02.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past couple of days, focusing on privacy, surveillance, and abuses of power
Ombudsman (Ireland)
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Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times in Ireland broke a story claiming that the offices of the scrutiny body that monitors the Irish police force had been bugged. It has remained the main story in Ireland ever since. There are some elements of the story which appear undeniable. Sources close to this increasingly complex Dublin scandal are persuaded that there was a surveillance operation. Even government insiders are speculating privately about who may have been behind it, despite the justice minister publicly questioning whether it existed at all.
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Verizon/Phones
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Last year’s revelations over the U.S. tapping of phone and internet data gave telecoms firms pause for thought over whether they should sell their “big data” for gain, but the commercial potential could prove irresistible.
Although figures are scarce, analysts think selling data on mobile users’ locations, movements, and web browsing habits may grow into a multi billion-dollar market for the business.
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Russia
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Eteri Tutberidze said reporters bugged the locker room at Lipnitskaia’s practice rink in Moscow with listening devices after the 15-year-old left the Winter Games to train for the ladies individual competition. The coach also accused the media of stalking Lipnitskaia’s family in her hometown of Nizhny Bardym, a village in the Ural Mountains with a population of just 300.
Germany
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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has stepped up its surveillance of senior German government officials since being ordered by Barack Obama to halt its spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bild am Sonntag paper reported on Sunday.
Revelations last year about mass U.S. surveillance in Germany, in particular of Merkel’s mobile phone, shocked Germans and sparked the most serious dispute between the transatlantic allies in a decade.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has stepped up its surveillance of senior German government officials since being ordered by Barack Obama to halt its spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel, the German Bild am Sonntag paper reported on Sunday.
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Far from giving up on its habit, the US National Security Agency is reportedly still wiretapping some 320 prominent German economists and politicians. Although President Barack Obama has allegedly delivered on his promise to leave German Chancellor Angela Merkel alone, America’s omnipresent spy agency is still keeping tabs on hundreds of her compatriots, the crème de la crème of the German political and economic world, including Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. This is according to the Bild am Sonntag.
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Still upset over the U.S. spying on her phone, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this week that her country would consider establishing new data networks based in Europe that could shield individuals’ private communications from National Security Agency (NSA) prying.
UK
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On December 3rd last year the editor of the Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger, was questioned by the House of Commons select committee on home affairs. Its chairman, Keith Vaz, perhaps hoping to start Rusbridger off on an easy one, asked if he loved his country. It was an odd, and oddly un-British, question, and Rusbridger, frequently described as unflappable, admitted to surprise before declaring that, yes, he and his journalists saw themselves as patriots.
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The Queen and Prince Charles are using their little-known power of veto over new laws more than was previously thought, according to Whitehall documents.
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The extent of the Queen and Prince Charles’s secretive power of veto over new laws has been exposed after Downing Street lost its battle to keep information about its application secret.
Whitehall papers prepared by Cabinet Office lawyers show that overall at least 39 bills have been subject to the most senior royals’ little-known power to consent to or block new laws. They also reveal the power has been used to torpedo proposed legislation relating to decisions about the country going to war.
Apple
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Did U.S. government spies create the security hole that Apple patched last week?
PRISM Dropbox
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Dropbox has updated its privacy policy to address privacy concerns about the National Security Agency’s requests for user data.
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Dropbox, a cloud storage app the government recommends for federal teleworkers, has revised its privacy policy to address concerns about other federal workers spying on users’ data.
The new policy, which goes into effect March 24, acknowledges that Dropbox might share user data with outsiders to comply with the law, “if we determine that such disclosure is reasonably necessary.” An email to users immediately adds that the company will follow its own Government Request Principles, guidance that obliquely antagonizes the National Security Agency and includes fighting requests for bulk data.
PRISM WhatsApp
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The company warns users need to be aware that when they send messages, the recipient’s device may not be secure. But it says it does not store any chat history and that messages are wiped off its system after delivery.
Lawsuits
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In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner just before his presentation, Fein said he would also comment on events since the book’s 2009 publication, events that illustrate how “violations of the constitution have become so chronic that they numb the public and even elected officials to the danger we encounter as we move toward what I call ‘one branch tyranny’ – secret government, [with] everything subordinated to a risk-free existence and absolute executive power.”
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Of the many questions that still surround the National Security Agency’s vast global spying operations, one seems especially pertinent: Do they actually work? That is, have they helped to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans?
In the case of the NSA’s phone-data program – in which the agency vacuums up information about essentially every call made by Americans – it’s getting harder and harder for the government to answer yes. The latest evidence comes from a report last week by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency established on the recommendation of the Sept. 11 Commission to balance the right to liberty against the need to prevent terrorism.
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Following news reports that a foreign ally of a U.S. intelligence agency may have spied on a BigLaw firm, the American Bar Association has asked the director of the National Security Agency and its general counsel for an explanation of how it deals with attorney-client privilege.
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On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2014, the individual Government Defendants, Barack H. Obama, Eric H. Holder, Keith B. Alexander, Roger Vinson, the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA), in our initial lawsuit over the NSA spying on the American people – the one that produced a great victory last December when Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that President Obama and the NSA had egregiously violated the Fourth Amendment and the U.S. Constitution – presented me and the other plaintiffs with the gift that may keep on giving. In response to a court order issued about 10 days earlier, wherein Judge Leon testily told the Obama Justice Department lawyers to get the show on the road and finally file an answer to the complaint as they were in default for not having responded timely, President Obama’s lawyers stonewalled the judge in the answer they later filed on the day reserved for love, not obstruction of justice.
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An attorney suing the federal government over the National Security Agency’s spy programs says the Obama administration is delaying and obstructing the court, and a default judgment against the individual defendants would be an appropriate remedy.
The case was brought by attorney Larry Klayman in U.S. District Court in Washington over the NSA’s PRISM spy program that gathers details about the telephone calls and contacts of innocent Americans.
Wikileaks
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Another document, from July 2011, details discussions between NSA offices as to whether WikiLeaks might be designated a “malicious foreign actor” for reasons of surveillance (the language in the document is “targeting with no defeats”). Such a designation would simply broaden the scope of activities available to the agency. “No defeats are needed when querying against a known foreign malicious actor.” The response from the agency’s general counsel on the subject of WikiLeaks’ status is tentative – “Let us get back to you.”
Amazon
Breakup
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The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.
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Edward Snowden
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People marched through Naples Saturday in support NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Constitution and the 4th Amendment. At the same time, they were protesting a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. speaking in Naples, for his comments against Snowden. We heard from both sides about why they feel so strongly.
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Following former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure of widespread spying by the U.S. government, there has been a massive push to develop privacy-centric software and hardware. During the 2014 RSA Conference, which begins on Monday in San Francisco, data security and privacy solutions will be demonstrated at a frantic time in the industry.
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02.21.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Domestic and foreign abuses of power; examples from recent weeks for police and from the past 24 hours for the army/secret agencies
Police
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Neighbors say Mary Musselman has been feeding backyard animals as long as they can remember.
“She fed the squirrels, the birds, strays and that was in the community. She’s just always been that kind of soul,” says neighbor Patty Palmer.
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For absolutely no reason other than “because they could”, cops in Pinal County, Arizona executed a suspect who was standing there, not near any of the officers, with his hands in the air, offering no threat whatsoever. Without trial, judge, or jury, they simply assassinated the man, as his family looked on in horror. Warning: There is some graphic violence in the video below.
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Stacey Feigel’s husband, Sheldon, is facing multiple felony counts related to an alleged scam involving filing fraudulently for adverse possession on abandoned homes. While arriving in court for a hearing, Stacey collapsed from a “cardiac event” (according to the coroner) and died. Attorney Mark Coleman suggested stress from the raid and arrest could have led to her death.
Panic
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I’ve never seen a real study, but my guess is that it’s a reflection of fear and desperation. It’s a very frightened country. The United States is an unusually frightened country. And in such circumstances, people concoct either for escape or maybe out of relief, fears that terrible things happen.
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Foreign Policy
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The U.S. may be forced to withdraw troops completely from Afghanistan by the end of the year. That’s bad news if you’re the CIA and your lethal drone flights over neighboring Pakistan rely on the close proximity of Afghan airstrips.
Not surprisingly, the defense industry has already produced a solution: a new jet-powered drone that can range 1,800 miles from the nearest base.
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As Spencer Ackerman, National security reporter, said “it’s just so little transparency and so much opacity when it comes to Drones, belonged to CIA; if it were military then you could at least get the insight as how it works and debate about whether it should run this way”. With his comment on Drones dilemma, CIA is not required to give any information on any drone operations. They do not officially discuss drone programme, as Spencer Ackerman mentioned.
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Kareem Khan’s son and brother died in a US drone strike. His lawsuit has made waves in Pakistan and overseas, and he was recently detained for nine days.
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A year ago, 8-year-old Nabeela ventured outside while her 68-year-old grandmother picked vegetables in their family garden. Moments later, the grandmother was blasted to pieces by two U.S. drone missiles. Nabeela and other nearby grandchildren were injured when the exploding missile lodged shrapnel in their bodies.
No one is alleging the grandmother did anything wrong. Her fatal “mistake” was living in North Waziristan, a region in Pakistan pummeled by U.S. drone strikes (Amnesty International, Nov. 13).
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A U.S. military drone strike in Yemen in December may have killed up to a dozen civilians on their way to a wedding and injured others, including the bride, a human rights group says. U.S. officials say only members of al-Qaida were killed, but they have refused to make public the details of two U.S. investigations into the incident.
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Last week I wrote about the news that the Obama administration is considering whether to assassinate another American citizen in a drone strike. The Associated Press reported the target is an American citizen and member of al-Qaeda, “and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year.”
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The story told by the report is one of disputed identity. Anonymous US officials have said all of the twelve men killed were militants traveling with Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, allegedly a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the primary target of the strike. Officials say al-Badani was wounded, and escaped. Relatives of the dead say they didn’t know him.
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Lithuanian prosecutors said on Thursday they have opened an investigation into claims that a Saudi terror suspect was held in an alleged secret CIA jail in the Baltic state, reports LETA/AFP.
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Sitcom and sadism mix uncomfortably in Luc Besson’s “3 Days to Kill,” starring Kevin Costner as a CIA hitman and absentee father.
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As the world’s biggest online retailer, Amazon wants a benevolent image to encourage trust from customers. Obtaining vast quantities of their personal information has been central to the firm’s business model. But Amazon is diversifying — and a few months ago the company signed a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide “cloud computing” services.
Amazon now has the means, motive and opportunity to provide huge amounts of customer information to its new business partner. An official statement from Amazon headquarters last fall declared: “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”
The Central Intelligence Agency has plenty of money to throw around. Thanks to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we know that the CIA’s annual budget is $14.7 billion; the NSA’s is $10.8 billion.
The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is bullish on the company’s prospects for building on its initial contract with the CIA. As you might expect from a gung-ho capitalist with about $25 billion in personal wealth, Bezos figures he’s just getting started.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about mass surveillance and privacy, collected over the past 24 hours
Wintelligence
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Microsoft’s Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it’s based on the same type of information – call details.
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One day last summer – a short while after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source behind the momentous leak of classified intelligence – the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger got in touch. Would I write a book on Snowden’s story and that of the journalists working with him? The answer, of course, was yes. At this point Snowden was still in Hong Kong. He was in hiding. He had leaked documents that revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent GCHQ were surveilling much of the planet.
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By September the book was going well – 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA’s close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.
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One Redditer asked the Intel chief how the NSA revelations have impacted how Intel looks at hardware security, another asked for a response to questions of the security level of Intel processors. Krzanich issued no response to either question.
Lawsuits
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The legal fight against National Security Agency surveillance is shaping up to be a titanic clash, with pugilistic litigants trading charges and countercharges of bad faith and misinformation.
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A recent report that the National Security Agency spied on Mayer Brown LLP has stoked fears that client communications and data at a host of law firms may be vulnerable to prying eyes, leaving attorneys susceptible to lawsuits claiming they failed to take reasonable steps to protect sensitive information.
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Call it the law of unintended consequences: Lawsuits brought forth by National Security Agency spying revelations may actually prompt the agency to expand its controversial program — at least in the short term.
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PR
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While many Americans are still reeling from several controversies surrounding the federal government, a top-ranking official stopped by the Sooner State to provide his view on some of the incidents.
FBI Director James Comey spoke with the media about some of the skepticism surrounding the government.
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Seventeen years before Edward Snowden began releasing secret documents on U.S. electronic spying, an analyst with the National Security Agency foresaw just such a threat.
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The original members of the NSA are seen below in this photograph from 1935. At the time the organisation was called the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service and was responsible for Army communications security.
Paranoia
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AT&T this week released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the U.S. government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans.
AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information — spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants — in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts.
There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks.
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In 1999, after the Furby craze put tons of these talking toys beneath American Christmas trees, the NSA issued a memo banning them from its offices in Fort Meade. Because the commercials advertised Furbies as “learning” English over time, the folks in charge believed that Furbies contained an internal recording device, and they feared the toys would spill secrets in their cutesy voices. According to a 1999 BBC News article, anyone who came across a Furby on NSA premises was instructed to “contact their Staff Security Office for guidance.”
Politics
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Europe must ensure that fears of NSA-style government snooping do not disrupt its multi-stakeholder Internet governance model.
That’s the verdict from this year’s FTTH Conference in Stockholm, as Sweden’s minister for information technology and energy, Anna-Karin Hatt, spoke candidly about the importance of securing a democratic future for the web.
“We are all stakeholders in the development of the Internet, with legitimate interests and points-of-view that we want to – and need to – be able to pursue and protect,” she said.
Hatt added: “The only logical way to continue developing the Internet is to protect and develop the multi-stakeholder model of decision-making we already have – a model that has been tried and proven to work.”
“The revelations of the capacities and activities of the NSA is not a reason to abandon our multi-stakeholder model.”
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Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., isn’t pleased with a bill pending in her state’s legislature that would prohibit state and local support for the National Security Agency.
The legislation was proposed Feb. 6 by eight Republicans in the 141-member Maryland House of Delegates and would deny the NSA “material support, participation or assistance in any form” from the state, its political subdivisions and companies with state contracts.
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New PRISM Additions
Induced Censorship
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For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state’s censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from cable networks, to the targeted blocking of social networking services, and the announcement of new government powers to censor and monitor online.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Valve have always taken a mysterious stance whenever it has come to the topic of Half Life 3; they never clearly stated their plans with the series, neither have they officially ever denied that they will make a sequel to the hit series. So this piece of new “evidence”, if you can call it that, should come as a ray of hope for the scores of patient fans who are waiting eagerly for the next game in the Half Life series.
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The games just keep on coming. Ever since SteamOS’ announcement, Linux has been getting a lot of attention from developers and publishers alike. This time around it seems it will be XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Although nothing concrete has been announced, according to the app’s update history on SteamDB, it seems that the developers are gearing up for a Linux debut of the game. The Linux history on the SteamDB entry for XCOM: Enemy Unknown is being filled up with Linux related references and instructions. A good number of new files have surfaced in the SteamDB entry, with quite a number of them being Linux Binaries.
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Picture this with me: there was a time when gaming on Linux was a niche within a niche, a small space of escape from coding, reading mailing lists, and actual work (I kid). Tux Kart, Secret Maryo Chronicales, text-based adventures, and hours of Frozen Bubble. If you wanted Steam, it was off to WINE, often struggling to make some games even launch correctly. As time marched on we wondered when gaming on Linux might finally take off. In the past 12 months, it’s been one heck of a ride. Steam for Linux is poised to make major noise this year in gaming.
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How do you put down a robot uprising of clumsy, idiotic and utterly devastating robot minions? With lasers, rockets and landmines of course.
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The Humble Indie Bundle 11 is now available with 6 games and their soundtracks for Mac, Windows, and Linux gamers everywhere.
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The author of the article seems to be trapped in the past, with a steady fixation on the keyboard and mouse. He doesn’t seem to understand the value of a gaming controller for SteamOS. Don’t get me wrong, I like the keyboard and mouse too but there are games where a controller can provide a superior gaming experience.
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Since Valve released the first stable version of Steam for Linux a year ago, the number of Linux-supported games has grown more than fivefold.
Valve’s digital game distribution service now hosts 333 games for Linux, compared to 60 games last February. (Strangely, Steam’s store page claims that 541 games are now available, but when you search the entire catalog it shows only 333 titles. We’ve asked Valve for clarification.)
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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After a few years of announcements, releases and online reviews, I am still out there looking for the right, if not the perfect, Twitter client on Linux. And believe me, this quest is frutstrating.
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More than a month into his campaign, Linux server admin Gao Nagy has persuaded just 124 people to join him in petitioning Adobe to make Linux versions of its most popular products. However, Nagy hopes that a little media attention will kick-start his petition efforts and result in an outpouring of support. “It’s really hard to reach people,” he noted.
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If you’re looking for a Twitter desktop application for your Linux operating system, especially a lightweight and simple program you can just leave running with very little drain on system resources, Birdie may be for you.
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Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency that is powered by its users with no central authority, central server or middlemen. Instead, managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world.
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Minimalism has it’s place, but there is such a thing as an installed system being too bare-bones. Many Docker images are built like they are full Linux installs, but don’t run like they are due to a lack of common daemons running inside the container. To address the issue, Phusion, the Rails company behind Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition, has released Baseimage. Baseimage is a Docker image that closer mimics a real Linux environment with proper init, syslog, SSH, and runit daemons.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Here’s how you can install TrueCrypt encryption in Ubuntu 13.10 to help keep your personal information safe and secure. Be sure to check out the tutorial (link below in additional resources) before trying to install TrueCrypt.
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Pipelight is a special kind of browser plugin, that acts as a wrapper for Windows plugins like Silverlight, Flash, … and allows you to use them in native Linux browsers. Pipelight installation instructions for various distros can be found here. Typing the following instructions in a terminal window installed pipelight on both my Xubuntu 12.04 and 13.10 pc’s.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ‘Cloud’, ‘stack’, and all that hype over servers which mostly run Free software and GNU/Linux
Oprating Systems
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And what’s funny is that Microsoft, the company that lays claim to the desktop in business with the Office/Windows franchise is getting left behind by the likes of Google and Amazon.
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The idea of PaaS came from the Ruby land and nowadays the market there is quite saturated. OpenShift came from a polyglot by design and Ruby is very well supported. Let’s take a look why OpenShift is a great option for a Ruby developer.
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Red Hat is officially releasing the next generation of its on-premises OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud solution. OpenShift Enterprise 2.0 brings new data center and networking features that expand on the initial promise of the first release of the OpenShift Enterprise platform in 2012.
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As 2014 gets underway, one of the biggest stories in all of open source has to be the transformation going on at Red Hat as it moves from being squarely Linux-focused to becoming a big player in the cloud computing space. As The Register notes, the company has “scraped up its Linux, virtualization, OpenStack and cloud management businesses into a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) unit.”
ownCloud
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As the new year begins, many people are focused on cloud computing, and that includes people who are focused on building out their own individual cloud environments. As we covered here, you can go beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, an open source platform that lets you set up your own cloud computing instance, which means you don’t have to have your files sitting on servers that you don’t choose, governed by people you don’t know.
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ownCloud, Inc. is proud to announce today, December 11, that the Community Edition of its highly anticipated ownCloud 6 open source DIY (Do It Yourself) cloud server software is now available for download/upgrade with an improved design.
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ownCloud, Inc. is proud to announce today, December 11, that the Community Edition of its highly anticipated ownCloud 6 open source DIY (Do It Yourself) cloud server software is now available for download/upgrade with an improved design.
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My conclusion is clearly ‘enthusiasm’. I will certainly be using ownCloud as my private cloud server from now on and I can see some very cool ideas coming in the future. I’m exited about WebODF working with ODF documents using JavaScript and I can see many useful things to use it for. I can clearly see ownCloud useful for small business and e.g., schools and NGOs.
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One of the most obvious reasons that services such as Dropbox or Box are so popular with end users is that most internal IT organizations simply haven’t had a way to offer that capability. End users were acquiring mobile computing devices by the millions and they simply needed a way to share files.
CloudStack
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It’s been nearly two years since Citrix contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation, a move that gave the platform a leg up in the competitive open source cloud computing race. And, CloudStack continues to gain rapid adoption with large scale deployments around the world. In October, Apache announced the arrival of version 4.2 online, as we covered here.
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OpenStack
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Dell’s Director of Cloud and Big Data solutions answers questions “why OpenStack?” and “Why partner with Red Hat to offer OpenStack solutions?”
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In spite of its considerable momentum, there are still skeptics about whether OpenStack will ultimately succeed. My colleague tackled some of that skepticism in a blog post last year and I’m not going to rehash those arguments here. Rather, I’m going to make some observations about how OpenStack is paralleling, and will likely continue to parallel, the adoption of another open source project that I think we can all agree has become popular and successful—namely Linux. [1]
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How do you get more users to contribute ideas to an open-source cloud effort? The OpenStack Foundation has a plan.
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OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. Backed by some of the biggest companies in software development and hosting, as well as thousands of individual community members, many think that OpenStack is the future of cloud computing. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit which oversees both development and community-building around the project.
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IBM has jumped through a number of hoops with its cloud computing strategy in the past couple of years. The company–which had been firmly in the OpenStack camp–eventually decided to spend billions to buy SoftLayer for its cloud computing infrastructure tools and services. Since then, it has committed billions more to its SoftLayer investment, and many have seen IBM as having completely dropped its original commitment to OpenStack.
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Hadoop
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At enterprises around the world, as the Big Data trend spreads out, you can hardly talk technology anymore without the conversation focusing on Hadoop, the star open source framework for drawing insights from large data sets. We’ve also reported that the job market is very healthy for people with Hadoop and Big Data skills.
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Cray has released a package designed to allow XC30 users to easily deploy Hadoop
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Hortonworks is down at the watering hole, blowing its trumpet and enjoying a period of positive development.
Just in case you missed the elephantine reference, Hortonworks (named after the elephant in Horton Hears A Who!) is a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the open source platform for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers.
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In the beginning – October, 2003 to be precise – there was the Google File System. And it was good. MapReduce, which followed in December 2004, was even better. Together, they served as a framework for Doug Cutting’s original work at Yahoo, work that resulted in the project now known as Hadoop in 2005.
After being pressed into service by Yahoo and other large web properties, Hadoop’s inevitable standalone commercialization arrived in the form of Cloudera in 2009. Founded by Amr Awadallah (Yahoo), Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Jeff Hammerbacher (Facebook) and Mike Olson (Oracle/Sleepycat) – Cutting was to join later – Cloudera oddly had the Hadoop market more or less to itself for a few years.
Misc.
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You may have heard the new buzz word “Cloud Operating System” a few times in the last few months.
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