus on advertising might give one the impression that a Smart TV is subsidized by ad sales, rather than paid for completely by the end user.
When LG was caught sending plaintext data on files stored on customers’ USB devices, it amended its policies and data collection tactics to exclude this data. This happened not on the strength of a customer complaint (in fact, LG told the customer to take it up with the store that sold him the TV) but because the UK government announced its intention to dig into LG’s practices and see if they conformed with the Data Protection Act.
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COLORADO SPRINGS: The intelligence community is on the verge of “revolutionary” technical advances. Spy satellites and other systems will be able to watch a place or a person for long periods of time and warn intelligence analysts and operatives when target changes its behavior. Satellites and their sensors could be redirected automatically to ensure nothing is missed.
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The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.
But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.
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Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me? What better evidence can that argument find than multiple influential American journalists standing up and cheering while a fellow journalist is given space in The New York Times to argue that those who publish information against the government’s wishes are not only acting immorally but criminally?
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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been recording and storing nearly all domestic and international phone calls from Afghanistan, according to Wikileaks’ front man Julian Assange.
Wikileaks revealed the name of the country after The Intercept reported Monday that the NSA was actively recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas and one other country under a program called SOMALGET. The Intercept said it did not name the second country because of concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.
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The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country “X”.
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Mostly lost in the past week’s media gossip around NYT executive editor Jill Abramson’s ouster, and Dean Baquet’s promotion to her role: Baquet is the former LA Times editor who killed the biggest NSA leak pre-Edward Snowden.
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The seven-page secret report by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), seen by Bild newspaper, discusses five possible ways the NSA could have gained access to Merkel’s phone. The story caused outrage in Germany when it came to light in October last year.
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The National Security Agency [NSA] has reportedly gained direct access to the fiber optic network linking Vienna, Austria to the Internet, and has been spying on the roughly 17,000 diplomats stationed in the Austrian capital city, where several important international organizations are headquartered, including the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/us/news/2014_05_24/NSA-Spying-In-Austria-Beyond-Unacceptable-Analyst-9767/
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Frontline’s expansive report on the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks (United States of Secrets) has uncovered some rather amazing stuff about the agency’s mindset. The post-9/11 decision to deflect every question or concern with conjecture about how “thousands of lives” will be lost if its programs are rolled back or altered in any way continues to this day — rehashed in every government hearing and set of talking points since the leaks began.
“Live in fear” is the motto. Every question about domestic surveillance is greeted with nods to its legality and assertions that even acknowledging known facts about the NSA’s programs gives our nation’s enemies the upper hand.
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The US government used security concerns to essentially drive Chinese companies out of the American networking marketplace. Now China is doing the same thing, as the Chinese government is planning to require all products sold in the country to pass a “cyber security vetting process,” the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported.
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Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing group announced plans to publish an NSA report that allegedly could get people killed. The question is: How did they get the documents?
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Members of the German parliamentary commission, which is investigating the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) questionable activity, want the heads of US high-tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google, to testify to the Bundestag, writes Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In March, the German parliament’s lower house voted to investigate the NSA’s operations in Germany. According to the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other members of the German political and economic elite.
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But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.
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Over the past two weeks, I watched the two-part PBS “Frontline” investigation broadcast locally on WNED titled, “The United States of Secrets.” This was an engrossing yet chilling report on the secret NSA spy program that encompasses the intrusions into the privacy of all U.S. citizens as well as foreign entities. This is the program that began after 9/11 under President George W. Bush and has been expanded upon under President Obama.
I found myself becoming very angry while watching this program, perhaps more for the fact that both presidents continue to mislead and even lie to the American public about the scope of the spying rather than the actual privacy intrusion itself. Yes, many people will say: “Oh, it doesn’t affect me. I have nothing to hide.” But this country was built upon the Constitution and our rights are being trampled under the guise of security from terrorism. Major U.S. Internet and communications providers are cooperating with the NSA in granting access to our emails, phone calls, messages, Skype calls and even our financial transactions.
I think the thing that may disturb me the most is the silence over this issue from the American public. In my opinion, Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower and should be applauded for his disclosures rather than ostracized and condemned as a criminal. Wake up, America, before it’s too late.
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Irony alert! Google Maps has labelled the now infamous NSA data centre in Utah a “hard drive backup service.”
While not technically inaccurate, it’s also hardly descriptive.
The NSA’s data centre in Utah is the focal point of many of the surveillance operations brought to light by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. It was popularized after an article in Wired Magazine last year profiled its construction and purpose. It includes four 25,000-square-foot buildings just to hold servers. It has its own power plant and substation. Security is intense and nobody gets close to it without proper clearance.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said she is willing to consider the surveillance reform bill passed by the House on Thursday, which would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of phone records.
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In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents. “We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories … that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, ‘This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do,” Greenwald says. “It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government.”
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One of the results of the endless propagation of this myth was the creation of so-called “intelligence fusion centers” throughout the United States, initially funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Now sustained by state and local governments, with occasional aid from DHS, fusion centers are staffed by representatives from federal, local, and state agencies, as well as members of private industry. They have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars over the last ten years, but even though they were set up as anti-terrorism intelligence offices, none has thus far produced any useful information about terrorism.
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This is interesting. People accept government surveillance out of fear: fear of the terrorists, fear of the criminals. If Watts is right, then there’s a conflict of fears. Because terrorists and criminals — kidnappers, child pornographers, drug dealers, whatever — is more evocative than the nebulous fear of being stalked, it wins.
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Civil Rights
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Corrie’s father expresses hope that the top justices ‘understand what it means to protect civilians,’ and that they reverse the trend of impunity for the IDF.
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Sweden: Yesterday, on May 21st, 7 swedish anti-fascists were convicted for up to 2 years and 4 months. This comes shortly after Joel Almgren was accused of protecting a rally from a neo-nazi attack that the police knowingly let happen. Antifascist comrade Joel has been sentenced to 6 and 1/2 years for stabbing a neo nazi in self defense during the incident. Please check the Free Joel event page for updates on how to help these comrades, and how to write them.
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The real battle is between popular politicians and an entrenched elite that is frightened by its electoral defeat
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Iranian court is asked to order the public flogging of award-winning actress Leila Hatami for greeting Cannes festival president with a kiss
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There was a time when reparations for slavery was a hot issue in race discussions in America. Randall Robinson’s The Debt was widely read, and there were endless forums on the issue nationwide. However, 9/11 broke the flow, and before long, Hurricane Katrina and then a certain senator from Illinois basically rendered reparations yesterday’s news.
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Thousands of demonstrators staging a peaceful protest at the McDonald’s headquarters were met by police in riot gear on Wednesday when the low-wage fast food workers and their supporters stormed the Illinois campus to say: “Make our Wage Supersize!”
The protest was held on the eve of the fast food giant’s annual shareholder meeting at the company’s corporate campus outside Chicago, during which activist shareholders are expected to vote against CEO Donald Thompson’s $9.5m pay package, the Guardian reports. Protesters are also planning to picket that meeting.
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The blogger was warned in his interrogation that exposing the identity of security operatives was a “crime against national security.” Doing so, he was told, carried a three-year jail term. Only in police states is this the case. In democracies, we’re entitled to know the names of our accusers whether civilian or official. They also used another classic police state tactic: they asked Noam to name the names of other peace activists with whom he worked. Though I understand why he couldn’t do so, I would’ve asked to make a bargain with Rona and told her I’d name a name for every Shin Bet agent she would name.
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Accusations of torture and mistreatment abound as several Palestinian lawyers are arrested by Israeli authorities.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Bogus copyright claims on YouTube are getting more and more prevalent, but they only get exposure when they do damage to high-profile targets. Michael Tiemann is the Chief of Open Source Affairs at Redhat Inc. and apparently he can’t use Creative Commons music in his uploads without being bombarded with copyright claims.
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This testimony – “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – was published by Leila Borg, a person who grew up in the Soviet Union but moved to Sweden after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It has been translated to English and reposted here for a wider audience.
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 7:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft: Cracking, racketeering, and corruption of officials
Satya Ballmer
Summary: The delusion of Microsoft as “open” or “law-abiding” still being promoted in the press, often by those who are paid by Microsoft
MICROSOFT is not a reformed company. Under Satya’s supposed ‘leadership’ there is still patent extortion (see recent examples) and Microsoft is attacking ODF, an international standard, after the British government selected it (basically not requiring all British citizens to become customers of Microsoft and proprietary spyware users). Based on this inquiry from Glyn Moody (British journalist), Microsoft lobbyists or some proxy of Microsoft like BSA are almost definitely still working hard to intercept pro-standards policies, not just FOSS policies. Watch what Moody writes:
Readers with good memories may recall that back in 2012, I put in a Freedom of Information request to the Cabinet Office regarding an astonishing U-turn it had performed on the matter of open standards. To my surprise, I received back a treasure trove of emails documenting Microsoft’s intense – and evidently successful – lobbying against the move to openness.
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As you can see, that was nearly a month ago, and I have still not received the full reply, which means that the Cabinet Office is now really late. And that, in its turn, probably means that there is obviously something very interesting regarding open standards and Microsoft, which the Cabinet Office is reluctant to let me see. Time for another email reminding them of their legal obligations, I think….
It is rather telling, is it not?
Despite all this, amid the latest openwashing by Microsoft, there are so-called journalists (working as Microsoft-funded analysts, but we shall refrain from naming this one person or his employer) who say that Microsoft “Suspicion [is] Waning”, adding the usual Satya-washing of Microsoft (making it look like the company has changed under new public-facing leadership). The journalist says: “Though there typically is no shortage of pushback against Microsoft when it makes open source moves, the skepticism and suspicion seem to be giving way to technicality and practicality, both within and outside of Microsoft. By continuing to promote openness, integration and true collaboration with other vendors and technologies, including open source, Microsoft is doing its part to ensure its place in key trends such as cloud computing and devops” (just buzzwords, no substance there).
This is complete and utter hogwash. There has been nothing more dangerous than Microsoft entryism and increased influence in bodies like the Linux Foundation, which evidently learned no lessons from Nokia. They take Microsoft’s money and the outcome is self-evident.
People who try to sell us the idea that Microsoft is now better (or ethical) just don’t pay attention to facts. Microsoft is actively attacking everything FOSS, standards, and GNU/Linux. Selective attention or selective reporting is the tool of propagandists. These people are part of the problem and it’s hardly shocking that some of them (almost all of them) are paid by Microsoft. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Internet Explorer facilitates remote search by spooks and non-government crackers
Summary: Another remotely-exploitable hole in Windows and more reasons for OEMs to choose GNU/Linux (e.g. Chrome OS) for new computers
ANTI-FOSS pundits like to distract. They are using OpenSSL to accuse FOSS as a whole of insecurity, based on just one bug. There are examples of this even in the past week’s news. It’s disproportional. Rarely do these pundits allude to Microsoft’s back doors for the NSA, which turn out to even include this remotely-accessible back door:
Microsoft has failed to address a remotely exploitable security flaw affecting the most widely used version of Internet Explorer.
This has been known about since last year. This is worse than negligent; it may actually be deliberate.
China recently banned Vista 8 in government. This is going to inspire other nations sooner rather than later. Some say that Microsoft is likely to not only alienate nations but also OEMs. One Microsoft booster, Gavin Clarke, believes that Microsoft has just distanced itself from PC makers “because Microsoft actually sees the Surface Pro 3 as a laptop killer.” To quote his piece:
It’s a marketing and a business decision that can only cause more damage to Microsoft’s relationships with PC and channel partners on Windows 8, and to its broader mission of encouraging uptake of its latest PC operating system.
One sure thing is, Microsoft is losing its dominance on the desktop, partly due to other form factors but also because of GNU/Linux (Chrome OS) on laptops. Many OEMs are now marketing and selling with great success so-called “Chromebooks”. It’s hard to ignore this trend at the local stores. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Killing the Web because of copyright lobbying
Summary: The MPAA-funded (occupied) W3C and Mozilla without Eich open the door to DRM on more or less everything, not just video
Microsoft patents on font DRM and other such malicious ideas should not be treated as news; this is old stuff, which was never likely to gain much of a foothold because FOSS browsers were around and were thriving. Google and Apple, however, joined with the monopolistic power of Microsoft, are now enjoying Adobe’s role in Mozilla, which supports DRM after the DRM-hostile CEO got ousted.
Glyn Moody has already challenged [2] Mozilla on the matter of text DRM, noting: “There seems to be a belief amongst people working on the project that video is special in the way that it uses DRM, and that pandering to the film industry’s demands by including DRM in Firefox will only have limited damage outside this industry.”
This is untrue and this is why it’s a big deal. People in Mozilla and the W3C (even the Web’s founder/creator) seem to be turning the Web into a new kind of monster which is both insecure [1] and restrictive [2], potentially ending one’s ability to copy and paste text or images, leaving FOSS browsers (such as Iceweasel) out of the loop. It’s not just censorship, tiered Web (slow lanes), and massive surveillance that are killing the Web as we once knew it. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Mozilla recently decided to add DRM in Firefox even if Mozilla hates it. Almost all video streaming websites use some kind of DRM and as Microsoft, Apple and Google has already implemented DRM in their browsers, Mozilla thinks not adding the DRM in Firefox would make it useless as a product as the user will have to switch to other browser everytime a user visits a website with DRM.
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The publishing industry would give anything to have the option to impose DRM on all online text in the same way that the film industry has for video. Indeed, publishers were so desperate to add DRM to ebooks that many of them adopted Amazon’s DRM system without thinking it through. By effectively making Amazon’s system the de facto DRM standard, the publishing industry has handed control of the ebook system to the retailer – read this excellent post by Charlie Stross for a full explanation of what happened and what it means.
That experience, I think, is why the publishing industry has not so far pushed for DRM on the Web: it needed a completely neutral DRM standard that would not give control to any one entity. The new HTML5 DRM framework provides publishers with exactly what they need: power over users, but independence from any one DRM supplier.
DRM for video is simply a Trojan Horse for all the copyright industries. Once all the main browsers have adopted it for video, the publishing (and music) industry will be able to point out that extending it to their media will be a small step now that the basic plumbing is in place. By acquiescing in this move, Mozilla makes it even more certain that this will happen.
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05.22.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Chinese OS developers are thrilled at news of the ban on Windows 8 by the central government, as the decision presents an opportunity to seize market share in the future, Xinhua news said on Thursday.
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Server
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In a series of recent interviews with IBM, the company made official its plans to go head-to-head with Microsoft in the PaaS market, as well as to compete with the likes of Heroku, Engine Yard and a host of others.
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Kernel Space
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Netcat is a 4-person band based in Seattle, Washington (USA) that just released an album titled Cycles Per Instruction. The 4-person band includes three soft-bodied persons (humans, if you like) plus one hard-shell human or what’s popularly called a computer (yes, if a corporation is a person, …).
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In a move that stands to strengthen the hand of open source within the embedded Linux market, especially the automotive industry, the Linux Foundation has announced that microcontroller and chip manufacturer Renesas has become a gold member of the non-profit consortium.
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Well, KDBUS landing didn’t happen for the Linux 3.15 kernel. The merge window for the Linux 3.16 kernel will be open in June, but there’s been no uptick in Linux kernel mailing list discussions about reviewing KDBUS or getting anything queued up for mainline nor is there any code for this kernel implementation of D-Bus living within linux-next. Greg’s KDBUS repository also hasn’t been touched in nearly one month. As soon as we learn anything more about KDBUS on approach for landing within the Linux kernel, you can expect to read about it on Phoronix.
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While the power efficiency of Linux on desktop/laptop systems is improving, overall it still doesn’t appear to be on par with Windows 8 or OS X systems, especially when it comes to the “out of the box” power performance as shipped by default. PowerTOP is one of the easiest ways to drop your Linux power usage, but for those curious about other measures, here’s some other common yet useful resources for new Linux users to make their systems more power efficient.
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The sixth test release to the Linux 3.15 kernel is now available after more time than usual lapsed since the 3.15-rc5 release.
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Graphics Stack
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While open-source activities around Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) hardware continues to flourish, for the unlucky users still dependent upon VIA x86 hardware, the OpenChrome and VIA kernel mode-setting initiatives seem to have come to a standstill.
I was curious about the state of OpenChrome, since it’s been several months since hearing any VIA kernel mode-setting update for the independent VIA DRM/KMS driver that was in the works for several years by James Simmons. Sadly though, there doesn’t seem to be anything new and the OpenChrome project seems to be in a dire state.
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Applications
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For those that may have some extra time over the summer months that are looking to get involved with some new open-source work and are looking for something that’s high-profile but often overlooked, Cairo would be a great project.
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Also, the support for numerous new devices has been improved, RawTherapee’s window size and position are remembered between sessions, users can now click anywhere without dragging to clear crop, and much more.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s a financial risk for a company to put out Steam Machines that much is obvious as if it flops they have a bunch of customized PC’s they have to get rid of somehow. With Steam’s massive user base it could sell better than a lot of companies think it will if Valve can push it enough, this is most likely why Alienware and other companies got involved since it has massive potential.
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Going back to the Kickstarter campaign in 2012 where Linux support was talked about early on, we have been excited to see Wasteland 2 available for Linux gamers. In August is when the game has been announced for its official release.
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Valve has two builds for SteamOS. One is a stable version (sort of) and the other one is a Beta (Alchemist). Up until a week ago the two versions have been almost identical, which meant that maintaining two different branches was really nonsensical. This has started to change and Valve has released a second Beta in just a few days, making some important updates.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE community is working hard on the next major release of KDE software, most notably Framework 5 and Plasma Next. While Arch users can already play with KDE Framework 5 packages via extra repository and also run some components of Plasma Next via kde-unstable repo (which already has KWin), rest of those who can’t get Arch to work (though we have a very user-friendly tutorial), they can get a preview of Plasma Next using the live image of Fedora.
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The last time KDE released a major revision of its interface, users protested bitterly, and the project took several years to live down the reaction.
Next time, you would expect that KDE would play it safer. And, at times, the newly released beta of the latest Plasma interface does just that. In many respects, it is more a matter of re-alignment and positioning than of overthrowing paradigms.
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To some people an operating system is an operating system. It is a means to an end. Many Windows users definitely look on life in this way.
A lot of Windows user buy a computer and that computer happens to have Windows on it. Windows lets them connect to the internet via a browser and they can read their email, watch videos, check their mail and perform office type tasks.
The fact that the computer is running Windows is irrelevant to them. They certainly wouldn’t spend time discussing their operating system or reading articles about it.
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That feature was implemented by several companies starting on low level software components like X11, Cairo and pixman. However desktops where pretty slow to adapt software to the new needs and fix bugs. That was in part of the initially higher costs for the hardware. Only few developers in the open source community had early access to suitable gear. I do not write here about suitable graphic cards and monitor combinations. You should consult the web for this. Search for 30-bit monitor. Many early adopters observed psychedelic colours, not working graphics areas and more. Here the state on the well known KDE X11 desktop in release 4.11 on a openSUSE-13.1 . The login screen colours are broken. The splash screen after login looks correct and after some period the desktop becomes visible with again broken colours. To manually fix most of that, one have to tell that Qt shall use native colours. Create following text into a file called ~/.kde4/env/qtnative.sh .
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So I will post this and then ANOTHER post soon after to delve some more into the work going on with Wallpapers and the wallpaper competition.
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My primary goal for this summer is adding support for OTR protocol in KTp, what will enable both end-to-end encryption of text messages and peer authentication. I believe that thanks to cooperation with my brilliant mentors: David Edmundson and Sandro Knauß, I will introduce a reliable solution without negative effects on user experience.
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First, our Copr repository with KDE Frameworks has been updated to 4.99.0 release, so go get it! All frameworks are co-installable with KDE 4, so you can develop against KF5 without needing any special setup. Also KDE Frameworks 5 were approved as feature for Fedora 21, which means that in next Fedora release, we will ship all Frameworks in the Fedora repositories! There are already some packages imported into rawhide, the rest will follow in next weeks.
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A trip through 10 of the more popular desktop Linux distributions, with an eye on the novitiate’s experience.
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Ironically, “Blue” was the Microsoft codename for the Windows 8.1 release. By default, Blue Pup boots into a screen displaying active tiles much like the Windows 8 Metro design. You can remove or add tiles and programs, and change their position and size. You can easily change the default mode so that Blue Pup boots instead into a standard desktop.
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Chakra Linux 2014.05 is the first one in a new series called “Descartes” that will be following the KDE 4.13 releases, although the team will not settle for just a simple implementation of this desktop environment.
Unlike other developers who are using KDE as their desktop solution, the guys from Chakra didn’t want a run-of-the-mill experience for users. They tried to give it a unique feel so that users know two things right from the start: they are using Chakra and a KDE variation.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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The Wall Street Journal reports (this article is behind a paywall) that, based on documents it reviewed, Red Hat “has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack.” It quotes an HP cloud executive, Martin Fink, saying: “Red Hat has taken the art form of closed open-source to a new level.”
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Fedora
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I’ve been in the Fedora Project Leader role for a bit over two years now, and was the program manager for Fedora for nearly a year and a half before that; needless to say, Fedora has been my full time and lots of my other time job for a long time now. Being in this role certainly is humbling and daunting at times, and amazingly gratifying at others, but it has also afforded me an almost overwhelming opportunity to learn about anything and everything going on in open source outside the Fedora universe, with the hopes of bringing those people, projects, and ideas into our folds. Some of it is incredibly interesting, and some of it brings incredibly creative thinking into solving problems that we face in the technology space today — and, like those before me, it has also led me inevitably into exploring new opportunities.
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Robyn steps down, FUDCon Beijing, Package Database version 2, help with F21 release notes, and a comparison of CoreOS and Project Atomic….
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One month ago we looked at the latest performance of Fedora 20, but with its more liberal update strategy — especially with the long release time until Fedora 21 — we’re back with some more tests today as since last month the Linux 3.14 kernel has been added and other changes. This article has benchmarks of the Fedora 20 KDE spin out-of-the-box and then with all available updates as of this week to see how the performance has evolved in the half-year since the F20 release.
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Debian Family
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It seems like everyone is embracing systemd these days. It’s been in Fedora since 2011 and it’s already in the RHEL 7 release candidate. Arch Linux and Gentoo have it as well. Debian got on board with the jessie release (which is currently in testing).
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Webmin, a web-based interface for system administration for Unix, has just reached version 1.690 and is available for download.
With Webmin and with the help of any modern browser, users can set up user accounts, Apache servers, DNS, file sharing, and much more. The developers of Webmin have made regular updates to this piece of software. This latest version is not a major one, but some interesting fixes have been implemented.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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Adlink has released a rugged, Android 4.0 handheld with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm SoC, 3.8-inch WVGA display, NFC, 3G, and a 5-megapixel barcoding camera.
Adlink’s IMX-3000 handheld computer updates its earlier IMX-2000 model. This in turn is a slightly revised version of its first Android handheld, the circa-2011 TIOT 2000. The IMX-3000 is designed for applications including retail, logistics, on-site inspection, warehousing, and transportation, says Adlink.
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Private communications firm Silent Circle has secured $30 million in funding to cope with demand for the privacy-based Blackphone, as well as expand operations globally.
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Our SBC survey has now concluded, and it’s time to reveal the Top 10 SBCs list. Yes, the Pi is still in the sky… but some other winners may surprise you!
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Meanwhile, Samsung is shipping real small cheap computers that fit on your wrist and are inexpensive… At $200 you can have the latest Samsung watch, which some sell for as little as $50 with the purchase of a Samsung smartphone. Yes, M$, A Tizen device is much more affordable than your latest burdensome gadget.
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Since Apple launched the first iPad in 2010, tablet PC shipments have grown continuously. Not only have tablet PCs been well-positioned between the casual and professional computing market segments, but the shift to mobility and the surrounding ecosystem exemplified by apps added to the attraction of the tablet PC. On the other hand, sufficient supply of components has also been a key driving force for tablet PC market growth, as the cost of the bill of materials (BOM) has fallen rapidly. One of the most important components is the LCD panel. According to the latest Quarterly Worldwide FPD Shipment and Forecast Report, tablet PC display shipments are expected to reach 342M in 2014, tremendous growth from 80M in 2011.
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Devcoin is an open source project designed to support open source projects through the use of a dedicated crypto currency.
Crypto currency is a new form of digital money which is decentralized and runs on a distributed network of computers. Cryptographic techniques are used to secure the network and each individual’s funds, while open source code provides the shared protocol through which each wallet or service communicates with the public “block chain” where information on all transactions is stored. The most famous example of this is, of course, Bitcoin.
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Large companies like Google don’t really like open source projects, although their Chrome browser is based on Chromium. Now, the PDF rendering engine that is being used in Google Chrome has been released as open source.
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Events
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EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has unveiled Chrome 35 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. After the relative excitement of version 34, version 35 contains little of note for the end user to get excited about.
Developers, however, will be pleased to see a number of new and improved features implemented, including the ability to take more control over touch input. There’s also an undocumented switch to the Aura user interface on the Linux platform.
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Google has released Chrome 35 today for Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms. Special about the Linux version of Chrome 35 is that it replaces the GTK interface with their in-house Aura system.
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Mozilla
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Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox for Windows and Linux, but it doesn’t come down to a silly theming fork or other basic changes. The fundamental differences between upstream Firefox and Pale Moon is that they will not be implementing HTML5 DRM/EME support, they are sticking with the original Firefox interface rather than the new Australis UI, and they will not be accepting sponsored ad pages / tiles.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Thierry Carrez, who has been in charge of OpenStack release management since 2010, discussed key elements of OpenStack project management.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation are making some progress in the new 4.3 branch, which promises to bring some very interesting changes, not only under the hood of the software, but also in the visual department.
There are no particular details about this branch of the application, but the devs have made public some of their goals for the 4.3 release.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Tehnoetic TET-N150 wireless USB adapter.
The RYF certification mark is awarded to products that meet the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The TET-N150 can be purchased from Tehnoetic’s online store.
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GNU Parallel 20140522 (‘Boko Haram’) has been released.
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The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.8.3 has been released.
GCC 4.8.3 is the third bug-fix release containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 4.8.2 with over 141 bugs fixed since the previous release.
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Public Services/Government
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Open government isn’t a new concept. Thanks to the proliferation of the printing press, the Age of Enlightenment blasted through Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and brought demands for new rights: free speech, assembly, and, of course, the freedom of the press.
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“Open source helps to solve IT vendor lock-in situations”, Norbert Weidinger, ICT-Strategist for the city, said in a presentation on the city’s use of free and open source solutions.
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Openness/Sharing
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J. R. R. Tolkien, perhaps best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was, in his academic life, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. After a delay of 90 years, his translation of Beowulf will finally be published today. Through this newly available translation, readers will have the opportunity to visit (or revisit) King Hrothgar’s mead hall and experience Beowulf’s battles against Grendel and Grendel’s mother without having to learn to read Anglo-Saxon, or as it is also known, Old English.
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Open Data
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In 2007, Colin Drane wanted to know more about the crime that was happening in his Baltimore neighborhood. Utilizing the momentum of the open government movement, he founded SpotCrime, a public facing crime mapping and email alert website that collects public crime data from police agencies around the world.
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Scandals, mismanagement, and back-room deals; the City of New Orleans has long endured a legacy of opaque policies and decision-making processes closed to its citizens. A historic disconnect caused by the city’s lack of available information has led to generations of disenfranchised residents.
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National Rail Enquiries to open live database for all
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Open Hardware
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Arduino launches an amazing beta program for Arduino TRE developers. Giving the novelty of the board and of the approach I think it’s a great opportunity for you to experiment and give feedback!
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Programming
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Science
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Well scientists have to take their share of the blame for this, in that if anyone can promote science, it’s them. However speaking as a research scientist I KNOW why communicating science/ debunking pseudoscience (in science circles) is generally seen as a gamma rate objective, typically only pursued by betas.
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Security
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eBay announced this morning that they’ve been hacked and that “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” have been compromised. They’re expected to begin notifying their customer base later today, which will include a suggestion for users to change their passwords. The company says that PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, uses its own servers and was not affected by the attack.
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PayPal did not say why the passwords needed to be changed, and then later the message was removed altogether.
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eBay’s morning just went from bad to worse. The e-commerce site confirmed Wednesday that its corporate network was hacked and a database with users’ passwords was compromised. While eBay says there is no evidence that users’ financial information was accessed in the hack, the company is telling all users to change their passwords.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It is quite extraordinary to me how very little publicity is being given to the CIA sponsored military coup in Libya, following the same event in Egypt. The Arab Spring was front page headlines. The CIA and Saudi sponsored cooperation to turn it back to the deepest of freezes virtually gets no mention. This is even true of Libya, where we bombed tens of thousands of civilians to a pulp to ensure the changeover of regime, under the guise of installing democracy. The real aim was never democracy, but a neo-con friendly government, which is so much better secured under the auspices of the CIA.
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The senior former Iranian intelligence officer who quarterbacked the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and killed scores of Americans was recently living under CIA protection in the United States, a book being published Tuesday says.
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From alleged connections to the CIA to possible plans to overthrow the government, there is a sense of mystery surrounding Khalifa Haftar, the rogue general whose forces led an attack on the Libyan parliament in Tripoli Sunday.
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This could be the real Benghazi scandal: As Libya’s major cities see some of the worst fighting since 2011, a Libyan general who once defected to the U.S. is leading the charge.
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The CIA is said to have blocked a plan to supply Western-backed Syrian rebels with up to 70,000 assault rifles for the war against President Bashar Assad.
The Wall Street Journal said a plan by a private U.S. group to provide Russian-made light weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army was foiled by the CIA.
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In a 2-1 split ruling, the US Court of Appeals has decided that the CIA can keep its Bay of Pigs invasion history report secret on the grounds that the history only exists in a “draft” form, and was never marked as a final document.
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After receiving a court order in April to reveal a secret memo that justifies drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens who live overseas, the Obama administration has announced that it will not appeal the order and will comply with the request. The announcement came as the Senate votes on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron—the author of the memo—to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
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When the Administration first released the Awlaki memo to all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Committee had never seen at least 5 other OLC memos pertaining to targeted killing. In her statement, she cited 9 total memos, while reporting at the time suggested there might be 11 (and therefore 7 memos even the Intelligence Committees had not seen).
Just after that disclosure, the National Journal provided some description of what might be in the memos withheld even from the Intelligence Committees: “secret protocols with foreign governments, including Pakistan and Yemen,” the two countries where the US is known to have used signature strikes. Members of the House Judiciary Committee have twice asked for memos pertaining to signature strikes; and John McCain has posed questions about them as well.
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Bolstered by the promised public release of a secret legal memo, Senate Democrats are ready to approve a top federal judgeship for a former Obama administration official who helped formulate the justification for the drone killings of suspected American terrorists overseas.
The Senate was expected Thursday to approve David Barron to join the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Boston.
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The 120-mile walk had begun eight days earlier at the gates of Ft. Benning. Drones researched and developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) Research Institute are then tested at the Fort Benning Maneuver Battle Lab through a project federally funded by the U.S. Army Threat Systems Management Office.
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And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us a secret memo that gets us out of the bit about Thou-shalt-not-kill.
And, lo, as I was driving home from the committee hearing I was pulled over for speeding, and I said unto the officer, “I’ve got a memo that lets me speed. Would you like to see it?” and he said, “No thank you, and not your grocery list or your diary either.”
Transparency in drone murders has been a demand pushed by U.N. lawyers and pre-vetted Congressional witnesses, and not by the victims’ families. Nobody asks for transparency in child abuse or rape. “Oh, have you got a memo that explains how aliens commanded you to kill and eat those people? Oh, well that’s all right then.”
Seriously, what the filibuster?
I don’t want to see the memo that David Barron wrote “legalizing” the killing of U.S. citizens with drone strikes, after which (or is it beforehand?) I’ll decide whether he should be a federal judge.
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The Los Angeles Times is reporting: “President Obama’s Justice Department will release a long-sought secret document laying out the legal basis for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorist activities abroad, administration officials confirmed Tuesday.
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Faced with the threat the U.S. Senate would block judicial nominees, the Obama administration announced this week it would release the so-called “drone memos” outlining the supposed legal rationale for using drones to attack and kill American citizens.
The “most transparent administration in history” just needed to be asked 22 different ways.
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So, thanks to our membership of the Five Eyes network, the GCSB spy agency has been supplying information on “persons of interest” in Afghanistan (at least) that may be used for targeting them in US drone strikes. At his post-Cabinet press conference yesterday, Prime Minister John Key said that he did not know how, or for what purposes, the information that New Zealand supplies to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is being used. He did however confirm that GCSB-supplied information had not been used to target the New Zealand citizen Daryl Jones, killed by a drone strike in Yemen last November. (How Key could be so sure when he claimed not to know the purposes for which ISAF uses the data that we supply, was left unclear.) Key would not confirm whether any other New Zealanders had been killed by drone operations.
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Prime Minister John Key admits drones occasionally hit the wrong targets and kill innocent civilians, but he’s comfortable with New Zealand’s indirect involvement in the programme.
The Government Communications Security Bureau doesn’t give the United States information for the express purpose of carrying out strikes, Mr Key said on Firstline this morning – but it does pass on intelligence that could be useful.
“There are environments like Afghanistan where our people have gathered information, and that’s information on people of interest to our ISAF partners, and we’ve passed that information onto ISAF partners – and one of those is the United States – and ISAF have passed that information on,” says Mr Key.
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John Key today admitted that the GCSB is supporting the US state sanctioned assassination programme. He said that the GCSB provided information to the United States that was used to conduct drone strikes in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.
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If women’s rights in Yemen were of real international concern, say locals, health funding would not remain a meager 4 percent of the government’s budget, leaving little money to provide primary health care and nutrition, and nothing for reproductive health. The development community would be working to combat female illiteracy (which hovers at a staggering 70 percent) and helping women set up small businesses and monitor the use of money — which we know women are better at than men — to cut down on rampant corruption. Since social capital remains strong among women, and they are providing much of the remaining glue in this unstable society, this is where the West should invest.
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Greg Dawes condemns New Zealand’s involvement with drone strike ”murders”.
Almost a year ago, I drew readers’ attention to the fact our security services may be spying on New Zealanders.
Sadly, it now seems they may be doing much worse.
They may be complicit in extra-judicial killings, acts that violate principles of natural justice and, almost certainly, international law.
If they are supporting such actions – and the prime minister has all but admitted it – our security services have blood on their hands.
What I am talking about is the involvement of the GSCB, the Government’s electronic spy agency, in the drone killing programme that for some years has been undertaken by the United States.
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Declaring that a Harvard University law professor nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals violated the Bill of Rights by penning a memo justifying the administration’s drone killing of Americans overseas, Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday vowed to fight David Barron’s appointment.
“I cannot and will not support a lifetime appointment of someone who believes it is okay to kill an American citizen not involved in combat without a trial,” Paul said in a Senate floor speech in opposing Barron’s nomination to the Boston court, considered a sure bet.
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In a Senate hearing Wednesday, irate lawmakers criticized senior administration officials over the lack of follow-up with one of the strategy’s principal goals: Obama had said he was looking forward to “engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal” the nearly 13-year-old congressional authorization to use force against those individuals, groups and nations responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
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Does the President have to have a statute authorizing the use of military force in order to legally wage war against terrorist groups that may or may not pose an imminent threat to the United States? Or can the President simply target, capture and kill whomever in whatever terrorist group wherever, even if Congress has not authorized action?
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“It’s unfortunate that it took Mr. Barron’s nomination for the Justice Department to make these memos public,” Wyden said. “I believe that every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them.”
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He has also rubbished claims by a US journalist the country’s spies likely provided information which led to a drone strike which killed a New Zealander.
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Drone strikes are justified – even if innocent civilians are mistakenly killed, Prime Minister John Key says.
Key confirmed yesterday that intelligence collected by the Government Communications Security Bureau might be passed to the controversial US programme.
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At least four Taliban militants were killed following a drone strike in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan, local officials said Wednesday.
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The basic premise of the Obama Administration’s drone program is that decapitation, the killing of a terrorist organization’s top leadership, works. Killing al-Qaeda’s leadership should, in theory, limit the organization’s ability to plot attacks on the US and its allies.
But what if that’s not true? That’s the core finding of a just-published study in the prestigious journal International Security. In it, Georgia Tech professor Jenna Jordan takes a look at the history of targeting terrorist leaders and draws lessons for the fight against al-Qaeda. According to Jordan, believing that targeted killing can actually weaken al-Qaeda means assuming al-Qaeda depends on a group of charismatic leaders. But that’s wrong, and that mistaken assumption has led the Obama Administration to pursue a strategy centered on targeting al-Qaeda’s leadership with drones when it’d really be better to cut down on targeted killings altogether.
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Transparency Reporting
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When whistleblowers clash over whether information should be censored from the public then alarm bells should be ringing in the heads of all free thinkers. In this particular instance we are talking about an organisation headed by a political prisoner and another spearheaded by an acclaimed prize winning journalist.
Of course we are talking about two giants in the whistleblowing community – Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald – both of whom work for very different organisations.
Assange, who heads up Wikileaks, has been a political prisoner, held without charge, for more than three years, including almost two years in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Wikileaks has also been treated as a pariah organisation cut off from the usual avenues of international funding from would be donors.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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About 2,000 bullfights are still held every year in Spain, but the numbers are falling. In 2010, Catalonia became the second Spanish region after the Canary Islands to ban the tradition.
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The fresh waters of the Colorado river reached the Gulf of California at high tide on Thursday, the first time in decades that the river has flowed all the way to the sea.
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Finance
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Students who take out private loans to pay for college could face a nasty surprise if their co-signer dies or files for bankruptcy: The lender may suddenly demand the loan be paid in full—or even worse, put that loan in default—even though all payments are being made on time.
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Censorship
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Facebook’s censorship rules have been thrust into the spotlight after a seemingly innocuous photo of two women kissing was removed on the grounds that it ‘violated the community’s standards on nudity and pornography’.
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Students learn so much in fighting for their First Amendment rights. They learn the extent of their resolve. They learn that the ideals of the Bill of Rights extolled in the classroom aren’t so revered by school administrators intent on protecting their fiefdoms. And they learn that there’s nothing like a swimsuit issue to boost circulation.
[...]
Fond du Lac High School’s student newspaper, the Cardinal Columns, won multiple awards this year, including a prize for a recent article about rape victims at the school. After publication of the piece, titled “The Rape Joke,” administrators enacted oversight guidelines. Let it be known that award-winning journalism will not go unchecked at Fond du Lac High.
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Twitter’s ability to block certain tweets or users from being seen in specific countries, a somewhat Orwellian feature it calls the “country-withheld content” tool, seems to be getting more popular, according to the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, which tracks such things: tweets and/or users are now being blocked in Pakistan as well as Turkey, and a pro-Ukrainian account is apparently unavailable to users who try to view it from inside Russia, at the request of the government.
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In 2012, when Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis—as opposed to taking it down across the entire Twitter network—EFF defended that decision as the least terrible option. After all, when a company refuses to comply with an official government request, the government’s response is often to block an entire platform.
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Privacy
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The Feds ran roughshod over Lavabit, forcing it to shut down and proving that in the privacy wars, the government is fighting to win — and fighting dirty
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…NSA’s DROPOUTJEEP program, which describes the agency’s ability to infiltrate the Apple iPhone.
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New documents released by Snowden through Greenwald’s new website, The Intercept, show just how much further the NSA program goes. The spy agency logged and recorded EVERY cell phone call in the small island nation of Bermuda. Audio from those calls was stored on servers and could be played back for up to a month by NSA analysts.
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At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states, the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants.
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When the NSA surveillance news broke last year it sent shockwaves through CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. Andy Yen, a PhD student, took to the Young at CERN Facebook group with a simple message: “I am very concerned about the privacy issue, and I was wondering what I could do about it.”
There was a massive response, and of the 40 or so active in the discussion, six started meeting at CERN’s Restaurant Number 1, pooling their deep knowledge of computing and physics to found ProtonMail, a gmail-like email system which uses end-to-end encryption, making it impossible for outside parties to monitor.
Encrypted emails have actually been around since the 1980s, but they are extremely difficult to use. When Edward Snowden asked a reporter to use an end-to-end encrypted email to share details of the NSA surveillance program the reporter couldn’t get the system to work, says Yen.
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A day before the House will vote on a major bill designed to rein in government surveillance, a group of blue-chip tech firms are warning that the measure falls far short of what is advertised.
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Yet recent closed-door negotiations between the leadership of the Republican-led House and the Obama administration have left the bill with sapped privacy protections that do not adequately address mass surveillance abuses, privacy advocates say.
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In 2003, an AT&T technician discovered a secret room being used to copy all internet traffic coming through his building
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The NSA and AT&T refuse to discuss exactly what was going on in now-legendary Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street.
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“The level of trust in U.S. companies has been seriously damaged, especially but not exclusively outside the U.S. Every time a new shoe drops — and there are 10,000 of them — it serves a blow to the U.S.,” he said.
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A year ago this June, things were uncertain for U.S.-based cloud service providers after revelations of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of customer data intercepted from U.S. tech companies. The U.S. tech industry was on the defensive amid concerns that customers would shift their hosted data and services to providers in other parts of the world. U.S. businesses ostensibly stood to lose up to $35 billion over three years as a result, according to a dire prediction by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Forrester put the losses as high as $180 billion.
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After the US spooks effectively shut down Lavabit last year, a truly secure email system which is unhackable by the spooks has been a holy grail.
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The locations may not make sense — the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, Kenya — but that’s not stopping the DEA from teaming up with the NSA to amass information on phone calls there.
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The Aquino government must protest the collection of cellphone metadata and text messages by the United States National Security Agency, the leftist organization Bayan said Wednesday.
In a statement, Bayan’s Renato Reyes was reacting to news reports that the US spy agency through the computer program Mystic embedded in Philippine telecommunications networks is able to collect metadata (information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls) and text (SMS, or short messaging services) messages.
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Despite warnings that doing so “could lead to increased violence” and potentially deaths, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says it plans to publish the name of a country targeted by a massive United States surveillance operation.
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‘The Intercept’ is the new publication created by the journalists who revealed the secrets of the National Security Agency (NSA), including Glenn Greenwald. The online publication revealed that the NSA collects metadata from telecommunications systems in five countries, including Mexico, through a program called MYSTIC. MYSTIC collects information about the time, origin and destination of calls, and is funded, in the case of Mexico, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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The U.S. National Security Agency has been recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas without knowledge and permission from the island nation’s government, according to a report from The Intercept.
The surveillance is part of an NSA secret system called SOMALGET that tapped into access legally granted to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and opened a “backdoor” into the country’s cell telephone network, the article states.
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It’s been a couple of months since the Washington Post published a scoop on the extraordinary overseas eavesdropping capabilities of the U.S. government. Under the bylines of Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, the paper revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had amassed a system — known as “MYSTIC” — enabling it to “rewind and review” all of the telephone conversations of a foreign country.
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Wikileaks has announced that it will reveal the name of the country that is having nearly all of its mobile phone calls tapped by the US National Security Agency (NSA) within the next 72 hours.
The group tweeted that it will “reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours” despite warnings from investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald that he was “very convinced” the leak could “lead to deaths”.
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In a secured room beneath the US Capitol last week, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama administration and the intelligence services.
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The Reform Government Surveillance coalition – AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo – offered a statement on Wednesday denouncing the USA Freedom Act as a weak attempt at ending the government’s bulk storage of domestic phone metadata.
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The NSA’s wide-ranging surveillance programme should be curtailed, says hardware-maker Cisco in a letter to President Obama.
Cisco boss John Chambers said faith in US technology companies was being eroded by the NSA’s activities.
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The German government is to block IT companies that have links to the NSA from being awarded public contracts in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance.
According to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcaster NDR, Germany’s coalition government has changed the rules for awarding IT contracts to eliminate those companies suspected of passing on data to foreign secret services. Companies awarded contracts by the state will have to sign contracts saying that they won’t pass on data relating to German citizens. The rule will mainly apply to US companies that are bound to give back-door access to the data they collect.
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US Attorney General Eric Holder will travel to Germany to discuss privacy concerns after the NSA spying scandal damaged relations between the two allies, Germany said Wednesday.
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German lawmakers may call the heads of the largest U.S. technology companies to testify before their investigation into the National Security Agency’s data-collection activities, adding a new corporate twist to the spying scandal.
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Without trust in the unelected officials who run government programs, it is impossible for our elected representatives to conduct public business in a manner that instills in the public a sense of trust or legitimacy.
Revelations about government surveillance programs, and the inaccurate statements made by public officials about them, some under oath, indicate that we have a serious problem.
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The NSA is supposed to be America’s offshore spy agency, forbidden from spying on Americans. But as an important article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Nadia Kayyali points out, the FBI, DEA and other US agencies have closely integrated the NSA into their own efforts, using the NSA’s mass surveillance to gather intelligence on Americans — as Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide discloses, the NSA isn’t a stand-alone agency, it is part of an overarching surveillance state.
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Almost one year ago, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed the existence of PRISM, a top secret program that allows the NSA to access user data from major Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, an Apple.
The tech world was surprised and appalled — how could the companies allow something like that? As it turned out, they were just complying with the law. But PRISM was just the first of an array of revelations that uncovered how the NSA exploits technology, and our reliance on Silicon Valley companies, to conduct its surveillance.
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The state of California is looking to pass a law stating the federal government would need a warrant from a judge if it wants to search residents’ cellphones and computer records. The bill passed the state senate with just one person voting against.
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As U.S. National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers seeks to repair the damage to the agency caused by leaks about its electronic spying programs, the abuses of government revealed in the wake of the Watergate scandal are very much on his mind.
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IT companies that want to work for the German public sector will have to guarantee they are not supplying information to any foreign intelligence agency, including the US government’s NSA, as part of the new rules proposed by the coalition government.
According to the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung, the rules are primarily aimed at organisations that cooperate with the US National Security Agency (NSA), and could put many US businesses in a difficult position.
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If you’ve been imagining NSA surveillance as something distant, with analysts sitting in remote data centers quietly analyzing metadata—stop now. NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States. The Snowden disclosures that were made public as part of Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide drive this point home, and they emphasize why we need real change to government surveillance, not minor reforms.
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Maybe someday we’ll patch vulnerabilities faster than the enemy can use them in an attack, but we’re not there yet.
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It was December 11, 2012, and in a small art space behind a furniture store in Honolulu, NSA contractor Edward Snowden was working to subvert the machinery of global surveillance.
Snowden was not yet famous. His blockbuster leaks were still six months away, but the man destined to confront world leaders on a global stage was addressing a much smaller audience that Sunday evening. He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously.
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Developers are reaching to us both because there is a new understanding about what is happening to our electronic communications and also response to rapidly changing requirements from the public and private sectors.
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Expect the Chinese to make the U.S. pay an economic price in retaliation, said former CIA deputy director and CBS News senior security analyst Mike Morell.
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Civil Rights
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“The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking. The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen.
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Future American historians will marvel at how long the CIA engaged in such utter unconstitutional lawlessness as the torture of its captives and drone-plane executions of alleged terrorists — including U.S. citizens — without trials, using “kill lists” provided by President Barack Obama.
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A federal judge has ruled that Pennsylvania’s state law banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, bringing the total number of state marriage amendments to be overturned in the federal courts over the past year to over a dozen. Pennsylvania is one of the five states that does not have marriage equality but only has a state law banning it — not a state constitutional amendment. The decision did not include a stay, which means couples could possibly begin applying for marriages immediately immediately. Pennsylvania law, however requires a 3-day waiting period between when an application is filed and when a license can be issued, which could prevent any marriages from being finalized should the 3rd Circuit issue an emergency stay.
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A computer hacker who was released early from prison last month due to a federal appeals court decision is demanding that the Justice Department pay him for what he calls acts of fraud and violence committed by the United States government.
On Tuesday, 28-year-old Andrew Auernheimer of Fayetteville, Arkansas published an open letter addressed to the members of the New Jersey Direct Court and US Department of Justice who oversaw his 2012 conviction for computer hacking and identity fraud vacated last month by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
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Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer, whose struggles with federal prosecutors have fueled calls for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), wants the government to pay him $13 million for taking away his freedom for the past three years.
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A little-known aspect of the juvenile justice system requires young offenders to pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.
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The CIA has ended the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations amid concerns for the safety of health workers, the White House has said.
In a letter to US public health schools, a White House aide said the CIA stopped such practices in August.
The CIA used a fake vaccine programme to try to find Osama Bin Laden before US special forces killed him in 2011.
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The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, has accused the CIA of possibly knowing the whereabouts of missing flight MH370.
Dr Mahathir says that someone is hiding something because if the plane’s GPS system failed then Boeing or the US government agency would know why.
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The former Prime Minister of Malaysia has accused a US intelligence agency and the Boeing aircraft firm of concealing the whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has been missing since 8 March.
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Get ready to live in a world without privacy or secrecy, warns historian Richard Aldrich, who specializes in intelligence gathering and espionage.
Speaking at the PINC 15 conference in Amsterdam, Aldrich said it’s not just government agencies that are spying on us now.
According to Wired, Aldrich believes the big intelligence gatherers are now airlines, banks, Internet providers, and others.
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In one of the great mysteries of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, three prisoners, two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen, died the night of June 9, 2006. Authorities at Guantánamo said the three men — Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi — had killed themselves. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, described their deaths as an “act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
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“If we look at the original report that was released some years ago, about four years ago now, it gave a narrative of how these three prisoners committed suicide in their cells simultaneously and in a rather strange way,” Horton explained. “When we reviewed that account with well-known medical examiners, they all had the same conclusion, which was: impossible. No one has ever committed suicide that way and it’s pretty much impossible to do.”
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On the hook to release a redacted version of the so-called torture report, the CIA has asked a federal judge for more time to review the study by the Senate Intelligence Committee that harshly criticizes its interrogation techniques.
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Why did Human Rights Watch select a former CIA official to sit on its advisory committee for eight years?
That’s a question two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a former UN assistant secretary general, a UN special rapporteur, and over 100 scholars are asking HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth in an open letter. They note that Miguel Díaz, a CIA analyst in the 1990s, served as an advisor on human rights to HRW Americas from 2003-11 before moving back into government, as a State Department “interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.”
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Wyoming has become the latest death penalty state to consider a return to the firing squad, as concern rises over the scarcity and secrecy surrounding medical drugs used in lethal injections.
State legislators have begun to draft a bill that they plan to introduce in Wyoming’s next legislative session that would reintroduce executions at the point of a gun. The move was prompted, elected members said, by the drought in lethal injection drugs caused by a pharmaceutical boycott of US death chambers.
The Wyoming move adds to a mounting sense of crisis across the US in the practice of the death penalty, which is arguably more profound that at any time since a federal moratorium was imposed by the supreme court in Furman V Georgia in 1972. Utah is also considering reviving the firing squad, which it abolished for all death sentences handed down since 2004, and states including Missouri have also debated the return of the gas chamber.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Republican legislators don’t even want the Federal Communications Commission to think about reclassifying broadband as a utility—a route the regulator could take in order to reinstate net neutrality rules.
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Mania is peaking over the “open Internet,” but the last thing you should want is the FCC getting involved.
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The public can find a lot of ways to punish a corporation that abuses its privileges. This situation should not be escalated to the point that the FCC has anything to do with it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Activists are mobilising against another international trade treaty, with the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations between America and the EU starting to cause angst.
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European milk producers are calling for the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement negotiations between the USA and the EU to cease.
It says: “The negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – the TTIP – are causing the European Milk Board (EMB) great concern.
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Copyrights
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The European Elections are upon us and several groups are keen to see as many pro-digital rights MEPs elected as possible. A campaign called WePromise.eu is encouraging MEP candidates to support a charter of 10 digital rights principles, and in returning is encouraging citizens to pledge their votes to those candidates.
Wired.co.uk has picked out five MEPs and wannabes who have shown real dedication to supporting digital rights with input from the Open Rights Group, which is supporting the WePromise campaign, and the Pirate Party, which has many of its candidates signed up to the charter.
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The Swedish Supreme Court has rejected an application by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde to have his case reopened. Based on new EU rulings, Sunde’s legal team argued that he cannot be held responsible for copyright infringements carried out by users of The Pirate Bay, but the Court didn’t see any reason to reopen the case.
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As we’ve pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled “for the encouragement of learning.” Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it’s frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.
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